A Kentucky Cardinal by James Lane Allen
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James Lane Allen >> A Kentucky Cardinal
A KENTUCKY CARDINAL _A Story_
by James Lane Allen
Dedication
This to her from one who in childhood used to stand at the windows
of her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars.
I
All this New-year's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wrought
no thaw. Even the landscapes of frost on the window-panes did not
melt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughs
arched high above the jeweled avenues. During the afternoon a lean
hare limped twice across the lawn, and there was not a creature
stirring to chase it. Now the night is bitter cold, with no sounds
outside but the cracking of the porches as they freeze tighter.
Even the north wind seems grown too numb to move. I had determined
to convert its coarse, big noise into something sweet--as may
often be done by a little art with the things of this life--and so
stretched a horse-hair above the opening between the window sashes;
but the soul of my harp has departed. I hear but the comfortable
roar and snap of hickory logs, at long intervals a deeper breath
from the dog stretched on his side at my feet, and the crickets
under the hearth-stones. They have to thank me for that nook. One
chill afternoon I came upon a whole company of them on the western
slope of a woodland mound, so lethargic that I thumped them repeatedly
before they could so much as get their senses. There was a branch
near by, and the smell of mint in the air, so that had they been
young Kentuckians one might have had a clew to the situation. With
an ear for winter minstrelsy, I brought two home in a handkerchief,
and assigned them an elegant suite of apartments under a loose
brick.
But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the
ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf
of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument
which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music,
as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light.
Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft
leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.
Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind,
faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the lower
animals, I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard,
listening to that music which is at once so cheery and so sad--the
low chirping of birds at dark winter twilights as they gather in
from the frozen fields, from snow-buried shrubbery and hedge-rows,
and settle down for the night in the depths of the evergreens, the
only refuge from their enemies and shelter from the blast. But this
evening they made no ado about their home-coming. To-day perhaps
none had ventured forth. I am most uneasy when the red-bird is
forced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, on
the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shining
and beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the tree in
which a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure they
were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next
with the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.
The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched
my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it
on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other.
Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times
the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side
everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through
me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across
the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go
to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.
That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising
in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before
any other dogs are in sights. And, indeed, the case is much that
of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at
every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever
snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought
like a common cur, is Man.
Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life,
the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner. I
called him my rain-cow, because the sound of his voice awoke
apprehensions of falling weather. A visit from him was an endless
drizzle. For Jacob came over to expound his minute symptoms; and
had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments
been written down, it must have made a volume as large, as solemn,
and as inconvenient as a family Bible. My other nearest neighbor
lives across the road--a widow, Mrs. Walters. I call Mrs. Walters
my mocking-bird, because she reproduces by what is truly a divine
arrangement of the throat the voices of the town. When she flutters
across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself
lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me
with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note
of the village songsters. After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins
to flutter in a motherly way around the subject of _my_ symptoms.
Naturally it has been my wish to bring about between this rain-cow
and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another. For, if a
man always wanted to tell his symptoms and a woman always wished
to hear about them, surely a marriage compact on the basis of such
a passion ought to open up for them a union of overflowing and
indestructible felicity. They should associate as perfectly as the
compensating metals of a pendulum, of which the one contracts as
the other expands. And then I should be a little happier myself.
But the perversity of life! Jacob would never confide in Mrs.
Walter. Mrs. Walters would never inquire for Jacob.
Now poor Jacob is dead, of no complaint apparently, and with so few
symptoms that even the doctors did not know what was the matter,
and the upshot of this talk is that his place has been sold, and
I am to have new neighbors. What a disturbance to a man living on
the edge of a quiet town!
Tidings of the calamity came to-day from Mrs. Walters, who flew
over and sang--sang even on a January afternoon--in a manner to
rival her most vociferous vernal execution. But the poor creature
was so truly distressed that I followed her to the front gate, and
we twittered kindly at each other over the fence, and ruffled our
plumage with common disapproval. It is marvellous how a member of
her sex will conceive dislike of people that she has never seen;
but birds are sensible of heat or cold long before either arrives,
and it may be that this mocking-bird feels something wrong at the
quill end of her feathers.
II
Mrs. Walters this morning with more news touching our incoming
neighbors. Whenever I have faced towards this aggregation of unwelcome
individuals, I have beheld it moving towards me as a thick gray
mist, shutting out nature beyond. Perhaps they are approaching
this part of the earth like comet that carries its tail before it,
and I am already enveloped in a disturbing, befogging nebulosity.
