The Heart of Monadnock/Chapter 6
VI
The Mountain-Lover had been wandering along the Amphitheatre path again, and had left it at the broken gorge to climb straight over the rough head of this until he should come out behind the little height of Cranberry Crag. It was a friendly view of the Giant which one had here, absolutely different, as usual, from any other. He dropped down in one of his innumerable favorite lairs where he could gaze up with the welling devotion those gray walls always inspired. . . As a thousand times before, the question came to his mind, why this small mountain was so inexpressibly dear; so intimate and so great a Teacher. He knew many great mountains; our own Adirondacks; the White Mountains; the North Carolina ranges tossing in their careless wilderness; the Rockies in their magnificence; the young, sharp-edged peaks of the Alps. He loved them all with a broad, impersonal affection, but no one of them ever took hold of his very heart as did this intimate and personal Monadnock. This alone, in an inexplicable way, was like his
"Life's ornament,
"To mix itself with each event."
There was an extraordinary graciousness about the mountain with all its strength and ruggedness; a friendliness, as if glad to let its garnered richness of wisdom flow out like healing balm on all who stretched out longing hands for its renewing. It had that graciousness of a great soul, that going through the Valley of Baca, had made of it a well, and not a draught of poison bitterness. . . . A great soul in which centres the harvest of ripe experience and leadership; whose musings have delved deep into the unknowable, bringing back as from a treasure-house things beyond speech but which the yearning heart of another may yet receive through some unknown osmose.
The Mountain-Lover thought of the mighty ranges of the Alps; of icy Matterhorn piercing the sky in its imperial isolation; of the Ice-Maiden in her white austerity standing by the Monk with the Youth beyond, drawing her white skirts haughtily about her feet; of Mount Blanc in mighty majesty and cold pride of expanse. These drew and thrilled their devotees as the desire of the almost inaccessible ever draws and thrills the heart of man for conquest. But did their devotees feel for these huge mountain-masses the depth of inexpressible tenderness and the personal longing and the sheer delight in intimate beauty that the lovers of Monadnock felt for the Wise Old Titan? The watcher had never heard such expressed. Myriads of men were yearly drawn to the attempt of those austere heights of the Alps as if with a lodestone, but countless men had those grim peaks—as if with rage at the attempt for conquest—flung remorselessly back, down into their black crevasses, ever yawning for victims, or buried them deep in their cruel white blankets, as relentlessly as Eastern deities sacrifice their worshippers.
The Mountain-Lover felt their strange enchantment, but it was only this "Great little mountain" that with its inexplicable personal quality, that drew and held his heart.
"Joy-giver and enjoyer," said Thoreau, looking deeply into Monadnock. The Mountain-Lover as he lay full length upon his water-worn cradle of rock, put his hand caressingly on its garnet-flecked sides, fancying that the now purpling masses above him—how the lights quivered and changed every moment!—delighted in the wooing sunlight that crept along its crest and that it loved the dappled shadows that played endearingly with its crannies and recesses. He fancied as Wordsworth imagined of the moon, that with delight the deserted summit must look around it "when the heavens are bare" and that in some mystic way it must flash back signals of joy and love and understanding to the far glimmering lakes lying in the scattered hollows of the fair country-side, their waters rippling in the midnight wind, tossing back the dancing stars, since their every drop had once caressed his own rugged shoulders on their downward way. Oh, surely the brooding spirit of the mountain must rejoice in that far-flung beauty, while it lies there, chin on hand, waiting with flawless patience for heaven's perfect hour. . . The world drifted away as one gazed.
"And the whole flight with folded wing
"Vanish and end their murmuring."
In the sight of that stately, willing patience shall not one's own sorrow become, even to the sorrow-stricken, an impertinent thing? A thing that after all takes no more root in the world than the fleeting shadows on the rock's calm face?
"Fretful child! In the time of thy trouble He shall hide thee in His pavilion! In the secret place of His dwelling He shall hide thee! He shall set thy foot upon a rock of stone."
Surely a voice spoke.
For three days a great storm had raged, and had retreated sullenly. The early morning had shown its power still holding, but slowly the wind shifted and by noon the storm clouds had acknowledged themselves vanquished, reluctantly drawing off their massed cohorts. By noon, with incredible swiftness came golden light and radiance indescribable, filtering through the rain-scrubbed air, and a serenity that seemed to steep one's soul in its essence. It was like a miracle to see how swiftly the clouds had vanished from a sky of pure ultramarine.
In a moment the Mountain-Lover was off for the heights of Jaffrey Overlook. It was sheer joy to spring briskly up the steep, wet path—no loitering today—up and up and up! Joy to be climbing again after three days of bondage in the house, except for brief excursions down the road to the gate, a mile and a half away. The woods were still drenched and the rich, indescribable odor of rejoicing earth fresh from its bath rose on every side. The few birds that August had left recalled their June jubilation in mad joy of living. The note of the hermit thrush came flutily from the direction of Monte Rosa across the steep declivity between. Everything was free again.
