Part 4 (2/2)
”AND I FOR ROSALIND”
Chapter XXI
In the Forest of Arden.
I
Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Rosalind had just laid a spray of apple blossoms on the study table.
”Well,” I said, ”when shall we start?”
”To-morrow.”
Rosalind has a habit of swift decision when she has settled a question in her own mind, and I was not surprised when she replied with a single decisive word. But she also has a habit of making thorough preparation for any undertaking, and now she was quietly proposing to go off for the summer the very next day, and not a trunk was packed, not a seat secured in any train, not a movement made toward any winding up of household affairs. I had great faith in her ability to execute her plans with celerity, but I doubted whether she could be ready to turn the key in the door, bid farewell to the milkman and the butcher, and start the very next day for the Forest of Arden. For several past seasons we had planned this bold excursion into a country which few persons have seemed to know much about since the day when a poet of great fame, familiar with many strange climes and peoples, found his way thither and shared the golden fortune of his journey with all the world. Winter after winter before the study fire, we had made merry plans for this trip into the magical forest; we had discussed the best methods of travelling where no roads led; we had enjoyed in antic.i.p.ation the surmises of our neighbours concerning our unexplained absence, and the delightful mystery which would always linger about us when we had returned, with memories of a landscape which no eyes but ours had seen these many years, and of rare and original people whose voices had been silent in common speech so many generations that only a few dreamers like ourselves even remembered that they had ever spoken.
We had looked along the library shelves for the books we should take with us, until we remembered that in that country there were books in the running streams. Rosalind had gone so far as to lay aside a certain volume of sermons whose aspiring note had more than once made music of the momentary discords of her life; but I reminded her that such a work would be strangely out of place in a forest where there were sermons in stones. Finally we had decided to leave books behind and go free-minded as well as free-hearted. It had been a serious question how much and what apparel we should take with us, and that point was still unsettled when the apple trees came to their blossoming. It is a theory of mine that the chief delight of a vacation from one's usual occupations is freedom from the tyranny of plans and dates, and thus much Rosalind had conceded to me.
There had been an irresistible charm in the very secrecy which protected our adventure from the curious and unsympathetic comment of the world. We found endless pleasure in imagining what this and that good neighbour of ours would say about the folly of leaving a comfortable house, good beds, and a well-stocked larder for the hard fare and uncertain shelter of a strange forest. ”For my part,” we gleefully heard Mrs. Grundy declare,--”for my part, I cannot understand why two people old enough to know better should make tramps of themselves and go rambling about a piece of woods that n.o.body ever heard of in the heat of the midsummer.” Poor Mrs. Grundy! We could well afford to laugh merrily at her scornful expostulations; for while she was repeating plat.i.tudes to overdressed and uninteresting people at Oldport, we should be making sunny play of life with men and women whose thoughts were free as the wind, and whose hearts were fresh as the dew and the stars. And often when our talk had died into silence, and the wind without whistled to the fire within, we had fallen to dreaming of those shadowy aisles arched by the mighty trees, and of the splendid pageant that should make life seem as great and rich as Nature herself. I confess that all my dreams came to one ending; that I should suddenly awake in some golden hour and really know Rosalind. Of course I had been coming through all these years to know something about Rosalind; but in this busy world, with work to be done, and bills to be paid, and people to be seen, and journeys to be made, and friction and worry and fatigue to be borne, how can we really come to know one another? We may meet the vicissitudes and changes side by side; we may work together in the long days of toil; our hearts may repose on a common trust, our thoughts travel a common road; but how rarely do we come to the hour when the pressure of toil is removed, the clouds of anxiety melt into blue sky, and in the whole world nothing remains but the sun on the flower, and the song in the trees, and the unclouded light of love in the eyes?
I dreamed, too, that in finding Rosalind I should also find myself.
