The Hills of Hingham | Page 7

No more writing for me--but breathing and eating and jostling with the good earthy people outside, laughing and loving and dying with them!
The sweet wind in Copley Square! The sweet smell of gasoline! The sweet scream of electric horns!
And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hack driver, standing there by the stone post! He has a number on his cap; he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the library. Thank heaven he is no book, but just a good black human being. I rush up and shake hands with him. He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I must get hold of life again, and he looks so real and removed from letters!
"Uncle!" I whisper, close in his ear, "have ye got it? Quick--
"'Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's steppin' at de doo'! Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's creakin' on de floo'!'"
He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston Street, a living thing once more with face toward--the hills of Hingham.
It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and all the street pours forth to meet me--some of them coming with me bound for Hingham, surely, as all of them are bound for a hill somewhere and a home.
I love the city at this winter hour. This home-hurrying crowd--its excitement of escape! its eagerness and expectancy! its camaraderie! The arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy they see on the faces beneath them.
It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter Street. Now the very stores are closing. Work has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone. The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his stand at the Subway entrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women, young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, more joyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street. They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any one particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understand as we cross and dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through this deep narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush at the station, that nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plunge into the crowd and are carried through the gates and into our train--which is speeding far out through the dark before I begin to come to myself--find myself leaving the others, separating, individualizing, taking on definite shape and my own being. The train is grinding in at my station, and I drop out along the track in the dark alone.
I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread and bananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down the track. Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road lie before me. I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, and very close about me the deep darkness of the woods--and silence and space and shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to my city-dinned ears and staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin to see and hear.
And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank; that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees shines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the dog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching stars.
How the car takes the hill--as if up were down, and wheels were wings, and just as if the boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire were all waiting for it! As they are, of course, it and me. I open up the throttle, I jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in the middle of the hill,--puppy yelping down to meet me. The noise we make as the lights flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come to our nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn! They drag me from the wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon my bundles; they hustle me toward the house, where, in the lighted doorway more welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppy joining the attack!
Who would have believed I had seen and done all this,--had any such adventurous trip,--lived any such significant day,--catching my regular 8.35 train as I did!
But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the children in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.
How the night has deepened since my return! No wind stirs. The hill-crest blazes with the