The climber reached at last the spot he had in mind. It was a point of vantage that Thoreau loved, on the east side of the unsuspected, high-nestled little mountain meadow, in the middle of the small plateau which lies under the east flank of the summit. He found his sheltering nook; a pew-like ledge with blueberries creeping close to his hand along the crevice between seat and back, and at his feet a little charming carpet of cranberries, matted and close and clean-cut, with glowing little globes of scarlet still yellow on the underside, hiding their unimagined spiciness in their firm polished plumpness. The tiny shining leaves were a delight to the eye.
In the middle foreground as one looked towards the summit lay the swampy little meadow with every shade of russet and brown and red and pale green, rejoicing the artist. Beyond it rose flanking walls and broad bed-rock surfaces; the meadow stretched to the edge of the torn rocks of the interjacent gorge which lies like a rough knife-slash close under towering heights. The sweep of the mountain from this point is perhaps the most splendid vision one may obtain of it; precipices, now sharp, now slanting; bare cliff basking in the sun; deep little black recesses in its rent sides; incredibly ancient, determined little spruces knotting themselves into crannies and cracks and clenching every vantage-point with their tough roots, their dark green embroidered against the grayish-purple background; and surmounting all, the bold and splendid outline clearly etched against the dazzling sky.
The climber had the mountain to himself. The storm had cleared too recently for any one but himself to be abroad. For three days had the rain lashed furiously that granite mass, and so deeply had the clouds enveloped it that only at brief moments when mad winds flung aside the obscuring veil could it be seen rising vast, black, inscrutable. There towered the mountain, calmly biding its time. The fury of the wind could not stir it; the rage of the lightning could not affect it; the mighty artillery of the thunder left it unmoved.
Now that the storm had passed, Monadnock rose again against the blue, "busy with its sky affairs," absolutely undisturbed, absolutely peaceful. What mattered the might of wind and driving storm? They had passed. So had they always passed. All was as if they had not been. To the watcher _-_plate_09.png)
ON THE SUMMIT DEEP CRYSTAL POOLS REFLECT THE SKY
on the stone seat words floated into his consciousness.
"The storms can endure but for a night. Peace comes with the morning. Oh, soul! tarry thou the Lord's leisure! Be strong and He shall comfort thine heart!"
Surely a voice spoke.
Above towered the unshaken, sun flushed mightiness, shining with countless, threadlike rills trickling down every crevice or slipping over broad slants in transparent, glinting sheets. There was the message again—one of unassailable peace; of unconquered endurance. The storm was over. What matter if it came again? It would pass again. Some things are to be fought, but some must be endured. So one cannot fight storms; one lives through them. Shall one rage in bitterness against the tempests of life? With that bitterness and resentment which crumbles all our power to dust? Do not the hard things we bear go as completely to the fashioning of man as the hard things we do? If the muscles of the soul demand conflict to strengthen them, the lungs of the soul require the steady intake of the breath of endurance. Bunyan, who portrayed the Hill Difficulty up which the soul must toil, also painted the Dark Valley of the Shadow of Death through which it must pass; here it meets not demons to be conquered, but riving sorrows to be borne. There is nothing to fight. Everything to endure. Through the quagmire of agony must the stumbling feet tread—and one lives on as best one may. But—the end comes.
While we are in the world it is the way of the world that storms will come. Let them come.
The father of the Mountain-Lover had been a clergyman and his training had been in the Theological Seminary under the keen and wise old Bishop Williams of Connecticut. A favorite if enigmatical piece of advice he frequently gave to "His Boys," as he loved to call his students, was this:
"My boys," he would say to some beloved group at parting, "you will appreciate this piece of advice more when you are older than you do now, but I want you to remember it. It is this: when it rains—let it rain."
The climber, who had heard the story from his father many times, himself appreciated the sage, calm wisdom of this simple advice more deeply as the years passed. This afternoon the words returned to him with renewed meaning, as he looked deeply into the heart of Monadnock. That counsel was what the mountain whispered. When it rained—let it rain. How could anything so transient as even the most raging tempest affect its inner, inscrutable calm? . . . Even as one gazed, its ineffable peace, its unshakable serenity like a benediction shed themselves upon the heart.
