On Getting Home

IF someone should take all manner of sensations and pin them in a pretty row along the wall, for me to choose which had assumed the comeliest countenance, doubt would not have sufficient time to stretch his sticky hands out toward my heart before I should march boldly up and lay the wreath of laurel at the feet of that one we call ‘getting home.’ It means, of course, arriving at that place of all the world where you do most belong. I yield the crown to this sensation, because it is the winsome parent of so many others. There is comfort in it, and ease; there is gayety, laughter, and a catching of the breath, as if excitement had crept through the keyhole of emotion, thrown the door wide, and let sweep in a multitude of unsuspected pleasures created by everything the senses can take cognizance of.

But most of all there comes relief. Or is it love? Relief at what? I do not know. Just to be there again, perhaps; to be able to cast off pretense and affectation, even politeness, and know beyond a peradventure that it does not matter how you act, feel, think, believe — this countryside belongs to you; these hills and trees and gardens, these people walking down the village street, are yours! Nothing can change that. No whirl of time, no endless vagabonding, no voyaging from Patagonia to Persia, can ever take away the glorious fact that these green fields, brooks, orchards, and long grass are yours, yours, yours, forever. The West Wind carries you that news as soon as your feet have felt the station platform; or, if the West Wind’s in abeyance and the tidings cannot slide into your heart upon a sunbeam, then they are showered on your consciousness by raindrops sparkling with the errand.

How rag-bedecked in poverty is he who never has ‘belonged,’ who never ‘grew up’ anywhere, who spent his youth and middle age in ceaseless rounds of packing trunks, and had no chance to make one small compact green countryside the jeweled box in which to keep his rarest memories! Even to have grown up in a city is better than never to have grown up at all. There are so many unfortunates in this restless age who are rooted up before they have a chance to grow, and are transplanted hither and yon, from garden to garden, with no chance of ever becoming a spiritual owner of a plot in any one of them. For, of course, that is all that ‘belonging’ means.

I cannot pretend to be the actual possessor of R—, Massachusetts, for if I did there would be Mr. Pudd all up in arms, and Mrs. Honeybun desirous to know if I were turning Socialist and laying claim to equal shares in all my neighbors’ cows and yellow butter. And when I call to mind the gurgling, junking sound of churns, which floats up my hill from their dairies, I ’ve half a will to try it on. Except that I bethink myself of Charlie Squire, village constable, whose silver badge might put me in the pound as an unclaimed donkey, or in the jail for threatening the public peace. Which latter would without a doubt much threaten mine, for the jail has been condemned some two years now, and does itself threaten to collapse should it be so much as shaken by an oath. So I will not turn Socialist; nor need I, for in the country town where I ‘ belong ’ no one except the dogs regards it as a crime to walk across a neighbor’s fields, to pick his daisies, or sample his raspberries, so long as one will use discretion and never overdo it.

The sensation properly begins before you have arrived at home at all. It starts when your mind is made up to reappear there, and it grows unconsciously along the route of your return. As miles are cast off like stitches in a knitted blanket, the spell is cast on you as if these stitches went to weave an unseen net, to drag your heart out of your sea of travels into the harbor ‘where you would be.’ Unlike most train-journeys, you find that your last hour by rail is a delight; and if it be that your lot has fallen in a local, Fate is forgiven in anticipation of the end. Besides, here is sweet opportunity to lend superfluous good-humor to others; and who would miss the chance of being kind when kindness is no effort? Your book has been abandoned, for you have recognized trees, houses, lanes, ‘the old familiar faces’ hurrying by; and soon there will be paths that you have walked along, and hills that you have ridden over, so that it well behooves your eyes to keep their watchfulness.

They say that love makes poets of us all. You find the collector of tickets on a homebound train a fascinating fellow — a very Apollo, with gold teeth scattered in his upper jaw, which glitter through his smile with kindlier rays than ever the stars cast on Ulysses’ course to Ithaca. And also, is it not he who shouts at last, in a voice that calls your heart into your mouth for very admiration, ‘R—! R—!' You gather your bundles, dropping one or two as homage to excitement — and then you see that

My last arrival came just as the clock struck three, in June. This is the hour when country people ‘finish up,’ and there was no one anywhere about except the stationmaster, Jim. Now, Jim and I are friends, and have been ever since our worlds began. We keep our intimacy bright by tales of ghastly railroad accidents and horrid pictures of poor mortals all de-limbed; for Jim’s a pessimist and revels in this sort of thing. He greets me this way: —

‘Well, well,’ he says, ‘I ’spect you ’re kinder sick at gettin’ back to this old burg after all the places you bin.’

‘Oh, not so very sick, Jim,’ I say; and cast a sidelong glance into the soft, sweet, rustling shade of maples, which makean archèd alley of the village street.

‘Ah, well, you don’t work for the railroad, that’s what,’ he answers dismally; and then, ‘Wantcher bag?’

‘Yes; please put it in the carriage?’

For the carriage is there, and the old black horse, whom haughty ladies of the kitchen have refused to drive behind— that mighty steed who ‘can trot all day in the shade of a tree.’ And the old coachman is there too — older, he is, than anyone I know; so old that he had white hairs in my grandfather’s time, and can remember the last potato famine in Ireland. He is the purveyor of the first edition of news.

‘How are the dogs? and the horses? Is Ponzi still there? ’ (Ponzi is a pigeon, so called because he came, a foreigner, unannounced, and stole our grain from the loft.) ‘When is the strawberry festival? Has old man Sawyer died?’

The questions go on, endlessly, all up the avenue. Elm trees bend down their feathery branches to try to catch the gossip; and you take note how the hedge has grown on either side, just shutting out the sight of kitchen gardens, which you know are there because there comes the smell of fresh, damp earth, and early vegetables.

