October Vagabonds | Page 9

There was something rich and stormy and
ominous in the air, and a soft rainy sense of solemn impending change,
at once brilliant and mournful; a curious sense of intermingled death
and birth, as of withered leaves and dreaming seeds being blown about
together on their errands of decay and resurrection by the same breath
of the unseen creative spirit. Incidentally it meant a rain-storm by
evening, and its mysterious presage had prompted Colin to the
furnishing of our knapsacks with water-proof cloaks, which, as the
afternoon wore on, seemed more and more a wise provision. But the
rain still held off, contenting itself with threatening phantasmagoria of
cloud, moulding and massing like visible thunder in our wake. It
seemed leisurely certain, however, of catching us before nightfall; and,
sure enough, as the light began to thicken, and we stood admiring its
mountainous magnificence--vast billows of plum-coloured gloom,
hanging like doomsday over a stretch of haunted orchard--the great
drops began to patter down.
Surely the sky is the greatest of all melodramatists. Nothing short of the
cataclysmal end of the world could have provided drama to match the
stupendous stage-setting of that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and
wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in
that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it the landscape seemed to
grow livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees
and grasses. Oedipus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could
hardly have accounted for that angry sky. Such a sky it must have been
that carried doom to the cities of the plain. And, after all, it was only
Colin and I innocently making haste to Dutch Hollow!
That Teutonic spot seemed hopelessly far away as the rain began to
drive down and the horizon to open here and there in lurid slashings of

stormy sunset; and when the road, which for some time had been one
long descent, suddenly confronted us with a rough, perpendicular lane,
overgrown with bushes, that seemed more like a cart-track to the stars
than a sensible thoroughfare, we realized, with a certain indignant
self-pity, that we were walking in real earnest, out in the night and the
storm, far from human habitation.
"Nature cannot be so absurd," said I, "as to expect us to climb such a
road on such an evening! She must surely have placed a comfortable
inn in such a place as this, with ruddy windows of welcome, and a
roaring fire and a hissing roast." But, alas! our eyes scanned the
streaming copses in vain--nothing in sight but trees, rain and a solitary
saw-mill, where an old man on a ladder assured us in a broken singsong,
like the Scandinavian of the Middle West, that indeed Nature did mean
us to climb that hill, and that by that road only could we reach the
Promised Land of supper and bed.
And the rain fell and the wind blew, and Colin and I trudged on
through the murk and the mire, I silently recalling and commenting on
certain passages in certain modern writers in praise of walking in the
rain. At last the hill came to an end--we learned afterward that it was a
good mile high--and we stumbled out on to some upland wilderness,
unlit by star or window. Then we found ourselves descending again,
and at last dim shapes of clustered houses began to appear, and the
white phantom of a church. We could rather feel than see the houses,
for the night was so dark, and, though here was evidently a village,
there was no sign of a light anywhere, not so much as a bright keyhole;
nothing but hushed, shuttered shapes of deeper black in the general
darkness. So English villages must have looked, muffled up in darkness,
at the sound of the Conqueror's curfew.
"Surely, they can't all be in bed by seven o'clock?" I said.
"There doesn't seem much to stay up for," laughed Colin.
At length we suspected, rather than saw, a gleam of light at the rear of
one of the shrouded shapes we took for houses, and, stumbling toward
it, we heard cheerful voices, German voices; and, knocking at a back

door, received a friendly summons to enter. Then, out of the night that
covered us, suddenly sprang a kitchen full of light and a family at
supper, kind German folk, the old people, the younger married couple,
and the grandchildren, and a big dog vociferously taking care of them.
A lighted glimpse, a few hearty words of direction, and we were out in
the night again; for though, indeed, this was Dutch Hollow, its simple
microcosm did not include an hotel. For that we must walk on another
half-mile or so. O those country half-miles! So