Sweet Rocket

The woman driving turned the phaeton from the highway into a narrow road. Almost immediately the forest through which they had been passing for a mile or more deepened. It was now a rich woodland, little cut, seldom touched by fire. Apparently the road knew little use. Narrow and in part grass-grown, soft from yesterday's rain, dimmed by many trees, now it bent and now it ran straight, a dun streak, cut always in front by that ancient, exquisite screen of bough and leaf. The highway dropped out of sight and mind. The woman to whom this countryside was new, sitting beside the woman driving, drew a breath of pleasure. "Oh, smell it! It goes over you like balm!"

"It washes the travel stains away. Take off your hat."

The other obeyed, turning and placing it upon the back seat beside a large and a small traveling bag. She drew off her gloves, too, then, straightening herself, sighed again with happiness. "How deep it goes ... and quiet! It's thousands of miles away!"

"Hundreds of thousands, and right at hand!"

Leaves were beginning to turn. Maples had lighted fires, hickories were making gold, dogwood and sumac dyeing with crimson. Ironweed, yet blooming, blotched the roadside with purple. Joe-pye lifted heads of ashy pink, goldenrod started forth, in places farewell-summer made a low mist of lilac. The road dipped into a dell. The gray horse, the phaeton, crossed a brown streamlet, sliding, murmuring. Mint filled the air. The road lifted and ran on again into mystery. Blackbirds flew across, a woodpecker tapped and tapped, a squirrel ran up an oak. But for all of faint, stealthy rustle, perpetual low sound and small movements without end, deep, deep, deep rest was the note. Rest and solitude.

The old, strong, gray horse was named Daniel. This was his road since he was a colt. Sometimes he might find upon it Whitefoot and Bess, the farm horses, drawing the farm wagon, but oftenest it was solitary like this--his road--Sweet Rocket road. The phaeton moving its wheels rolled it, droned it forth--"Sweet Rocket road--Sweet Rocket road."

"There are five miles of it," said Marget. Her tone added, "I love it--its solitariness, its ownness!"

"It's miraculously beautiful," answered her companion. "It aches, it is so beautiful!"

"Sweet Rocket road--Sweet Rocket road," said the wheels. "Way to Sweet Rocket--way to Sweet Rocket."

"It is straight and single-minded as an arrow. No one goes but one who wishes to travel to Sweet Rocket. It is our road in and our road out. There seems to be no other."

"'Seems'?"

"I mean that it is the only road made with spade and pick."

They traveled again in silence. The visitor sat, a small, elderly woman, with a thin, strong, intelligent face. Something about her, alike of strength and of limitation, said, "Teacher for long years." She sat with her hands in her lap, looking at that truly beautiful road and the forest walls. But at last with a sigh of appreciation she turned to talk. "Twenty years and more since we last met! But you keep young, Marget. I had no difficulty in picking you out of the station crowd."

"Nor I you, dear Miss Darcy! But then I've always kept you in mind and heart. I owe you so much!"

"Ah, Marget, not much!"

"I owe you learning. It is a good deal to take a country girl, charge scarcely anything for her and see that she gets knowledge and learns how to get more--and more--"

"You are of those who reward teaching. Don't let us talk about that which was neither load nor task and so is no debt. The 'now' interests me. You look well. Your face is a rose under clear brown."

"I am well."

"And happy?"

"Yes, happy."

"I know that you couldn't be happy unless you were helping."

"I don't know how much I help. I help some."

"You were never given to long letters. There really is much that I don't at all know about you! And such as they are, I have had very few letters of late years. It was the sheerest accident my finding out that this was your part of the country. I might have gone to the Conference and never known that you were not twenty miles away!"

"The day before I had your card I knew that something pleasant was going to happen."

"Well, tell me what you do--"

Marget Land looked over Daniel's ears, down the vista of the road. At this point hemlocks grew to either hand, cones of a green that was almost black. Between rose sycamores with pale arms and leaves like silky brown hair. At the road edge the farewell-summer made a lacework, and above it glowed the sumac torches. Blue sky roofed the autumn earth. The air just flowed, neither hot nor cold, milk warm, happy. Summer and winter had made a bargain, struck a compromise, achieved a diagonal. Gold autumn, crimson autumn, violet autumn, dusky and tawny autumn--autumn balm--autumn drawn up into a gracious figure--Keats's autumn--a goddess!

