Part 4

The dapper clerk and the prosperous merchant and his wife, who have ridden up in the train with their good clothes and their company faces on, may stare if they will. It is nothing to the campers and walkers. They are not on parade, and do not mind being smiled at. A pretty college girl will walk about the office, alpenstock in hand, with her hair tied in a careless knot, her skirts well above the tops of her scratched and dusty boots, her face brown and her sleeves tucked up, and seem quite as much at ease as if she were in full evening dress with the drawing-room lights blazing upon her alabaster shoulders, her laces, and her diamonds. It is heroism (or heroinism) of a kind worth seeing.

You are still enjoying the spectacle when two men enter the door, one with a botanical box slung over his shoulder. It is as if he had given you the Masonic grip, and you hardly wait for him to cross the sill before you make up to him with a question. By which route has he come, and what luck has he met with? Over the Crawford path, he answers, and though the season is pretty late, and Alpine plants are mostly out of bloom, he has found some interesting things.

Two or three of them he cannot name, and he opens the box. His special puzzle is a tiny, upright-growing plant, thickly set with roundish, crinkled leaves, and bearing a few blossoms so exceedingly small as almost to defy a common pocket-lens. Do you know what it is? Yes, to your own surprise, you remember, or seem to remember, and you run upstairs to bring down a Gray’s Manual. The plant is Euphrasia (eyebright), an Alpine variety. It was pointed out to you ten years ago, near the same Crawford path, by the man who knew the Mount Washington flora better than any one else. You recall the time as if it had been yesterday. Your companion dropped suddenly upon his knees, eyes to the ground. “What are you looking for?” you asked; and he answered “Euphrasia.” It is good to see it again. You find it for yourself the next day, it may be, in the Alpine Garden.

And this other plant, stiffly matted and long past flowering? Your new acquaintance supposes it to be Diapensia; and for that you need no book. And this third one, with its rusty leaves, is the Lapland azalea. You remember the day you saw it first--in middle June--when all by yourself you were making your first ascent of the mountain, walking alternately over snowbanks and beds of flowers. So far as the lovely blossoms are concerned, you have never seen it since.

Next morning your botanist bids you good-by; he is going down by the way of Tuckerman’s Ravine; and at noon, after some indolent, happy hours on the carriage-road and in the Alpine Garden, you are again in the hotel office when half a dozen campers from the northern peaks make their appearance. Dusty, travel-stained, disheveled, they bring the freedom of the hills with them and fill the place with their breeziness. Some of the “transients” clustered about the stove smile at a sight so unconventional, but the manager, the clerk, and the bellboys are better informed. They have seen the leader of the party before, and in a minute the word is passed round. This is Mr. ----, who came up the mountain with his son a year ago on the day of that dreadful storm, when two later adventurers upon the same path perished by the way, and he himself, old mountaineer that he was, with another life hanging upon his own, had more than once been all but ready to say, “It can’t be done.” Your traveling companion has seen him here before, though she was not present on that memorable occasion, and presently you are being introduced to him and his friends--a metropolitan clergyman, a university professor, and a younger man, with whose excellent work in your own line you are already acquainted.

Anon the company breaks up,--the pedestrians are off for an afternoon excursion,--and you step out upon the platform to look about you. Against the railing are two men, one of them with what seems to be a “collecting gun” in his hand. “An ornithologist,” you say to yourself, and at the word you begin edging toward him. A remark or two about the weather and you ask him point-blank if he is collecting birds. No, he answers, his weapon is a rifle, and he shows you the cartridge. He has brought it along to shoot squirrels with. You wonder why any one should think it worth while to carry a gun over the nine miles of the Crawford path for so trifling a use; but that is none of your business, and just then the other man speaks up to say that his companion is a botanist, while he himself is a “bird man.” This is interesting (the second ornithologist within an hour), and you set about comparing notes. Did he hear anything of the Bicknell thrushes and the Hudsonian chickadees on his way up? No, he missed them both on this trip, though he has met them elsewhere in the mountains. You drop an innocent remark about the thrushes, and he says, “Are you Mr. So-and-So?” There is no denying it, and when he pronounces his own name it proves to be familiar; and a good talk follows. Then he starts down into the Alpine Garden,--you charging him to be sure to eat some of the delicious cespitose blueberries on the descent,--and ten minutes afterward he turns up again at your elbow. He has left his friend, and has hurried back to tell you of a sharp-shinned hawk that he has just seen. You may put the name into your Mount Washington bird list, if you will.

