CHAPTER VIII.. The Mood of August

THE MOOD OF AUGUST

The wild cherries are no longer garnet; they have darkened to their harvest and hang in somber ripeness from the twig. Drowsy lie the grain fields and slowly purpling vineyards. The robin in the apple orchard is hardly to be seen among the red-fruited boughs from which the first Astrakhans are dropping. Days of uncertain suns and exultant growing are over. A languorous pause has come to the year. Even the crows, flapping away across the windy blue, caw in a sleepy fashion, not yet hoarse with anxiety because the huskers are hurrying the corn to cover with that penurious vigilance which a crow finds so objectionable. The rabbits, scampering and wary in the new clover time, sit out in the hot sun a good deal now, like convalescent patients; they will keep this up until the faint noons of November, storing the warmth that lets them sleep, come winter, through many a hunting party overhead. The woodpecker knocks with less ferocity. Stately on his favorite dead branch at the lake's edge the blue-armored kingfisher sits to watch the ripple. Only the grasshopper persists with tragical intensity in his futile rehearsal for the role of humming bird. A satirical Italian compares man to the grasshopper, but no man is capable of such devotion to baffled aspirations. Practice in grace makes him more and more imperfect. Young wood duck, with portentous dignity, follow their mother down the topaz creek in single file, an attentive field class, observing the demented lucky bugs, the red-lined lily pads of the coves, the turtles sound asleep on the warm stones. For the wood's feathered children this is no month of play and slumber; it will soon be autumn, and they must attempt the long flight.

The aspect of the buckwheat fields is August's signet. From their goldenrod borders reaches a world of happy whiteness, against sky the color of the pickerelweed flower, waving softly, shadowed only by the plumy clouds. The corn is out in topgallant, and if you look from a mountain path into the planted valley, the écru tassels have hidden the lustrous ribbon leaves. Cornfields are never silent. Always there is a low swish, like that of little summer waves on a lake shore.

Lavender and purple thistles, brimmed with nectar, are besought by imperious bees and the great blue-black butterfly, but already their pale-lit ships drift, unreturning, under sealed orders, to some far harbor in the port of spring. More silvery still, the milkweed is adrift. Fleets of white butterflies rise and fall with the sunset breeze, and slow, twilight moths come from under the brakes at the hour of dew. White-flowered, the clematis and wild cucumber, the creamy honeysuckle of the amorous fragrance, cover fence rail and stone wall, give petals to the barren underbrush, twine fearlessly around barbed wire, and festoon deserted barns. Healing herbs of long ago that once were hung every fall from attic rafters--the "wild isep," or mountain mint, and the gray-blooming boneset--stand profuse but unregarded in the lowgrounds. We buy our magic potions now. Once they were brewed above the back log, as occasion came. In ferny shadows glimmers the ivory Indian pipe. The wild carrot, with delicate insistence, takes the field.

Ironweed of royal purple, maroon-shot, mingles in illogical harmony with the blue vervain and magenta trumpet-weeds. The note makers name over for us a score of flowers that Shakespeare meant by "long purples"; but surely he foresaw our Northern swamps in August, on fire with those exuberant, torchlike weeds that rise tall above the bogs and earn, by their arresting splendor against a crimson sky, the need of immortality in song. They bloom before the katydids begin and survive the first frost. A few violets--a seed crop, not intended for men's gaze, and hidden cautiously beneath the leaves, are timidly aflower. They will not go unwed, but would crave to die obscure.

The last of the new-tasting bough apples lie in the orchard grass. The later apple trees, like the sunning rabbit and the thought-worn crow, wait for the harvest moon. Already the unresting twigs are preparing their winter mail of cork and gum, which will not be unfastened by the fiercest assaults of the sleet. Short-stemmed flowers have arisen to clothe the sharp wheat stubble. Along the mountain road grow vagabond peach trees, to whose fruit cling eager blue wasps, whose aromatic gum traps many a climbing robber. Other wanderers from the tended orchard--cruelly sour plums and rouge-cheeked pears--growing among the cornel bushes, drop down for the field mouse and woodchuck their harvest of the wilderness. Some of them, companioned by the faithful phlox and sunflower, once grew in dooryards now desolate. The surpassing rose mallow like sunrise lights the marshes.

It is not a month of growth. Fruit and grain are only expanding--weeks ago the marvel of formation was complete. It is the time of warm, untroubled slumber that ends with the reveille of frost.