WHAT should there be more? My house stands upon a hill; waving, sighing
trees are ranked about it, while to the eastward I have the shimmering
stretches of the river beneath my feet. From a wooden seat between two
beeches, I may see the fog-loom born of the dust and smoke of the city
far away. At night, when clouds lie thick and low, the red reflection of
the city's million lamps breaks on the sky as though a fire raged.
It is upon my seat between the beeches that I spend my days. Men would
call my life a stagnant one; I care not, since I find it peace. I have
neither hopes nor fears nor pains nor joys; there come no exaltations,
no depressions; within me is a serenity--a kind of silence like the
heart of nature.
At that I have no dimness; I roll and rock for hours on the dead swells
of old days, while old faces and old scenes toss to and fro like seaweed
with the tides of my memory. I am prey to no regrets, to no ambitions;
my times own neither currents nor winds; I have outlived importance
and the liking for it; and all those little noises that keep the world
awake, I never hear.
My Sicilian, with his earrings and his crimson headwear of silk, is with
me; for he could not have lived had I left him in town, being no more
able to help himself than a ship ashore. Here he is busy and happy over
nothing. He has whittled for himself a trio of little boats, and he
sails them on the pond at the lawn's foot. One of these he has named the
Democrat, while the others are the Republican and the Mugwump. He sails
them against each other; and I think that by some marine sleight he
gives the Democrat the best of it, since it ever wins, which is not true
of politics. My Sicilian has just limped up the hill with a story of
how, in the last race, the Republican and the Mugwump ran into one
another and capsized, while the Democrat finished bravely.
Save for my Sicilian, and a flock of sable ravens that by their tameness
and a confident self-sufficiency have made themselves part of the
household, I pass the day between my beeches undisturbed. The ravens are
grown so proud with safety that, when I am walking, they often hold
the path against me, picking about for the grains my Sicilian scatters,
keeping upon me the while a truculent eye that is half cautious,
half defiant. In the spring I watch these ravens throughout their
nest-building, they living for the most part in the trees about my
house. I've known them to be baffled during a whole two days, when winds
were blowing and the swaying of the branches prevented their labors.
Now and then I have a visit from Morton and the Reverend Bronson. The
pair are as they were, only more age-worn and of a grayer lock. They
were with me the other day; Morton as faultless of garb as ever, and
with eyeglass as much employed, the Reverend Bronson as anxious as in
the old time for the betterment of humanity. The spirit of unselfishness
never flags in that good man's breast, although Morton is in constant
bicker with him concerning the futility of his work.
“The fault isn't in you, old chap,” said Morton, when last they were
with me; “it isn't, really. But humanity in the mass is such a beastly
dullard, don't y' know, that to do anything in its favor is casting
pearls before swine.”
“Why, then,” responded the Reverend Bronson with a smile, “if I were
you, I should help mankind for the good it gave me, without once
thinking on the object of my generosity.”
“But,” returned Morton, “I take no personal joy from helping people.
Gad! it wearies me. Man is such a perverse beggar; he's ever wrong end
to in his affairs. The entire race is like a horse turned round in its
stall, and with its tail in the fodder stands shouting for hay. If men,
in what you call their troubles, would but face the other way about,
nine times in ten they'd be all right. They wouldn't need help--really!”
“And if what you say be true,” observed the Reverend Bronson, who was as
fond of argument as was Morton, “then you have outlined your duty. You
say folk are turned wrong in their affairs. Then you should help them to
turn right.”
“Really now,” said Morton, imitating concern, “I wouldn't for the world
have such sentiments escape to the ears of my club, don't y' know, for
it's beastly bad form to even entertain them, but I lay the trouble you
seek to relieve, old chap, to that humbug we call civilization; I do,
'pon my word!”
“Do you cry out against civilization?”
“Gad! why not? I say it is an artifice, a mere deceit. Take ourselves:
what has it done for any of us? Here is our friend”--Morton dropped his
hand upon my shoulder--“who, taking advantage of what was offered of our
civilization, came to be so far victorious as to have the town for
his kickball. He was a dictator; his word was law among three
millions--really! To-day he has riches, and could pave his grounds
with gold. He was these things, and had these things, from the hand
of civilization; and now, at the end, he sits in the center of sadness
waiting for death. Consider my own case: I, too, at the close of my
juice-drained days, am waiting for death; only, unlike our friend, I
play the cynic and while I wait I laugh.”
“I was never much to laugh,” I interjected.
“The more strange, too, don't y' know,” continued Morton, “since you are
aware of life and the mockery of it, as much as I. I may take it that
I came crying into this world, for such I understand to be the beastly
practice of the human young. Had I understood the empty jest of it, I
should have laughed; I should, really!”
“Now with what do you charge civilization?” asked the Reverend Bronson.
“It has made me rich, and I complain of that. The load of my millions
begins to bend my back. A decent, wholesome savagery would have
presented no such burdens.”
“And do you uplift savagery?”
“I don't wonder you're shocked, old chap, for from our civilized
standpoint savagery is such deuced bad form. But you should consider;
you should, really! Gad! you know that civilized city where we dwell;
you know its civilized millions, fretting like maggots, as many as four
thousand in a block; you know the good and the evil ground of those
civilized mills! Wherein lieth a triumph over the red savage who abode
upon the spot three centuries ago? Who has liberty as had that savage?
He owned laws and respected them; he had his tribe, and was a patriot
fit to talk with William Tell. He fought his foe like a Richard of
England, and loved his friend like a Jonathan. He paid neither homage to
power nor taxes to men, and his privileges were as wide as the world's
rim. His franchises of fagot, vert, and venison had never a limit; he
might kill a deer a day and burn a cord of wood to its cookery. As for
his religion: the test of religion is death; and your savage met death
with a fortitude, and what is fortitude but faith, which it would bother
Christians to parallel. It may be said that he lived a happier life, saw
more of freedom, and was more his own man, than any you are to meet in
Broadway.”
Morton, beneath his fluff of cynicism, was a deal in earnest. The
Reverend Bronson took advantage of it to say:
“Here, as you tell us, are we three, and all at the end of the journey.
Here is that one who strove for power: here is that one who strove for
wealth; here is that one who strove to help his fellow man. I give you
the question: Brushing civilization and savagery aside as just no more
than terms to mark some shadowy difference, I ask you: Who of the three
lives most content?--for it is he who was right.”
“By the way!” said Morton, turning to me, as they were about to depart,
and producing a scrap of newspaper, “this is what a scientist writes
concerning you. The beggar must have paid you a call, don't y' know.
At first, I thought it a beastly rude thing to put in print; but, gad!
the more I dwell upon it, the more honorable it becomes. This is what he
says of you:
“'There was a look in his eye such as might burn in the eye of an old
wolf that has crept away in solitude to die. As I gazed, there swept
down upon me an astounding conviction. I felt that I was in the presence
of the oldest thing in the world--a thing more ancient than the Sphinx
or aged pyramids. This once Boss, silent and passive and white and
old, and waiting for the digging of his grave, is what breeders call a
“throw-back”--a throw-back, not of the generations, but of the ages. In
what should arm him for a war of life against life, he is a creature of
utter cunning, utter courage, utter strength. He is a troglodyte; he
is that original one who lived with the cave bear, the mastodon, the
sabertoothed tiger, and the Irish elk.'”
They went away, the Reverend Bronson and Morton, leaving me alone on my
bench between the beeches, while the black ravens picked and strutted
about my feet, and my Sicilian on the lake at the lawn's foot matching
his little ships for another race.
THE END