So the days pass--no day without a new acquaintance. If you and one of the local editors start down the trail to the Lakes of the Clouds after a Sunday-morning breakfast, you find yourselves going along with three Baltimore gentlemen, who have walked up from the Crawford House the day before (“Well, we arrive!” you remember to have heard the leader exclaim, as his foot struck the hotel platform), and are now on their return.

They introduce one another to you and your companion,--Dr. This, Dr. That, and Dr. The Other,--and you pick your way downward over the boulders in Indian file, talking as you go. After a while you and the oldest of the Baltimoreans find yourselves falling a little behind the rest, and the conversation grows more and more friendly. He has come to New Hampshire, as he does every year, for the best of all tonics, a dose of mountain climbing. He has been somewhat overworked of late, especially with a long task of proof-reading. A new edition of his treatise on chemistry is passing through the press, and the moment the last sheets were corrected he broke away northward; and here he is, walking over high places, where he loves to be. “I am an old man,” he says; but his strength is not abated. Far be the day! At the lakeside hands are shaken and good-bys said. You will most likely never see each other again, but one of you, at least, keeps a bright memory.

It is a strange place, the Summit House. Twice a day, as on the seashore, the tide rises and falls. But the evening flood is a small affair. The crowd comes at noon. It registers its name, eats its luncheon, writes a postal-card, buys a souvenir, asks a question or two, more or less pertinent (“Can you tell me where the Tip-Over House is?” one good woman said--for the rarified air plays queer pranks with its victims), possibly looks at the prospect, probably snaps a camera, and then takes the after-dinner train for the base. Evening passengers make a longer stay. They cannot do otherwise. For them the sunset and the sunrise are the great events. One would think that such phenomena were never to be witnessed in the low country. They watch the clouds, or more likely the cloud, and go to sleep with one ear open for the sunrise bell.

So much for the larger number of Summit House guests, the respectable majority. A few, two in twenty, perhaps, arrive on foot; and these are the good ones--the salt of the mountain, so to speak. This time I was not one of them, but I had no thought of denying the superiority of their privilege.

ABOVE THE BIRDS

In the course of my seven days at the summit of Mount Washington I listed six species of birds. A few snowbirds--three or four--were to be found almost always in the neighborhood of the stables; a myrtle warbler was seen on the climb up the cone from the Lakes of the Clouds; twice I heard a goldfinch passing somewhere overhead; a sharp-shinned hawk, as I took it to be, showed itself one day, none too clearly, flying through the mist; and the next afternoon, as I sat in the rear of the old Tip-Top House waiting for the glories of the sunset, a sparrow hawk shot past me so near as to display not only his rusty tail, but the black bands on the side of his neck. Here are five species. The sixth was one that, rightly or wrongly, I should not have expected to find in so treeless a place. I speak of the red-breasted (or Canadian) nuthatch. On two mornings, as all hands were out upon the platform at sunrise, we heard the characteristic nasal calls of this northern forester, and saw two birds scrambling about the roofs of the buildings; and more than once at other times I noticed one or two on the wing. The species is very common this season in Franconia,--where it was extremely scarce a year ago,--and I was pleased at the summit when a lady standing near me remarked to her husband, “Why, that is the note we have been hearing so continually at the Rangeleys.” It was so incessant there, she told me, as to be almost a trouble. Let us hope that this autumnal abundance in New Hampshire foreshadows a nuthatch winter in Massachusetts.

