286 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



cliffs cut out through it like some vast blunt ship's 

 prow through a giant sea. 



From my window I saw the trees, the tall, dark 

 pines apparently in command, stepping up the slope 

 rank on rank, till the leaders grew indistinct and 

 ghostlike as the mist enfolded them, like patient 

 soldiers climbing into the mystery of battle smoke. 

 I saw the cliffs, too, their feet amid the golden, sun- 

 lit soldiers, their naked gray sides rearing up into the 

 vapor, their tops invisible. Without the sun, the 

 scene would have depressed me. I know of nothing 

 more leaden on the spirit than to be shut in by 

 mountain walls which vanish into a cloud ceiling. 

 But with the warm sun striking under from the 

 open east, I had only the exhilarating sensation of 

 vast, unknown height, gained from the stimulus of 

 an upward-soaring line which vanishes into mystery 

 and might go on forever. Here, thought I, is an 

 argument for the imaginative, the suggestive, in any 

 art, but particularly the graphic arts, the art, say, 

 of scene-designing in the theater. My mountain 

 was a scene by Gordon Craig, not Belasco. 



As the sun climbed higher and from far off came 

 the sput-sput, sput-sput, skip — sput-sput, sput-sput, 

 sput — skip, of a gasolene-engine running my neigh- 

 bor's thresher (if I had really had Spanish in- 

 fluenza, I should have gone mad trying to predict 

 the coming of each skip!), I could see the under 

 fringe of the cloud fray out, sway, twine wraiths 

 of vapor around the trees, untwine again, and 

 always rising, almost imperceptibly but still rising, 

 exactly as if it were a gigantic soft gauze curtain 

 being drawn up to heaven with a superb leisureli- 