There is still no getting the truth, but it appears that they are
a family of consequence in their way--which, of course, may be
a very poor way. Mrs. Margaret Cobb, mother, lately bereaved of
her husband, Joseph Cobb, who fell among the Kentucky boys at the
battle of Buena Vista. A son, Joseph Cobb, now cadet at West Point,
with a desire to die like his father, but destined to die--who
knows?--in a war that may break out in this country about the
negroes.
While not reconciled, I am resigned. The young man when at home
may wish to practise the deadly vocation of an American soldier of
the period over the garden fence at my birds, in which case he and
I could readily fight a duel, and help maintain an honored custom
of the commonwealth. The older daughter will sooner or later turn
loose on my heels one of her pack of blue dogs. If this should
befall me in the spring, and I survive the dog, I could retort
with a dish of strawberries and a copy of "Lalla Rookh"; if in the
fall, with a basket of grapes and Thomson's "Seasons," after which
there would be no further exchange of hostilities. The younger
daughter, being a school-girl, will occasionally have to be subdued
with green apples and salt. The mother could easily give trouble;
or she might be one of those few women to know whom is to know the
best that there is in all this faulty world.
The middle of February. The depths of winter reached. Thoughtful,
thoughtless words--the depths of winter. Everything gone inward
and downward from surface and summit, Nature at low tide. In its
time will come the height of summer, when the tides of life rise
to the tree-tops, or be dashed as silvery insect spray all but to
the clouds. So bleak a season touches my concern for birds, which
never seem quite at home in this world; and the winter has been
most lean and hungry for them. Many snows have fallen--snows that
are as raw cotton spread over their breakfast-table, and cutting
off connection between them and its bounties. Next summer I must
let the weeds grow up in my garden, so that they may have a better
chance for seeds above the stingy level of the universal white. Of
late I have opened a pawnbroker's shop for my hard-pressed brethren
in feathers, lending at a fearful rate of interest; for every
borrowing Lazarus will have to pay me back in due time by monthly
instalments of singing. I shall have mine own again with usury.
But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed
for a summer song? Would he refuse to invest his stale crumbs in
an orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices?
And to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man more trees of holly,
juniper, and fir, since the storm-beaten cedars will have to come
down. For in Kentucky, when the forest is naked, and every shrub
and hedge-row bare, what would become of our birds in the universal
rigor and exposure of the world if there were no evergreens--nature's
hostelries for the homeless ones? Living in the depths of these,
they can keep snow, ice, and wind at bay; prying eyes cannot watch
them, nor enemies so well draw near; cones or seed or berries are
their store; and in these untrodden chambers each can have the
sacred company of his mate. But wintering here has terrible risks
which few run. Scarcely in autumn have the leaves begun to drop
from their high perches silently downward when the birds begin to
drop away from the bare boughs silently southward. Lo! some morning
the leaves are on the ground, and the birds have vanished. The
species that remain, or that come to us then, wear the hues of
the season, and melt into the tone of Nature's background--blues,
grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and breast and wing
for coming flecks of snow.
Save only him--proud, solitary stranger in our unfriendly land--the
fiery grosbeak. Nature in Kentucky has no wintry harmonies for him.
He could find these only among the tufts of the October sumac, or
in the gum-tree when it stands a pillar of red twilight fire in
the dark November woods, or in the far depths of the crimson sunset
skies, where, indeed, he seems to have been nested, and whence to
have come as a messenger of beauty, bearing on his wings the light
of his diviner home.
With almost everything earthly that he touches this high herald
of the trees is in contrast. Among his kind he is without a peer.
Even when the whole company of summer voyagers have sailed back to
Kentucky, singing and laughing and kissing one another under the
enormous green umbrella of Nature's leaves, he still is beyond them
all in loveliness. But when they have been wafted away again to
brighter skies and to soft islands over the sea, and he is left
alone on the edge of that Northern world which he has dared invade
and inhabit, it is then, amid black clouds and drifting snows,
that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth in the ideal picture of
his destiny. For it is than that his beauty I most conspicuous,
and that Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him from afar.
So that he retires to the twilight solitude of his wild fortress.