The all but total absence of birds at the summit was a most striking thing. It helped greatly to intensify the loneliness and the silence; that wonderful mountain silence--no leaf to rustle, no brook to murmur, no bird to sing--which, wherever I walked, I was always stopping to listen to. I should love to praise it, but language for such a purpose would need to be found on the spot, the stillness itself suggesting the words; and I came down from the summit more than a week ago. It must have been, I think, something like that apocalyptic “silence in heaven.”

As for the birds, I should have felt their absence more disagreeably but for the fact that I had a novel and absorbing occupation with which to enliven my walks, and even to beguile effectually what otherwise might have been the idle odds and ends of the day. For the nonce I had turned entomological collector. My search was for rare Alpine insects. Not that I knew anything about them; it would have been all one to me if most of what I saw had been created out of nothing the day before; but I was in learned company and needed no science of my own. My part was to carry a “cyanide bottle” and put into it any beetle, moth, fly, or other insect--ants and spiders excepted--on which I could lay my ignorant fingers. The possessor of the learning--enough and to spare for the two of us--has made many collecting visits to the summit; her list of Mount Washington species numbers more than sixteen hundred, if I remember the figures correctly, and no inconsiderable proportion of them are honored with her name. A proud lot they would be, if they knew it. But the end is not yet; there are many winged mountaineers still to be pinned, and in the prosecution of such an enterprise, so she gave me to understand, two bottles are better than one, no matter who carries the second one. Her language was rather encouraging than complimentary, it might have seemed, but I did not mind; and for seven days I was never without a bottle about my person except when I lay in bed.

If I went down to the Lakes of the Clouds, for example, the poison-bottle went with me; and the looker-on, had there been one,--as luckily there wasn’t,--might have seen me on my knees, with hands outstretched over the water, struggling to snatch from the surface a poor, unhappy “skater,” or a “lucky-bug” (it really was lucky, for it got away while the skater perished), as a possible prize for my lady’s cork-lined box. On all my jaunts down the carriage-road (and they were many, longer or shorter, that route offering the readiest means of escape from the frequent summit-capping cloud) the same scientific vial was my companion. If a grasshopper jumped (not the common one with banded legs, of which I saw a superfluity, but a handsome, rare-looking green fellow, making me think of Leigh Hunt’s “green little vaulter in the sunny grass”), I stole murderously after him, and with a reckless clutch at the stunted bush on which he had settled I gathered him in and put him to sleep. (This was well done, for he was really of a wingless Alpine species, and only my employer’s third specimen of his kind.) If a “daddy-long-legs,” prayerless friend of my childhood, crawled across the way, he, too, hapless creature, with legs so superfluously numerous and elongated that he could not hurry, even to save his life, fell a victim to my uninstructed zeal. He died easily, for all his undevout habits, but the sacrifice was useless. He proved to be no longer among the entomologist’s desiderata, though he also is Alpine, and it is not many years since she herself discovered him here, an insect till then unregistered by human science.

All caterpillars I was bidden to bring in alive; and so, of course, I did, rolling them up in scraps of soft paper and committing them tenderly to a pocket. My chief business, however, after I had breathed the air, eaten my fill of mountain blueberries (“Happy,” said I, “is the mouth that feeds on such manna”), and looked my fill at the northern peaks,--for I was not employed by the day, but by the piece, and could steal an hour to myself now and then with a clear conscience,--my principal occupation, I say, was to pry under the boulders for beetles. “Leave no stone unturned,” the entomologist had said, with her fine gift of laconic quotation; but she could not have intended the commission to be taken literally. The stones were too many, and human existence is too brief. She meant no more than that I should use a reasonable diligence; and so much I surely did, till the ends of my fingers were in danger of being skinned alive. Down on all fours I got, lifted a stone quickly, fastened an eagle eye upon the exposed hollow, and if a dark object, no matter how small or how large, was seen to be scurrying to its burrow, I thrust my fingers into the dirt in frantic efforts to seize it. I knew not which were common and which rare; my only course was to let none escape. But many were too swift for me, with all my efforts, and of all that I captured in this manner I am not sure that one was “worth mounting.” I quote those last two words partly by way of emphasis. They stood for the lowest round in the ladder of my entomological ambition. What I most of all desired was to discover a new species; next I coveted a species new to New England; after that a species new to Mount Washington; and last of all a specimen worth saving, or, as my employer said, “worth mounting”--in short, worth a pin.

