Hillsboro People | Page 8

radiant vision of May woods. She was a woman now, with a trained
mind which took in the saddening significance of these lives, not so
much melancholy or tragic as utterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored.
They weighed on her heart as she walked and drove about the lovely
country they spoiled for her.
What a heavenly country it was! She compared it to similar valleys in
Switzerland, in Norway, in Japan, and her own shone out pre-eminent
with a thousand beauties of bold skyline, of harmoniously "composed"
distances, of exquisitely fairy-like detail of foreground. But oh! the
wooden packing-boxes of houses and the dreary lives they sheltered!
The Pritchard family, her temporary hosts, summed up for her the
human life of the valley. There were two children, inarticulate,
vacant-faced country children of eight and ten, out from morning till
night in the sunny, upland pastures, but who could think of nothing but
how many quarts of berries they had picked and what price could be
exacted for them. There was Gran'ther Pritchard, a doddering, toothless
man of seventy-odd, and his wife, a tall, lean, lame old woman with a
crutch who sat all through the mealtimes speechlessly staring at the
stranger, with faded gray eyes. There was Mr. Pritchard and his son
Joel, gaunt Yankees, toiling with fierce concentration to "get the crops
in" after a late spring. Finally there was Mrs. Pritchard, worn and pale,
passing those rose-colored spring days grubbing in her vegetable
garden. And all of them silent, silent as the cattle they resembled. There
had been during the first few days of her week's stay some vague

attempts at conversation, but Virginia was soon aware that they had not
the slightest rudiments of a common speech.
A blight was on even those faint manifestations of the esthetic spirit
which they had not killed out of their bare natures. The pictures in the
house were bad beyond belief, and the only flowers were some petunias,
growing in a pot, carefully tended by Grandma Pritchard. They bore a
mass of blossoms of a terrible magenta, like a blow in the face to
anyone sensitive to color. It usually stood on the dining-table, which
was covered with a red cloth. "Crimson! Magenta! It is no wonder they
are lost souls!" cried the girl to herself.
On the last day of her week, even as she was trying to force down some
food at the table thus decorated, she bethought herself of her old haunt
of desolate peace on the mountainside. She pushed away from the table
with an eager, murmured excuse, and fairly ran out into the gold and
green of the forest, a paradise lying hard by the pitiable little purgatory
of the farmhouse. As she fled along through the clean-growing
maple-groves, through stretches of sunlit pastures, azure with bluets,
through dark pines, red-carpeted by last year's needles, through the
flickering, shadowy-patterned birches, she cried out to all this beauty to
set her right with the world of her fellows, to ease her heart of its
burden of disdainful pity.
But there was no answer.
She reached the deserted clearing breathless, and paused to savor its
slow, penetrating peace. The white birches now almost shut the house
from view; the barn had wholly disappeared. From the finely
proportioned old doorway of the house protruded a long, grayed,
weather-beaten tuft of hay. The last utilitarian dishonor had befallen it.
It had not even its old dignity of vacant desolation. She went closer and
peered inside. Yes, hay, the scant cutting from the adjacent old
meadows, had been piled high in the room which had been the
gathering-place of the forgotten family life. She stepped in and sank
down on it, struck by the far-reaching view from the window. As she
lay looking out, the silence was as insistent as a heavy odor in the air.

The big white clouds lay like stepping-stones in the sky's blue river,
just as when she was a child. Their silver-gleaming brightness blinded
her ... "_Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh ... warte nur ... balde ... ruhest ...
du ..." she began to murmur, and stopped, awed by the immensity of the
hush about her. She closed her eyes, pillowed her head on her upthrown
arms, and sank into a wide, bright reverie, which grew dimmer and
vaguer as the slow changeless hours filed by.
She did not know if it were from a doze, or but from this dreamy haze
that she was wakened by the sound of voices outside the house, under
the window by which she lay. There were the tones of a stranger and
those of old Mrs. Pritchard, but now flowing on briskly with a
volubility unrecognizable. Virginia sat up, hesitating Were they only
passing by, or stopping? Should She show herself