Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval (15 page)

The way the nest-full every time we stirred

Stood up to us as to a mother-bird

Whose coming home has been too long deferred,

Made me ask would the mother-bird return

And care for them in such a change of scene

And might our meddling make her more afraid.

That was a thing we could not wait to learn.

We saw the risk we took in doing good,

But dared not spare to do the best we could

Though harm should come of it; so built the screen

You had begun, and gave them back their shade.

All this to prove we cared. Why is there then

No more to tell? We turned to other things.

I haven’t any memory—have you?—

Of ever coming to the place again

To see if the birds lived the first night through,

And so at last to learn to use their wings.

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At that word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Brown lived at such a lofty farm

That everyone for miles could see

His lantern when he did his chores

In winter after half-past three.

And many must have seen him make

His wild descent from there one night,

’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything,

Describing rings of lantern light.

Between the house and barn the gale

Got him by something he had on

And blew him out on the icy crust

That cased the world, and he was gone!

Walls were all buried, trees were few:

He saw no stay unless he stove

A hole in somewhere with his heel.

But though repeatedly he strove

And stamped and said things to himself,

And sometimes something seemed to yield,

He gained no foothold, but pursued

His journey down from field to field.

Sometimes he came with arms outspread

Like wings, revolving in the scene

Upon his longer axis, and

With no small dignity of mien.

Faster or slower as he chanced,

Sitting or standing as he chose,

According as he feared to risk

His neck, or thought to spare his clothes,

He never let the lantern drop.

And some exclaimed who saw afar

The figures he described with it,

“I wonder what those signals are

Brown makes at such an hour of night!

He’s celebrating something strange.

I wonder if he’s sold his farm,

Or been made Master of the Grange.”

He reeled, he lurched, he bobbed, he checked;

He fell and made the lantern rattle

(But saved the light from going out.)

So half-way down he fought the battle

Incredulous of his own bad luck.

And then becoming reconciled

To everything, he gave it up

And came down like a coasting child.

“Well—I—be—” that was all he said,

As standing in the river road,

He looked back up the slippery slope

(Two miles it was) to his abode.

Sometimes as an authority

On motor-cars, I’m asked if I

Should say our stock was petered out,

And this is my sincere reply:

Yankees are what they always were.

Don’t think Brown ever gave up hope

Of getting home again because

He couldn’t climb that slippery slope;

Or even thought of standing there

Until the January thaw

Should take the polish off the crust.

He bowed with grace to natural law.

And then went round it on his feet,

After the manner of our stock;

Not much concerned for those to whom,

At that particular time o’clock,

It must have looked as if the course

He steered was really straight away

From that which he was headed for—

Not much concerned for them, I say:

No more so than became a man—

And
politicain at odd seasons.

I’ve kept Brown standing in the cold

While I invested him with reasons;

But now he snapped his eyes three times;

Then shook his lantern, saying, “Ile’s

’Bout out!” and took the long way home

By road, a matter of several miles.

There overtook me and drew me in

To his down-hill, early-morning stride,

And set me five miles on my road

Better than if he had had me ride,

A man with a swinging bag for load

And half the bag wound round his hand.

We talked like barking above the din

Of water we walked along beside.

And for my telling him where I’d been

And where I lived in mountain land

To be coming home the way I was,

He told me a little about himself.

He came from higher up in the pass

Where the grist of the new-beginning brooks

Is blocks split off the mountain mass—

And hopeless grist enough it looks

Ever to grind to soil for grass.

(The way it is will do for moss.)

There he had built his stolen shack.

It had to be a stolen shack

Because of the fears of fire and loss

That trouble the sleep of lumber folk:

Visions of half the world burned black

And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke.

We know who when they come to town

Bring berries under the wagon seat,

Or a basket of eggs between their feet;

What this man brought in a cotton sack

Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce.

He showed me lumps of the scented stuff

Like uncut jewels, dull and rough

It comes to market golden brown;

But turns to pink between the teeth.

I told him this is a pleasant life

To set your breast to the bark of trees

That all your days are dim beneath,

And reaching up with a little knife,

To loose the resin and take it down

And bring it to market when you please.