Let him even show his noble head and breast at a slit in its green
window-shades, and a ray flashes from it to the eye of a cat; let
him, as spring comes on, burst out in desperation and mount to the
tree-tops which he loves, and his gleaming red coat betrays him to
the poised hawk as to a distant sharpshooter; in the barn near by
an owl is waiting to do his night marketing at various tender-meat
stalls; and, above all, the eye and heart of man are his diurnal and
nocturnal foe. What wonder if he is so shy, so rare, so secluded,
this flame-colored prisoner in dark-green chambers, who has only
to be seen or heard and Death adjusts an arrow. No vast Southern
swamps or forest of pine here into which he may plunge. If he
shuns man in Kentucky, he must haunt the long lonely river valleys
where the wild cedars grow. If he comes into this immediate
swarming pastoral region, where the people, with ancestral love of
privacy, and not from any kindly thought of him, plant evergreens
around their country homes, he must live under the very guns and
amid the pitfalls of the enemy. Surely, could the first male of
the species have foreseen how, through the generations of his race
to come, both their beauty and their song, which were meant to
announce them to Love, would also announce them to Death, he must
have blanched snow-white with despair and turned as mute as a stone.
Is it this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the
singing of the red-bird thoughtful and plaintive, and, indeed,
nearly all the wild sounds of nature so like the outcry of the
doomed? He will sit for a long time silent and motionless in the
heart of a cedar, as if absorbed in the tragic memories of his
race. Then, softly, wearily, he will call out to you and to the
whole world: _Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_..!--the
most melodious sigh that ever issued from the clefts of a dungeon.
For color and form, brilliant singing, his very enemies, and the
bold nature he has never lost, I have long been most interested in
this bird. Every year several pairs make their appearance about
my place. This winter especially I have been feeding a pair; and
there should be finer music in the spring, and a lustier brood in
summer.
III
March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with
that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper
air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by
faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing
the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier
might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown
to him from the clouds. What far-off lands, streaked with mortal
dawn, does he believe in? In what soft sylvan water will he bury
his tired breast? Always when I hear his voice, often when not,
I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where
hunts the darker Fowler--gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where,
one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love
me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.
March is a month when the needle of my nature dips towards the
country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of winter
sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet
after goblet of young sunshine. I must find the dark green snowdrop,
and sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly
from her couch, the frosted nightcap, which the old Nurse would still
insist that she should wear. The pale green tips of daffodils are
a thing of beauty. There is the sun-struck brook of the field,
underneath the thin ice of which drops form and fall, form and
fall, like big round silvery eyes that grow bigger and brighter
with astonishment that you should laugh at them as they vanish. But
most I love to see Nature do her spring house-cleaning in Kentucky,
with the rain-clouds for her water-buckets and the winds for her
brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a
day! How she dashes pailful and pailful into every corner, till
the whole earth is as clean as a new floor! Another day she attacks
the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October,
and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and
aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go
into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife
would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten
up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you,
joyfully, "Now, then, we are all right again!" This done, she
begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to
spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such
as no mortal looms could ever have woven. And then, at last, she
sends out invitations through the South, and even to some tropical
lands, for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The
invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May,
and by June her house is full of visitors.
Not the eyes alone love Nature in March. Every other sense hies
abroad. My tongue hunts for the last morsel of wet snow on the
northern root of some aged oak. As one goes early to a concert-hall
with a passion even for the preliminary tuning of the musicians,
so my ear sits alone in the vast amphitheatre of Nature and waits
for the earliest warble of the blue-bird, which seems to start up
somewhere behind the heavenly curtains. And the scent of spring,
is it not the first lyric of the nose--that despised poet of the
senses?
But this year I have hardly glanced at the small choice edition of
Nature's spring verses. This by reason of the on-coming Cobbs, at
the mere mention of whom I feel as though I were plunged up to my
eyes in a vat of the prosaic. Some days ago workmen went into the
house and all but scoured the very memory of Jacob off the face of
the earth. Then there has been need to quiet Mrs. Walters.
Mrs. Walters does not get into our best society; so that the town
is to her like a pond to a crane: she wades round it, going in as
far as she can, and snatches up such small fry as come shoreward
from the middle. In this way lately I have gotten hints of what
is stirring in the vasty deeps of village opinion.
Mrs. Cobb is charged, among other dreadful things, with having
ordered of the town manufacturer a carriage that is to be as fine
as President Taylor's, and with marching into church preceded by
a servant, who bears her prayer-book on a velvet cushion. What
if she rode in Cinderella's coach, or had her prayer-book carried
before her on the back of a Green River turtle? But to her sex
she promises to be an invidious Christian. I am rather disturbed
by the gossip regarding the elder daughter. But this is so conflicting
that one impression is made only to be effaced by another.
