Part 8

Yet, though flowers are rare on the third week in October and the pungency of dead leaves pervades the swamp, the upland pastures have a fine fragrance of their own,--a perfume so dainty and alluring that you look for its source in bewilderment, knowing that at this time of year no flowering shrub, no slender-blossoming vine, remains to float it down the wind.

It is not the pitchy aroma of the white pines. These have just carpeted all the floors of their house anew with last year’s leaves. The new ones are not pitchy, and that resinous smell which the midsummer sun distills is hardly to be noticed in the wood. Nor are the pasture cedars to be thanked. Their prim, close-wrapping branches give forth a woodsy smell when bruised. It is not a perfume, and it comes only with turmoil. The soft southern wind bears no particle of it to your wistful senses. The hemlocks stand, beautiful but darkly morose, on the north side of the hill, and give forth no scent.

I searched the pasture long before I found it. Coming out from under the white pines into an open glade on the more barren soil, where the pitch pines begin to climb the slope, it always seemed stronger than anywhere else. It was as if rose-crowned Cytherea and all her attendant nymphs had just passed from perfumed baths and gone upward through the wood. If the soft moss had shown the heel marks of dainty sandals I should not have looked further. It was as possible that the garments of passing nymphs should have shed sweet odors on the glade as that these should float serenely there when all the flowers were dead. I paused among the pitch pines to consider the matter, and one of them thrust its branch tip directly into my face.

Then I thought I knew. The same fragrance emanated from the pitch-pine branch, stronger, indeed, somewhat more resinous, I thought, but practically the same. Six clubs crown the tip of every pitch-pine branch, one standing erect like a plume in the center, five arranged about its base at equal distances, not unlike a five-pointed star. These are the new shoots for next year, in rudimentary form to be sure, but all modeled carefully on what is to be.

There is the vigorous stem and the leaves as green as they will ever be again, indeed I think greener. The whole thing, which will be a perfect shoot a foot long, is compacted into a solid club less than an inch in length. Enclosing this is a fibrous husk which wraps it from all cold. Howsoever bitter the weather the life warmth of the young shoots is most carefully protected by this wrapping. But there is more than this. An air-tight, waterproof coating of hardened pitch is outside of the whole, completing an exceedingly neat, tasteful, and effective seal.

The pitch-pine mother trees have completed their preserving and now sit back and radiate perfume in satisfaction and kindly good will toward the whole world, for this slightly resinous sweetness does not come at all from the pitch-covered buds on the branch tips as I first thought. It seems to emanate from the whole tree. Cut a branch and take it home with you. Strip leaves and buds from it if you will; then smell the wood. It is there. But more than from anywhere else it seems to come from the mature leaves,--those which have borne the burden and the heat of the summer, and now are losing their rich green in a ripening which befits maturity and work well done.

All the evergreens take on this slight tendency to a mellow yellow as the autumn waxes. It is due, no doubt, to the lessening of the sap in the leaves. All winter they will hold it, and when the joy of spring sends his lifeblood bounding back again, it will fade and leave them vigorously green once more.

Crossing the glade again on my homeward way I plucked branches of juniper so thickly studded with blue berries that there seemed scarcely room for the scaly-pointed leaves, and in so doing I stumbled upon the real secret of the dainty odor left by the goddess and her train. For the matured shoots and leaves of the juniper give off a fragrance that is as much more dainty than that of the pitch pine as that is more dainty than the strongly resinous odor of the white pine when cut or bruised.

Cytherea must have smiled upon the humbler juniper as she passed, and the dwarfed and stunted shrub must have caught the warmth of her eyes full in the heart, for it sits snug as the days shorten and radiates a happiness that is perfume, and sends the thought of the goddess to all who pass that way. The stronger odor of the pitch pine carries it far on the soft south wind across the glade and down the path through the pasture, but this is only the vehicle. The dainty essence of perfume which stops you as if a soft hand fell upon your arm floats from the loving heart of the rough and lowly juniper.

The sun of this day on which summer came back set in a pale sky that flushed with a tint of rose leaves, burning long before it died to ashes,--the cool, gray ashes of autumn twilight. Against this the slender tracery of birch twigs stood outlined delicately. Some leaves still cling to the birches, and these were silhouetted against the pale-rose glow in a soft haze that made a shadowy presentment of springtime all along the western sky. The year in its second childhood thus slips happily away from us in dreams of its youth. Through the August midday of the pitch-pine grove we pass to the home path among the birches, and though October dusk slips its cool hand into ours, it is only to lead us toward a western horizon where springtime seems still to wait for us wistfully.

WHEN AUTUMN PASSES

Last night the superstitious leaves, forced to part from the home branch and begin a journey on Friday, knocked on wood as they went by, hoping thus to make a change in their luck, for the omens were all bad. The gibbous moon was peering over the eastern wood and they saw it over their left shoulders. Hence in their fall they turned round three times, still for luck!

They suspected also that they were being sent off in batches of thirteen and shivered lonesomely all the way to earth, where they scrambled together in groups and held their breaths, listening. Now and then one of them saw a ghost, and rustled the fact to the others, who took up the dreadful story with little spatting sounds of terror till all rose like a flock of frightened birds and shuddered into scrambling heaps behind tree trunks and in fence angles. They made the night eerie with their outcry. As fresh platoons came down the wood-knocking had the effect of xylophone solos, the dead march in Saul played by goblins in the lonesome trees that tossed their bare arms to the sky in mute grief.

