Mistress Catherine and I returned together to Drake Hill, she
bearing herself with a sharp and anxious conciliation, and I with
little to say in response, and walking behind her, though she moved
more and more slowly that I might gain her side.
We were not yet in sight of Drake Hill, but the morning smoke from
the slave cabins had begun to thrust itself athwart the honeyed
sweetness of blossoms, and the salt freshness of the breath of the
tidal river, as the homely ways of life will ever do athwart the
beauty and inspiration of it, maybe to the making of its true
harmony, when of a sudden we both stopped and listened. Mistress
Catherine turned palely to me, and I dare say the thought of Indians
was in her mind, though they had long been quiet, then her face
relaxed and she smiled.
"'Tis the first day of May," said she. "And they are going to set up
the May-pole in Jarvis Field."
This did they every May of late, because some of the governors and
some of the people had kept to those prejudices against the May
revelries which had existed before the Restoration, and frowned upon
the May-pole set up in the Jamestown green as if it had been, as the
Roundheads used to claim, the veritable heathen god Baal.
Jarvis Field was a green tract, clear of trees, not far from us, and
presently we met the merry company proceeding thither. First came a
great rollicking posse of lads and lasses linked hand in hand, all
crowned with flowers, and bearing green and blossomy boughs over
shoulder. And these were so swift with the wild spirit and jollity
of the day that they must needs come in advance, even before the
horses which dragged the May-pole. Six of them there were, so
bedecked with ribbons and green garlands that I marvelled they could
see the road and were not wild with fear. But they seemed to enter
into the spirit of it all, and stepped highly and daintily with
proud archings of necks and tossings of green plumed heads, and
behind them the May-pole rasped and bumped and grated, the trunk of
a mighty oak yet bristling with green, like the stubble of a shaggy
beard of virility. And after the May-pole came surely the queerest
company of morris dancers that ever the world saw, except those of
which I have heard tell which danced in Herefordshire in the reign
of King James, those being composed of ten men whose ages made up
the sum of twelve hundred years. These, while not so ancient as
that, were still of the oldest men to be come at who could move
without crutches and whose estate was not of too much dignity for
such sports. And Maid Marion was the oldest and smallest of them
all, riding her hobby-horse, dressed in a yellow petticoat and a
crimson stomacher, with a great wig of yellow flax hanging down
under her gilt crown, and a painted mask to hide her white beard.
And after Maid Marion came dancing, with stiff struts and
gambols, old men as gayly attired as might be, with garlands of
peach-blossoms on their gray heads, bearing gad-sticks of peeled
willow-boughs wound with cowslips, and ringing bells and blowing
horns with all their might. And after them trooped young men and
maids, all flinging their heels aloft and waving with green and
flowers, and shouting and singing till it seemed the whole colony
was up and mad.