A week ago their agent wanted to buy my place. I was so outraged
that I got down my map of Kentucky to see where these peculiar
beings originate. They come from a little town I the northwestern
corner of the State, on the Ohio River, named Henderson--named from
that Richard Henderson who in the year 1775 bought about half of
Kentucky from the Cherokees, and afterwards, as president of his
purchase, addressed the first legislative assembly ever held in the
West, seated under a big elm-tree outside the wall of Boonsborough
fort. These people must be his heirs, or they would never have
tried to purchase my few Sabine acres. It is no surprise to discover
that they are from the Green River country. They must bathe often
in that stream. I suppose they wanted my front yard to sow it in
penny-royal, the characteristic growth of those districts. They
surely distil it and use it as a perfume on their handkerchiefs. It
was perhaps from the founder of this family that Thomas Jefferson
got authority for his statement that the Ohio is the most beautiful
river in the world--unless, indeed, the President formed that notion
of the Ohio upon lifting his eyes to it from the contemplation of
Green River. Henderson! Green River region! To this town and to
the blue-grass country as Boeotia to Attica in the days of Pericles.
Hereafter I shall call these people my Green River Boeotians.
A few days later their agent again, a little frigid, very urgent--this
time to buy me out on my own terms, _any_ terms. But what was back
of all this I inquired. I did not know these people, had never done
them a favor. Why, then, such determination to have me removed?
Why such bitterness, vindictiveness, ungovernable passion?
That was the point, he replied. This family had never wronged _me_.
I had never even seen _them_. Yet they had heard of nothing but
my intense dislike of them and opposition to their becoming my
neighbors. They could not forego their plans, but they were quite
willing to give me the chance of leaving their vicinity, on whatever
I might regard the most advantageous terms.
Oh, my mocking-bird, my mocking-bird! When you have been sitting
on _other_ front porches, have you, by the divine law of your being,
been reproducing _your_ notes as though they were _mine_, and even
pouring forth the little twitter that was meant for your private
ear?
As March goes out, two things more and more I hear--the cardinal
has begun to mount to the bare tops of the locust-trees and scatter
his notes downward, and over the way the workmen whistle and sing.
The bird is too shy to sit in any tree on that side of the yard.
But his eye and ear are studying them curiously. Sometimes I even
fancy that he sings to them with a plaintive sort of joy, as though
he were saying, "Welcome--go away!"
IV
The Cobbs will be the death of me before they get here. The report
spread that they and I had already had a tremendous quarrel, and
that, rather than live beside them, I had sold them my place. This
set flowing towards me for days a stream of people, like a line of
ants passing to and from the scene of a terrific false alarm. I
had nothing to do but sit perfectly still and let each ant, as it
ran up, touch me with its antennae, get the counter-sign, and turn
back to the village ant-hill. Not all, however. Some remained
to hear me abuse the Cobbs; or, counting on my support, fell to
abusing the Cobbs themselves. When I made not a word of reply,
except to assure them that I really had not quarrelled with the
Cobbs, had nothing against the Cobbs, and was immensely delighted
that the Cobbs were coming, they went away amazingly cool and
indignant. And for days I continued to hear such things attributed
to me that, had that young West-Pointer been in the neighborhood,
and known how to shoot, he must infallibly have blown my head off
me, as any Kentucky gentleman would. Others of my visitors, having
heard that I was not to sell my place, were so glad of it that they
walked around my garden and inquired for my health and the prospect
for fruit. For the season has come when the highest animal
begins to pay me some attention. During the winter, having little
to contribute to the community, I drop from communal notice. But
there are certain ladies who bow sweetly to me when my roses and
honeysuckles burst into bloom; a fat old cavalier of the South
begins to shake hands with me when my asparagus bed begins to send
up its tender stalks; I am in high favor with two or three young
ladies at the season of lilies and sweet-pea; there is one old soul
who especially loves rhubarb pies, which she makes to look like
little latticed porches in front of little green skies, and it is
she who remembers me and my row of pie-plant; and still another,
who knows better than cat-birds when currants are ripe. Above all,
there is a preacher, who thinks my sins are as scarlet so long as
my strawberries are, and plants himself in my bed at that time to
reason with me of judgment to come; and a doctor, who gets despondent
about my constitution in pear-time--after which my health seems to
return, but never my pears.
So that, on the whole, from May till October I am the bright side
of the moon, and the telescopes of the town are busy observing
my phenomena; after which it is as though I had rolled over on my
dark side, there to lie forgotten till once more the sun entered
the proper side of the zodiac. But let me except always the few
steadily luminous spirits I know, with whom is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning. If any one wishes to become famous in
a community, let him buy a small farm on the edge of it and cultivate
fruits, berries, and flowers, which he freely gives away or lets
be freely taken.