There were times when I had seemed on the very point of making this discovery, but something had always turned me aside when the quest was most eager and promising; the world pressed into the seclusion for which I had struggled, and when I waited to hear its faintest murmur die in the distance, suddenly the tumult had risen again, and the dream of self-communion and self-knowledge had vanished. To get out of the uproar and confusion of things, I had often fancied, would be like exchanging the dusty midsummer road for the shade of the woods where the brook calms the day with its pellucid note of effortless flow, and the hours hide themselves from the glances of the sun. In the forest of Arden I felt sure I should find the repose, the quietude, the freedom of thought, which would permit me to know myself. There, too, I suspected Nature had certain surprises for me; certain secrets which she has been holding back for the fortunate hour when her spell would be supreme and unbroken. I even hoped that I might come unaware upon that ancient and perennial movement of life upon which I seemed always to happen the very second after it had been suspended; that I might hear the note of the hermit thrush breaking out of the heart of the forest; the soulful melody of the nightingale, pathetic with unappeasable sorrow. In the Forest of Arden, too, there were unspoiled men and women, as indifferent to the fas.h.i.+on of the world and the folly of the hour as the stars to the impalpable mist of the clouds; men and women who spoke the truth, and saw the fact, and lived the right; to whom love and faith and high hopes were more real than the crowns of which they had been despoiled and the kingdoms from which they had been rejected. All this I had dreamed, and I know not how many other brave and beautiful dreams, and I was dreaming them again when Rosalind laid the apple blossoms on the study table, and answered, decisively, ”To-morrow.”
”To-morrow,” I repeated; ”to-morrow. But how are you going to get ready? If you sit up all night you cannot get through with the packing. You said only yesterday that your summer dressmaking was shamefully behind. My dear, next week is the earliest possible time for our going.”
Rosalind laughed archly, and pushed the apple blossoms over the wofully interlined ma.n.u.script of my new article on Egypt. There was in her very att.i.tude a hint of unsuspected buoyancy and strength; there was in her eyes a light which I have never seen under our uncertain skies.
The breath of the apple blossoms filled the room, and a bobolink, poised on a branch outside the window, suddenly poured a rapturous song into the silence of the sweet spring day. I laid down my pen, pushed my scattered sheets into the portfolio, covered the inkstand, and laid my hand in hers. ”Not to-morrow,” I said, ”not to-morrow. Let us go now.”
II
Now go we in content To liberty and not to banishment.
I have sometimes entertained myself by trying to imagine the impressions which our modern life would make upon some sensitive mind of a remote age. I have fancied myself rambling about New York with Montaigne, and taking note of his shrewd, satirical comment. I can hardly imagine him expressing any feeling of surprise, much less any sentiment of admiration; but I am confident that under a masque of ironical self-complacency the old Gascon would find it difficult to repress his astonishment, and still more difficult to adjust his mind to evident and impressive changes. I have ventured at times to imagine myself in the company of another more remote and finely organised spirit of the past, and pictured to myself the keen, dispa.s.sionate criticism of Pericles on the things of modern habit and creation; I have listened to his luminous interpretations of the changed conditions which he saw about him; I have noted his unconcern toward the merely material advances of society, his penetrative insight into its intellectual and moral developments. A mind so capacious and open, a nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and manifold as those which have transformed society since the days of the great Athenian; but even he could not be quite unmoved if brought face to face with a life so unlike that with which he had been familiar; there must come, even to one who feels the mastery of the soul over all conditions, a certain sense of wonder and awe.