There are so many pleasant things that happen with arrivals. The dogs come racing up, shattering quiet dignity to broken echoes of confusion; old servants must be shaken hands with; and after you have teaed and bathed and looked with friendliness upon your books, relatives come pouring in to say ‘Hello.’ Most of these are whiskered, and all of them stand waiting to be kissed; and you must tell about ‘the lovely places you have been, my dear.’

Not quite so pleasant, this; but there are compensations, for Virginia is with them. Virginia is only an aunt by marriage, and is called just Virginia, without a preface, because her youth levels any rank she has attained by wedding with a bearded uncle. She will ride out with you, and seek adventure down lanes lit by the moon that spills in through the overhanging boughs; and she will talk of anything you like, from England to the China Seas. She has a face like old Madonnas, and eyes as gray and fathomless as that deep mist which holds the secrets of the sea from which it’s born.

Presently they go, and you are left alone again. This is the best part. There are so many things to do. You can wander about, touching things to feel the solid happiness of their mere presence; you can sit on the terrace, and eat supper of cold eggs and coffee jelly, while the sun goes down and makes the old line of spectres stand out on the far-off hills; or you can go about announcing your arrival to your friends, or read your letters by the river, or pick flowers from a garden that you know of in the valley, and come back with the foaming torrent of them enveloping your mouth and nose and all but putting out your eyes.

This night I chose the terrace, letters, and the flowers. There would be time for all. The ghosts were there in wild array, flinging their arms out to the crimson sky in desperate pleading for some boon no man could guess at, yet frantic with their efforts to make the heavens understand. As I sat Turk-fashion, with my tray across my knees, there blew down the path of one of summer’s breezes the smell of strawberries. It was just a hint, just the merest breath of a suspicion, but I followed it and found them just around the corner. Sun-warmed fruit, so red and ripe that it did not wait for picking, but fell off in my fingers as I touched the leaves to look beneath. So big they were that even the widest mouth would have to take two trys to get around one. And the gems, the jewels, the very queens, and kings, and gods of strawberrydom I found, as my grandfather taught me, in those sun-feathered berries just pecked by the robin. Whoever does not know that these outshine all others, as diamonds outshine paste, must needs go back to school again, for his learning is a feeble thing.

When my hands were deep-dipped in scarlet, and my mouth was but a ruby stain, I took my letters to the riverbank, and sat me down to read. They had accumulated into mountains, and some of them were dry and old, so that the dust of their disinterest flew down my throat to choke me, and I threw them in the water and watched ‘ the ink turn pale, and run away in very shame ’ at having written such stupidities.

Yet others sang phrases like the wood thrush, and the wind left gardens to attend their words, and brought me scents of flowers in the evening light. It hummed so many pretty songs of things it had seen that I was forced to go and search for them. To leave the slow, black water, to push a hawthorn hedge apart, to climb a wall, and walk across a lawn, until I found myself in what I knew of old to be the home, beginning, gathering-place of flowers, and where I saw fair myriad ghosts of them shine through the dark. I threw myself beneath a tree that stood on a small patch of grass in the middle of this hiding-place for moonbeams. I lay on my back, and let the grass-blades trickle up between my fingers. I stayed quite still, and listened to my welcome back as sung among the tree toads. ‘Mine, mine, mine,’it goes, ‘all mine. I am a part of this. I too grew here.’ And then an echo of it is heard from the bold-throated frogs in distant ponds. ‘Yours, yours,’ they boom, ‘all yours. You are a part of this because you too grew here.’

Oh, those fairy noises that haunt homecoming nights in May and June; the witcheries that stir, the magic scents of lilac, honeysuckle, and syringa, the warmth of grasses, the coolness of leaves, the robes of gold wherewith the fields adorn themselves, the laughing brown of water, and the damp graciousness of earth! All, all for you, fashioned for you, growing for you, beautiful beyond the telling just for you, because your heart has found the key to Nature’s hills, and these, these hundred blossoming faces that she turns to you, are all your first loves, your adored ones, your friends since the first day you tottered after daisies and pulled their heads off ruthlessly.

There ought to be some old pagan god that one could worship on a summer’s eve. Some moss-grown statue of a satyr, who would chase with you the moonbeams that run down between the flower-stalks. Some laughing Panhorned creature, to rush with you among the flower-beds and help fling off in that tumultuous riot of abandoned motion the pain of beauty that has shut the heart in. Someone, partfaerie, part-fawn, and part-mortal, to run a breathless race with; to dash down rose-decked paths from; to yet beguile, by swift agility of bending body, with Terpsichore’s art; to charm by springing into life in untamed gracefulness, until the whole green-painted world is sent careening round the stars in the sweet mad motion of a dance. And then, to finish, panting, under some bloom-starred hedge, with the clover tickling your eyelids, and drawing in with hurried breaths perfumed night air. Thus ought we to worship summer’s advent to our own hills in June. And then, the statue turned back into stone again, you should go to sleep across its cloven hoofs, until dawn pushed your eyelids open and the birds sang with the morning stars to wake you. So it should be, I thought, as I lay there; so could I pour my adoration out of body, brain, and heart, and loose the suffocating weight of it until next spring came round again.

Instead, I went to all the flowerbeds and pulled a hundred blown buds from their places, to carry back with me and help me make a festival for beauty. I held them up against my cheeks and pushed their petals open with my lips. I kissed their tinted faces, and I drank the dew they still held in their delicate becolored cups. I wound them in my hair, and clustered them about my neck; and then I held up in my arms a solid, dripping, trailing mass of bloom.

Thus I walked home, and made my room a paradise for honeybees. And for myself — I slipped down into linen sheets that came from cedar boxes, and dreamed that every day was June, and in each one of them I should be ‘getting home.’