My most productive field, like her own, was about the front of the hotel itself. In warm afternoons flies, beetles, moths and what not are known to drop out of the invisible, from nobody can tell where, upon the windows or the white clapboards of the house. Here, not once, but with something like regularity, insects have been captured, the like of which have never been seen elsewhere except in the West Indies or Mexico, in Greenland or among the Rocky Mountains. How such wanderers come, and why, are among the things that no man knoweth. Enough that they are known to come. And who could tell but one might have come for me? Here, at all events, was my golden opportunity. Let me not miss it. If by chance, therefore, the lady herself stepped inside for a minute or two, I hastened to take her place. Tourists by the dozen might be watching me curiously, or even derisively, my equanimity was undisturbed. Science is a shield. Vial in hand (my vade-mecum I called it, Latin being in the air), I walked along the platform, with my eyes upon the glass and the paint, and woe to the unlucky insect that was there taking the sun. The yawning mouth of a bottle was clapped over him, the world swam before his eyes, and long before he knew it he was on his way to be a specimen. Strange things happen to insects, though they are not the only ones who have found perdition in a bottle.

Sometimes I climbed the stairs to the upper floors of the observatory. No matter how high I went, the higher the better. In the warm hours of the day the air at the very top was almost a cloud of tiny wings. “Excelsior” is the insects’ watchword. Once, in the upper room, I bottled carelessly a small black-and-white moth. Its appearance was ordinary enough; no doubt it was common; but it was an insect, and hit or miss I took it in. And in due course it went into the entomologist’s hands with the rest of the catch. She emptied the vial, and passed an unexciting comment or two upon the few flies and beetles it contained; perhaps she remarked that one of them might be worth mounting--I do not remember precisely; it was a way she had of egging me on; but the next morning she said: “You didn’t tell me anything about the lovely moth you took yesterday.” I was obliged to stop and think. “Oh, that little black-and-white thing,” I said. Yes, that was the one--“new to the summit.” If I was not proud, then pride does not dwell in earthly minds. This, I confide, was not my only contribution to the fauna of our highest New England mountain; I seem to remember a short-winged beetle also; but the moth, being in the Lepidoptera, is my especial glory. I wish I could recall its name, that I might print it here for the reading of future generations.

With such pursuits did I improve the spare hours of my Mount Washington week. I have no thought of boasting. At least I would not seem to do so. It was little enough that I accomplished, or could hope to accomplish, hampered as I was by my ignorance. Probably I shall never have a beetle, much less a moth, named after me; but with that precious black-and-white rarity in mind I feel that even in the way of entomology I have not lived altogether in vain.

Scientific studies apart, the best hours of the week (after some spent along the carriage-road, resting here and there upon a boulder to enjoy the magnificent, ever-shifting prospect, and some--not hours, alas, but minutes--spent in eating the ambrosial, banana-savored, soul-satisfying berries of Vaccinium cæspitosum)--my best hours, I say, were perhaps those of a certain wonderful evening. The air was warm, no breath stirring, the sky clear, and the half world below us, as we walked the hotel platform, lay covered with white clouds, on which the full moon was shining. The stillness, the mildness, the brightness, the sense of elevation, and the bewitching, unearthly scene, all this was like an evening in fairyland. For the time being, it is to be feared, even the rarest of moths would have seemed a matter of secondary importance. Such is the power of beauty. So truly was it born to make other things forgotten.