It was with some such feeling that Rosalind and I found ourselves in the Forest of Arden. The journey was so soon accomplished that we had no time to accustom ourselves to the changes between the country we had left and that to which we had come. We had always fancied that the road would be long and hard, and that we should arrive worn and spent with the fatigues of travel. We were astonished and delighted when we suddenly discovered that we were within the boundaries of the Forest long before we had begun to think of the end of our journey. We had said nothing to each other by the way: our thoughts were so busy that we had no time for speech. There were no other travellers; everybody seemed to be going in the opposite direction; and we were left to undisturbed meditation. The route to the Forest is one of those open secrets which whosoever would know must learn for himself; it is impossible to direct those who do not discover for themselves how to make the journey. The Forest is probably the most accessible place on the face of the earth, but it is so rarely visited that one may go half a lifetime without meeting a person who has been there. I have never been able to explain the fact that those who have spent some time in the Forest, as well as those who are later to see it, seem to recognise each other by instinct. Rosalind and I happen to have a large circle of acquaintances, and it has been our good fortune to meet and recognise many who were familiar with the Forest and who were able to tell us much about its localities and charms. It is not generally known, and it is probably wise not to emphasise the fact, that the fortunate few who have access to the Forest form a kind of secret fraternity; a brotherhood of the soul which is secret because those alone who are qualified for members.h.i.+p by nature can understand either its language or its aims. It is a very strange thing that the dwellers in the Forest never make the least attempt at concealment, but that, no matter how frank and explicit their statements may be, n.o.body outside the brotherhood ever understands where the Forest lies or what one finds when he gets there. One may write what he chooses about life in the Forest, and only those whom Nature has selected and trained will understand what he discloses; to all others it will be an idle tale or a fairy story for the entertainment of people who have no serious business in hand.
I remember well the first time I ever understood that there is a Forest of Arden, and that they who choose may wander through its arched aisles of shade and live at their will in its deep and beautiful solitude; a solitude in which Nature sits like a friend from whose face the veil has been withdrawn, and whose strange and foreign utterance has been exchanged for the most familiar speech. Since that memorable afternoon under the apple trees I have never been far from the Forest, although at times I have lost sight of the line which its foliage makes against the horizon. I have always intended to cross that line some day and to explore the Forest; perhaps even to make a home for myself there. But one's dreams must often wait for their realisation, and so it has come to pa.s.s that I have gone all these years without personal familiarity with these beautiful scenes. I have since learned that one never comes to the Forest until he is thoroughly prepared in heart and mind, and I understand now that I could not have come earlier even if I had made the attempt. As it happened, I concerned myself with other things, and never approached very near the Forest, although never very far from it.
I was never quite happy unless I caught frequent glimpses of its distant boughs, and I searched more and more eagerly for those who had left some record of their journeys to the Forest, and of their life within its magical boundaries. I discovered, to my great joy, that the libraries were full of books which had much to say about the delights of Arden: its enchanting scenery; the music of its brooks; the sweet and refres.h.i.+ng repose of its recesses; the n.o.ble company that frequent it. I soon found that all the greater poets have been there, and that their lines had caught the magical radiance of the sky; and many of the prose writers showed the same familiarity with a country in which they evidently found whatever was sweetest and best in life. I came to know at last those whose knowledge of Arden was most complete, and I put them in a place by themselves; a corner in the study to which Rosalind and I went for the books we read together. I would gladly give a list of these works but for the fact I have already hinted--that those who would understand their references to Arden will come to know them without aid from me, and that those who would not understand could find nothing in them even if I should give page and paragraph. It was a great surprise to me, when I first began to speak of the Forest, to find that most people scouted the very idea of such a country; many did not even understand what I meant. Many a time, at sunset, when the light has lain soft and tender on the distant Forest, I have pointed it out, only to be told that what I thought was the Forest was a splendid pile of clouds, a s.h.i.+ning ma.s.s of mist. I came to understand at last that Arden exists only for a few, and I ceased to talk about it save to those who shared my faith. Gradually I came to number among my friends many who were in the habit of making frequent journeys to the Forest, and not a few who had spent the greater part of their lives there. I remember the first time I saw Rosalind I saw the light of the Arden sky in her eyes, the buoyancy of the Arden air in her step, the purity and freedom of the Arden life in her nature. We built our home within sight of the Forest, and there was never a day that we did not talk about and plan our long-delayed journey thither.
”After all,” said Rosalind, on that first glorious morning in Arden, ”as I look back I see that we were always on the way here.”
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