The sunset drew on. Changing colors began to play caressingly over the rocky cliffs which slowly grew rosy-heliotrope, as are the violet-wreathed hills about old Athens. The emerald spruces took on a softer, warmer green; the mellow leaves of the maples far below were drenched in golden light Every moment the values changed. The poignant distant note of the hermit-thrush thrilled through the air. . . . The glorious colors deepened. To the west the sky above the horizon was palest green with long-drawn clouds lying between golden strips of apparent sea; above, the clouds melted into turquoise and then by mysterious gradations into salmon and into flamingo pink and deep rose and flame color. Overhead all was soft purplish tones. And well the watcher knew that such color, such piercing beauty must have had tempest preceding them.
The Wise Old Giant spoke softly to his listener.
"So the storm passes. Suppose trouble and disaster and crushing disappointment and shattering disillusion sweep over your soul. Suppose they even strip you bare as my riven sides were stripped bare by fire and flood long years ago. What matter? It all passes. You can only lose what was not truly yours. New beauty, new hopes, new development will come. Keep your feet steady; your head above the clouds. It passes!"
"Yes—it passes!" repeated the listener. "Thank God! Eternity is not here!"
He turned his meditative gaze from west to south and east He seemed to be alone in a world of unbelievable beauty, bathed in molten, golden light which like a palpable thing might have flowed from the throne of God. The far hills of Vermont looked like fairy transparent lines, distance melting behind distance, as the sun sank.
"The storm passes! God is behind the storm—somewhere."
He threw an intent look across the huge, wide-stretched shoulders of the Monadnock, all drawing up into that central stability. He thought of that solid rock of which he saw only the crest, reaching far down into the bosom of the earth, part and substance of the very framework of the globe whereon he trod.
"It is this sense of an unshakable foundation that gives the conviction that the old Titan is unassailable," he mused. "His foundations are a part of the earth itself. That knowledge is what we so yearningly crave in life. We reach out so longingly for what is unshakable; for something on which the soul can stand; for something that is founded upon a Rock. Where is it!"
He went back in mind slowly over those now distant, soul-shattering days of 1914, when convictions of civilization, of Christianity, of God Himself, were rocking dizzily before a stunned and paralyzed world. What an outcry had gone up in those first terrific, mad months, that the whole elaborate fabric of life was a blank, dead failure. Men had gone around with haunted eyes as if they had laid their dearest in a black grave, with no hope of resurrection beyond. Their hopes, their ideals, their very faith were being buried fathoms deep.
But the slow change crept on. Even before the end, even in the face of all the heaped-up horror; of all the eager, unshrinking sacrifice of magnificent youth; in the face of the shuddering knowledge brought to the ravaged hearts of mothers and the sharp-edged burdens of fathers—yes, in the very teeth of the storm while it raged most fiercely there strangely crept over the world an ever-deepening sense of a vast Power of love and mercy behind the crash and the ruin. A Power that would one day vindicate itself. A conviction of an unassailable foundation. Whence came that irresistible, intangible conviction that was absorbed into the very fibre of human life? And now that the tempest of war was spent, even though the bark of human life felt itself still tossed in the long ground-swell that follows the storm, even though waves of extravagance and mad unrest and crime still broke on the shore—yet the inner heart of man was dimly conscious of the Presence in human life of One who in quiet majesty of Power had once said to the waves, "Peace! Be still!"
There was Eternal Power. There was an Eternal Foundation.
He listened. Again the Mountain spoke.
"Sometimes all the accretions of life, which are not true growth, need to be stripped away. Men saw not my foundation rock, until flame and flood stripped them bare. War has stripped bare the souls of men, and beneath—if they choose—they will find their feet are upon a Rock. The Rock of a faith in the power of Good itself. . . . It is beyond reason. Only feeling can apprehend it. . . It is only when your soul is utterly still that it can hear God speak—and He speaks not with the tongue of humanity. . . . When the storm breaks, let it rage. . . . In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. In that strength you shall do the work of ten. . . . The confidence of a mighty Purpose working out its mysterious will—this shall bring you through, unhurt of soul—though the storms rage. . . . If you believe that God is in His heaven, must not all eventually be right with the world? Be not fearful, oh, ye of little faith!"
A soft, elusive breeze that seemed to bring with it the very soul of the words, fell on the listener. Thoughts gathered that were no longer translatable into human speech—but the soul knew them. . . . At last he rose slowly, and came with many pauses down the cliffs through the lingering unearthly beauty. Each radiant day seemed like a gem he might not find again. From ledge to ledge he came, with a warm sense of comfort and healing and strange assurance springing up within him. As he descended, some lines of Scollard's drifted through his mind.
"Gird me with faith; the radiant faith to see
"Beyond the darkness—Immortality.
"Thus may the gulf be spanned!"
Something that transcended words had passed from the heart of the mountain to the heart of the man; ineffable peace welled up in his breast as he came at last through the darkening woods, along the paths familiar even in the dusk; a healing touch of balm had been laid on a jagged cut in his heart that had hardly yet ceased to bleed.