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY

Nothing heightens appreciation like a contrast. After a week at the summit of Mount Washington, where we lived in the clouds and above them, in a world above the world, we returned to the lowlands. The afternoon was sultry, and before the descent was half accomplished--by the train--we wished ourselves back again on the heights. How can men live in such an atmosphere, we asked each other; so stifling, so depressing, so wanting in all the elements of vitality. Our condition seemed like that of fishes out of water, and we began to think of angling as a cruel sport. It grieved us to see the trees growing taller. Even the laughing young Ammonoosuc was looked upon with indifference. “I wish I were back,” said one; and the other responded, “So do I.”

At Fabyan’s the crowd surged about us like a sea. Baggage must be found and checked, our train was waiting, and the baggage-master, true railway “official” that he was, was not to be hastened. His steps were all taken by rule, and every movement of his hands was set to slow music. When he spoke, which was seldom, it was in a muffled voice and with funereal moderation. In the midst of all that bustle he was calm--

“Calm as to suit a calmer grief.”

You might say what you pleased to him, be urgently argumentative, or plaintive even to wheedling, it was all one. Your eloquence was wasted. It was like nudging a graven image, or crying haste in the ear of Death. Not a feature of his countenance altered, not a muscle quickened. Who ever knew the hands of a clock to accelerate their pace in response to human impatience? Time and tide--and a baggage-master--hurry for no man.

“Two trunks for Bethlehem,” you say. No answer. By and by, meekly insistent, and thinking that by this time your turn must surely have come, you repeat the words. No answer. But the man is taking down checks from their peg, and in due time, stepping as to the measure of a dirge, he marches with them down the platform. “These are mine,” you say, keeping an uneasy pace or two in advance and pointing to the trunks on the truck. No answer--not so much as a look. Nor is there need of any. You are silenced. That implacable manner carries all before it. You could not speak again, even to claim your soul. But finally the man himself speaks. You are relieved to know he can. He is addressing you. The minute hand is at twelve and the clock strikes. “These are yours?” he asks. You reply in the affirmative, as best you are able. “For Bethlehem?” he asks, and you answer “Yes.” And then, after one more set of machine-like motions, the mighty work is accomplished. The checks are yours. Fortunately, the train has not yet pulled away, though it is past the time, and at the last moment you see the trunks on board.

Trifles like these would have been as nothing, of course, to ordinary travelers; but to us, innocent Carthusians, fresh from the unearthly quiet of a mountain-top, they were little short of tragical. And how intolerably hot and close the car was! Things were growing worse and worse with us. Should we live to reach Bethlehem, with nothing but this blast out of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace in our nostrils? Why had we not remained where existence was not a struggle, but a dream of pleasure; where the air had not to be gasped for, but came of itself to be sweetly inhaled? Nevertheless, we survived the passage,--the conductor helping to pass the time by stopping in the aisle to make inquiries touching a little flock of puzzling birds, crossbills, perhaps, lately seen in his apple orchard,--and at Bethlehem the carriage awaited us. This was a welcome change, but even so we still found it difficult to draw breath; and when the horses started, what a dust they set flying! Truly, between the heat and the drought, this lower world was in an evil case. It was a road of sighs all the six miles to Franconia.

Once there, however, and supper eaten, I stepped out upon the piazza and looked westward. Venus was bright just above the near horizon (the near horizon!), and against the sunset sky stood a line of low woods, with detached pine trees towering over the rest. And in that sight I discovered anew, all in a moment, the charm of this valley world. I had seen nothing like this from the mountain-top. Yes, good as the summit prospect was, this was in some respects better. If that was more magnificent, more soul-expanding, this was more home-felt and beautiful. And as I looked and looked, while the light faded out of the sky, I was conscious of a new contentment. Mountain-tops for visits, I said, and may I enjoy them often; but the valley to live in.