All the out-door people seemed sorrowing, and more than half a prey to superstitious forebodings, for the passing of the hunter’s moon marks the passing of autumn. November, it is true, is rated as an autumn month in the almanac, but I have no doubt that The Old Farmer knew better. He had to divide the year into four equal segments, and he did it very well. If November must be classed with either autumn or winter it belongs rather with autumn. But it simply ought to be classed with neither.

November is a month by itself, just as March is, and neither has more than the most casual connection with the season that has gone before. The year might better be divided into two seasons,--the one of growth, the other of rest, with November and March sort of dead centers, as they say in mechanics, interstellar space as they say in astronomy--voids between the two.

These wood-knocking leaves are the last from the elms. The native maples and ash trees were bare long ago, and though some of the still birches hold their yellow nimbus, many others are bare already. Only the oaks stand up to be counted with their rich crowns of red transmitting the sunlight till those at the right angle between you and the sun flash like fire rubies.

Yet, when I say this it is true only of the native trees of the forest. None of the foreigners hereabout seem to ripen up in glory or, indeed, to understand what a winter is before them and duly prepare for it. The purple lilacs of my garden hedge show a green that may be a little grimmer than it was in midsummer, but there is no hint of a ripening color in them nor have they lost a leaf. Their pith is trained to continental winters still, and though they have faced a half-century of New England cold, they still have the habit of the Persian uplands, which are their birthplace.

The white lilacs haven’t even that dark green, but are a gentle shade,--almost like that of early springtime, when the leaves are hardly as yet half grown. The apple and pear trees have lost some leaves and others are browned by the frosts we have had, but none of those remaining show autumn coloring as we know it. They are simply darkened and grizzled. The Norway maples are showing a bronzy-yellow now, but holding their leaves bravely still, as if in the memory that, though the winter night of their homeland is long and dark, its shores are bathed by the Gulf Stream and the cold is late in coming. I think none of the imported trees and shrubs of Europe show the gorgeous coloring of our native ones, though they may have been here long enough to have been trained to it by the climate, if that is the cause of it.

Englishmen know nothing of the glory of autumn foliage until they come to America and see it. Then they are duly impressed, though you cannot always make them acknowledge it. Search English literature if you will, through prose and verse, and you will find no reference to any gorgeous reds and yellows of autumn. They don’t have them. Thomson in his “Seasons” speaks, referring to autumn, of

“ ... a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, Of every hue from wan, declining green to sooty dark.”

It is a pity Wordsworth could not have been born in Cumberland County, Maine, instead of Cumberland County, England, and have tramped the hills of, say, West Mansfield, instead of Westmoreland, that our rich autumn ripening might have fruited in his verse. I wonder that the English do not plant our maples and our red oaks in their parks. It would be an interesting experiment to watch for fifty years or a hundred and see whether the trees changed to the English habit and lost their gorgeous hues, and whether, if they retained them, some English poet did not rise to the occasion and make them immortal in splendid verse.

Perhaps it would all be a failure. Our American men and women, transplanted, so soon lose their native characteristics and ripen, over-ripen in fact, into English men and women that there lurks with us an underlying fear that the trees might suffer from the insidious blight also. Perhaps it has been tried with the trees; it would be interesting to know.

I think the leaves were afraid to go home to earth in the dark last night, because it is rarely the custom of leaves to part from the tree in the night time. On still nights you may camp beneath a maple whose leaves have long glowed red and seemingly been ready to fall, and not hear a single spirit-rapping of falling leaf against limb. The frost may be white upon them in the morning, but not until the rising sun touches them will they loose their hold and fall to the waiting earth. Then with the kindly light upon them you may hear, if you listen intently, the little chirp of contentment with which they let go and flutter quietly down to their winter’s rest. On a still frosty morning when the sun has first touched the trees these faint clucks make an infinitesimal chorus that is as sprightly as the morning light.

The xylophone ghost-march of last night was a far different thing. It came with little puffs of south wind after a bright, still day,--puffs that died out as soon as they had done the work, and left the night white and still under the gibbous moon. On all the leaves that had not scurried into shelter a white frost fell that filled them with ice-needles until they were crisp, and then sprouted miniature ghost-ferns all along their stems and upper sides.

Thus they lay stark until the white of the night gloomed into the gray of a daybreak fog that seemed to scatter all life in a formless void. After leaves have once been thoroughly frozen they dance about in the breeze no more. The forming and melting of ice crystals breaks up their cells and leaves them sodden and no longer elastic. They sag and sink and the chemic forces of the earth soon begin to work on them and resolve them into salts and humus that will go the rounds and form and nourish new leaves for another year.

You may see the ghost of autumn go up, these last mornings of October, in this dense white fog that often lingers late into the day. Last night was breathless with frost, after the leaves had done their ghost dancing, until the wan moon had begun to cushion down in the velvety blackness of the west and the gray of false dawn had stopped the winking of low-hung eastern stars.

The world was blank with silence. Until now, no matter how dark the night or how still, you had but to listen outdoors to hear the pulse of nature beat rhythmically, to hear the blood surging and singing through all her arteries. In that last hour before dawn the pulse had ceased and the blood stood stagnant. Then some outside presence held the mirror of the universe down close to the lips of the earth to see if she breathed. At first it was unclouded.

Then little wraiths of white mist shuddered up from meadowy hollows and others danced in bog tangle as will-o’-the-wisps might have done two months ago. These quivered together in soft gray masses that shut out the meadows and swamps, absorbing them and numbing them into a white nothingness. It was neither a rising tide nor a growth, but a sort of absorption. From my hilltop, in spite of the gathering darkness that seemed to be crowded together by advancing day, I could see the world gradually slipping back through chaos into the white glimmering nothingness of the nebular hypothesis.