The Lowest Stratum of Summer

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THERE are patent reasons for walking, on this day, so late in the autumn. It is worth seeing how the goldenrod, though ashen-colored, still keeps its exact loveliness of line, ready to catch on its brittle fronds the still, silver flowers of the snow. Three days ago, the first snow settled there, and made beautiful shadowy things out of the dead stalks. To-day, that tentative sweep of winter is forgotten, and the sunshine is strong and creative. Let the North Wind nap, and warmth and beauty try hardily to return.

A great smooth wind draws down the hill-slopes, through the gray beauty of the flat beech-branches, with their clinging drift of frost-bleached leaves, which rustle together, paper-like and pallid. The sycamores have cast their shaggy bark, and stand up white, to meet the white winter. Their intricate, angled tracery is so hoary, yet so beautiful, so different from the simplicity of the white birches of the north. Yet close to the stream, to rival the birches and disprove that sentence immediately, stand three young sycamores, girlish and lissome. Freed of the brown bark, they stand ready, like beggargirls who have thrown off their rags, to step down, silvery-ankled, into the silver water.

Birds’ nests now are discarded cradles. Love-making is a dream, passed or to come, and the birds grow socialminded in the season of hardship. Those that sing now sing with keen, whistling notes, which tune with the winter wind. Quails call around dawn.

The tufted titmouse summons, ‘Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter!’ This Peter must truly be a deaf little bird, with tufts of feathers over his ears!

Suddenly, across the landscape, like a lapful of brown leaves, drifts a flock of Carolina wrens. Their music rings, answers, and rings again. Hither and thither they flit, peopling every tree.

And here — oh, new beauty! — fly turtledoves. I scan them, in surprise. A cloud of tranquillity; think of the gray wealth of the sight against the soft sky — fifteen turtledoves, flying together, limning the very silhouette of peace along the horizon; here they breast the insolent airs, banded for the journey.

Drop down on this flat stone, watching the doves merge in gray cloud. Sit Japanese-fashion, near the almost Japanese beauty of the last stratum of summer, lying within ten inches of the surface of the earth. Down here are plants which have survived frost, and those which guilelessly think every warm day begins another summer, and so open their eyes too soon.

Trees blossom in the balm of spring, garden flowers are gay in May and June, and the waysides of August are awash with rich petal color. But greater plants yield up leaf and calyx to frost. Fingers of the oak leaves are curled and cold, tree branches move with the deadwood stiffness of marionettes when the North Wind pulls the strings. Berries are frozen and pulpy, and even the witch-hazel, with its pricks of light, glimmers no more.

But down here nearest the soil, shining with melted frost, are the small plants which cherish the tradition of bloom, until it can be handed on to the green shoots of spring.

Here is supreme courage in tiny scope. With edges crimped by cold, the wee plants renew themselves with what measure of sunlight they can catch. These are the last, last outposts of summer.

The darling of maple trees, three inches high, still holds up crisply its two tiny leaves, as exquisite and crimson as any that were on the tall trees. All bright leaves on topmost twigs were shaken days ago. This infant thing, caught close to the breast of the earth, is still rosy.

Obscure tones of mauve, of cinnamon, of fadey scarlet, of fawn, of russet and rust and flame, have been put here by the sharp pencil of the frost, on these snippets of plants — colors which never appeared in their proper periods of blooming. Orange, bright as the fruit, lies on a leaflet of mouse-ear size. Chickweed, with its minute flowrets, preserves that fresh green which has been long gone from the larger landscape. A finger-long spray of goldenrod abloom is a rare salvage. The devil’s-paintbrush, with its bricky pigment, is here, there, and everywhere, like its master, though the handle is short now. A bluet, the only forget-menot of these fields, and a cinquefoil have come up in the face of the snow. A bit of catnip and an inch-high tree of pennyroyal — how extra-pungent their flavor rises now! I discover a couple of shabby red clovers, a glossy wild-rose haw, a rosette of woolly mullein, a bronzed dewberry bramble.

It is surprising to find so much that is fine in so straitened a space. Brave plants are these, blooming in a charming perversity, long beyond their appropriate time. Bless them all, here on our knees! Bless this field-daisy, golden-eyed, though its petals are tipped with that rose-color which touches white flowers only when life goes hard and long with them. That tinge will visit the trillium, the fall anemone, the Christmas roses that dwell chin-high in the snows. It is exactly like the pretty pink on the over-white cheek of an old, old lady. It is like the flush of a winter sunset over snow, the gallant show of life across the very face of death.

All round the warm flat stone I lean, to discover the circlet of charm that rings it. A bit of self-heal and a small saxifrage are bedfellows in a crack of the rock. You want to hover over them, to cuddle them in your hands. There is the feeling that you may help them now, for whom, before, sun and rain and breeze were sufficient. They were ready for this fragment of a season; their obscurity has come to distinction. One day their faith shall be justified. ‘The broken heart it kens nae second spring again’; but nature kens, on and on, forever.

Alive with interest, we go down into the moist hollow where violets once bloomed —and bloom again! Two, no, three. Their color is deep, a dye of their very heart’s best, and their chins are lifted a little, saucily. This is meekness, driven finally to rebellion.

Royal purple calls for gold to lighten it, and behold, up against the earth, the gold shield of the dandelion. Oh, this bravery of retreat! In summer he reaches and reaches above the grasses. Now he has gone back, step by driven step, the sword of the frost at his throat. But ever breast-forward has he gone, to the wall, and still holds his golden shield shining against the enemy. And on every sunny day he will be bright, until spring shall bid him lengthen his cords.

‘Then thou, too,’ Warrior of the Gleaming Armor, ‘shalt return in honor, since in the battle thou hast kept thy shield.’