She drew a light, sighing breath. "I told you that I was happy.... Isn't it strange--living? Isn't it strange and sweet the way things come about? There's magic, all right! Sweet Rocket.... I was born in the overseer's house at Sweet Rocket. That was ten years after the war and there wasn't much nor many for my father to oversee. I love my father. He was what the mountain folk call 'a getter-on.' He had ability and a lot of goodness and a lot of kindness. Education from books had not come his way, but he knew many things. He had worked hard and saved, and after the war, when he gave up overseeing, or it gave him up, and when he turned merchant in Alder, over there, he made money--as we looked at it in Virginia in those days. Some money, that is. He had ten thousand dollars in bank when old Major Linden died, and Mary Linden married and went away, and Sweet Rocket was sold for debt. He bought it--though he kept a steady face, he was so proud to buy it! I was nine years old when we moved out of the overseer's house into the big house--my mother, my father, my two brothers, and I. I loved it, loved it, loved it--love it, love it, love it!"

"I remember the very way in which you used to say it, 'Sweet Rocket!'"

"We became at once land poor. And my father had an illness, and, though he seemed to recover, never did quite recover. When it came to choosing and bargaining, making and laying by, he was never again the man he had been. My mother, too, who had worked so hard when she was young--too hard--began to fail. Will, my elder brother, went West. Edgar, the younger, wanted to go, too. He did not like it here. You see ... every one still said: 'The old overseer bought it. They were all born in the overseer's house. Now they rattle around in the Lindens' house! Bottom rail--!' It was still called 'the Linden place.' As I grew old enough to have cared for what they said I somehow escaped caring. But Edgar cared. It was hard on the boy.... But I loved Sweet Rocket, loved it, love it! I love the overseer's house and the big house--which isn't, of course, very big, for the place was always a simple one--simple and still and out of the way!"

She seemed to pause somewhat deeply to vision something within. Miss Darcy watched the moving walls, now standing close, now a little receding, now opening as it were into gateways through which were seen forest lawns and aisles. They shut in again. A golden bough brushed the phaeton. She who had been speaking put out her hand and touched it. "How could one help but love it? To me it is forever so old and forever so new! I lock with it.... What was I saying? Well, Edgar did not like it, and my mother failed, and father had less money and less money--and still we went on ... five years, eight years, ten years. Then in one year my father died and my mother died.... Will came home. He and Edgar said that we must sell Sweet Rocket. I wasn't eighteen. We knew about the mortgage, but we didn't know about some other debts. When it was sold there was hardly anything to divide among us--"

"The Lindens didn't buy it back, then?"

"No, not then. Northern people bought it. Will went back to Wyoming, and Edgar with him. I went to my mother's sister--Aunt Hester--who lived in Richmond. I went to her with my two hundred and fifty dollars a year. She's one of the best of women. I never had anything but kindness from her--and one of the greatest was when she spoke of me to you!"

She put her hand over Miss Darcy's hand. "I had been to school a little, of course. There were some books at home, and I had borrowed where I could. But in Richmond, to you, I really began to go to school."

"You studied as very few study, Marget. You studied as though waves of things were coming happily back into memory."

"Yes. But you released something. Always fire is lit from fire. Always one comes to any that sit in darkness.... Well, I went to school for three years. Then off you go from that school to Canada, to England, to I don't know where! I stayed in Richmond and went to a business school. I learned typewriting and stenography. I began to earn my living."

"You were with Baker and Owen?"

"Yes. And then I passed into library work. I went to Washington. I was in the library there for five years. I saved. I wrote a few papers that were published. I took what they brought me and what I had saved, and I left the library and I went around the world, second class and third class--and at times fourth--and I learned and enjoyed. I taught English here and there, and so I paid as I went. I came back in four years--back to Richmond and Aunt Hester, until I might look about me and see what I could do, for I must earn."

"If you had written to me then in New York--"

"I felt that. But there is something--don't you know there is something?--that guides us.... I lay one night thinking of Sweet Rocket. I could always come back here, just as really--come back from the ends of the earth! I came back often. There has always been, along the garden wall, sweet rocket--dame's violet, you know. Some of it is white and some is purple--shining clusters growing above your waist. I could gather them in my arms and feel them against my cheek. I could get into the dark cedars that come up from the river. I lay in Richmond, more than half feeling, more than half seeing.... There's a country, you know, out of which things come down to you.... It came down--knowledge! I meant to go back to Sweet Rocket."