“Stay blinded and bewildered there,” he said, “until the hour comes when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; you will then see whether in this work you have been—the Incident.”
Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.
She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
“It is getting late,” she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning with which she had spoken before. “There is no time to lose.”
He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of her arms, looking at her reverently.
But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides—the hands that were life, the arms that were love.
She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache. Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over her shoulder to him:
“Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?” she asked, with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar:
“I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books.”
“The trouble is,” she replied, “the trouble is that the authors are right and the books are right: men and women are only Incidents to each other in life,” and she passed out into the hall.
“Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe,” he replied, “if we cared to look at it in that way; but we’d better not!”
He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly stopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything that he had brought together from such distances of place and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in.
“Are you coming?” she called faintly from the hall.
“I am coming,” he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he stopped again and looked back.
Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which men—like a crew of sailors—tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow her into some divine haven.
His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry any message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable children of the future the better for its shining?
“Are you coming?” she called more quiveringly.
“I am coming,” he called back, breaking away from his revery, and raising his voice so it would surely reach her.
II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the short frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting to be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the doorway for his emerging figure.
“To-morrow night,” he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his words, “to-morrow night you will understand.”
“Yes,” she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers, “to-morrow night I must understand. Until to-morrow night, then, blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be! Kind ignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or conjecture, come to me and console me!”
And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he should step forth.
It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad, ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their harvest of nuts—primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.
Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house. Near by was a thicket of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a genial torrent through all days and nights of the year—many a full-throated rill—but never with so inundating a movement as at this season. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor over well-chosen chips.
Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled, rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn aftermath.
Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to the towns, helping to fill the farmer’s pockets with holiday largess.
Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the mistletoe—the holly—the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men—the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives—the turkey and the quail—and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight there—the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil uplifted to human joyance.
One last thing completed the picture of the scene.
The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive verdure. Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor larch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had been planted.