An Evening with Verena

This sad afternoon there was neither rain nor shine, nor honest fog, nor a decent scudding and scurrying of clouds, but a gray neutrality of all, an eventless sky that had neither height nor depth nor color, an air wet enough to chill, cold enough to be nearly nasty, a flat landscape fudged out of sour, dull, pointless greens. I walked in the wood. Next week the leaves would turn. Oakwood here, floored with uniform bracken; better at any rate than the wood next door, of beech and waist-high nettles. In rare gaps of my bracken were little outbreaks of a few useless fungi, Paxillus futilis, Lactarius inedulis, Russula emetica; and Amanita phalloides, not useless at all if you wish to dispose of an emperor.

At the edge of the wood, dividing it from the muddy lozenge of a field of beet, a shallow, black, bitter stream, all silence and shadows, pulled the thin wires of its waterweeds one way. I thought, in the air as I jumped it, a thought that is often with me on these solitary searchings for a nothing that one always finds: why here? So many rooms in the mansion of the world: some papered with gold melon-flowers, some ceilinged in jungle-peacock-green, some where the copper dust flies up from the troubadour castles. Others have nothing but tiny, snake-gray lichens crusting a boulder that sticks from the ribbed ice. But why this, all sketchy and brooding and thinking sluggishly of rain? How many now—say thirty-eight out of forty-one solar revolutions—have I spent stuck in this beastly temperate chip of an enormously various planet! And forty-one out of how many? Eighty, if I’m lucky; or unlucky, depending on whether and how. And what to do about the coming, doubtful thirty-nine? I know well what ties tie me, what roots derive what from what earth. But do I know what goods and fancies lie for me, never probably to be tasted, in the huge, pure primaries of the enormous south?