Here come the line-gang pioneering by.

They throw a forest down less cut than broken.

They plant dead trees for living, and the dead

They string together with a living thread.

They string an instrument against the sky

Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken

Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.

But in no hush they string it: they go past

With shouts afar to pull the cable taught,

To hold it hard until they make it fast,

To ease away—they have it. With a laugh,

An oath of towns that set the wild at naught

They bring the telephone and telegraph.

He is said to have been the last Red man

In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed—

If you like to call such a sound a laugh.

But he gave no one else a laugher’s license.

For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,

“Whose business,—if I take it on myself,

Whose business—but why talk round the barn?—

When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”

You can’t get back and see it as he saw it.

It’s too long a story to go into now.

You’d have to have been there and lived it.

Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter

Of who began it between the two races.

Some guttural exclamation of surprise

The Red man gave in poking about the mill

Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone

Disgusted the Miller physically as coming

From one who had no right to be heard from.

“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel-pit?”

He took him down below a cramping rafter,

And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,

The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,

Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.

Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it

That jangled even above the general noise,

And came upstairs alone—and gave that laugh,

And said something to a man with a meal-sack

That the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch—then.

Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.

The three stood listening to a fresh access

Of wind that caught against the house a moment,

Gulped snow, and then blew free again—the Coles

Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,

Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.

Meserve was first to speak. He pointed backward

Over his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,

“You can just see it glancing off the roof

Making a great scroll upward toward the sky,

Long enough for recording all our names on.—

I think I’ll just call up my wife and tell her

I’m here—so far—and starting on again.

I’ll call her softly so that if she’s wise

And gone to sleep, she needn’t wake to answer.”

Three times he barely stirred the bell, then listened.

“Why, Lett, still up? Lett, I’m at Cole’s. I’m late.

I called you up to say Good-night from here

Before I went to say Good-morning there.—

I thought I would.— I know, but, Lett—I know—

I could, but what’s the sense? The rest won’t be

So bad.— Give me an hour for it.— Ho, ho,

Three hours to here! But that was all up hill;

The rest is down.— Why no, no, not a wallow:

They kept their heads and took their time to it

Like darlings, both of them. They’re in the barn.—

My dear, I’m coming just the same. I didn’t

Call you to ask you to invite me home.—”

He lingered for some word she wouldn’t say,

Said it at last himself, “Good-night,” and then,

Getting no answer, closed the telephone.

The three stood in the lamplight round the table

With lowered eyes a moment till he said,

“I’ll just see how the horses are.”

“Yes, do,”

Both the Coles said together. Mrs. Cole

Added: “You can judge better after seeing.—

I want you here with me, Fred. Leave him here,

Brother Meserve. You know to find your way

Out through the shed.”

“I guess I know my way,

I guess I know where I can find my name

Carved in the shed to tell me who I am

If it don’t tell me where I am. I used

To play—”

“You tend your horses and come back.

Fred Cole, you’re going to let him!”

“Well, aren’t you?

How can you help yourself?”

“I called him Brother.

Why did I call him that?”

“It’s right enough.

That’s all you ever heard him called round here.

He seems to have lost off his Christian name.”

“Christian enough I should call that myself.

He took no notice, did he? Well, at least

I didn’t use it out of love of him,

The dear knows. I detest the thought of him

With his ten children under ten years old.

I hate his wretched little Racker Sect,

All’s ever I heard of it, which isn’t much.

But that’s not saying—Look, Fred Cole, it’s twelve,

Isn’t it, now? He’s been here half an hour.

He says he left the village store at nine.

Three hours to do four miles—a mile an hour

Or not much better. Why, it doesn’t seem

As if a man could move that slow and move.

Try to think what he did with all that time.

And three miles more to go!”

“Don’t let him go.

Stick to him, Helen. Make him answer you.

That sort of man talks straight on all his life

From the last thing he said himself, stone deaf

To anything anyone else may say.

I should have thought, though, you could make him hear you.”

“What is he doing out a night like this?