THE CAMP IN VAGRANCY CAÑON
SHONTO collected wood and built a fire, while Charmian undid the packs.
At an early hour the sun sank behind the mountain peaks, and night
descended fast. They cooked and ate a simple meal and wasted not a
crumb, for this was a serious business that they were upon and the
success of it might depend on their husbanding of food.
They cleaned up after the meal, and, while the thin light lasted,
sought out their sleeping places for the night and spread the blankets.
Both were ineffably weary, for even Charmian’s pack was a heavy one.
But the warmth of the leaping fire that they now built up from the
red cooking coals soothed their aching joints and muscles and made
existence rosier. They sat one on either side of it, and Shonto rolled
and lighted a cigarette to be drawn upon between sips of hot black
coffee.
“I’ll take one too, please,” said Charmian. “I don’t often smoke, but
I know how; and it seems to me that, with only us two away out here
in the land of nowhere, I ought to smoke to keep you company. Do you
approve of women smoking, Doctor?”
“Never before having had any women to be solicitous about,” replied
Shonto thoughtfully, as he rolled her cigarette, “I have never given
the subject much thought.”
He arose and handed her the rolled cylinder. She accepted it a bit
awkwardly and ran the tip of her pink tongue along the edge of the
paper to moisten it. With the toe of his heavy high-laced boot he
scraped a burning twig from the fire and supplied her with a light.
“Women who smoke not being looked upon with favour,” he remarked, as he
squatted over his coffee cup again, “strikes me as only another example
of the slavery to which woman has been subjected from the beginning
of history. Laying aside any harm that may come from the practice,
why shouldn’t she smoke? It may stain her teeth and work havoc with
her digestive apparatus, but her teeth and digestive apparatus are
identical with man’s. So we can’t justly prohibit her from smoking on
those grounds. The smoking woman is looked upon with disfavour, then,
merely because tradition has it that she cannot smoke and remain in
the good graces of conservative society. To the bourgeois mind, she is
not a lady. Now, the act of smoking is in itself absolutely no more
unmoral than spinning a top. If men derived pleasure from top-spinning,
doubtless women would be permitted to likewise enjoy themselves. Men
eat candy, and women may do so too without losing caste. Just why they
can’t smoke without getting in bad is beyond me.”
“It’s simply another of our stupid taboos,” said Charmian, puffing
grandly to show her independence, and choking just a little now and
then. “We’re hemmed in with taboos on all sides. They are grounded in
our conservative minds from childhood, and we can’t shake them off.
Years ago some one decided that women ought not to smoke. Some one
agreed with him. Others took it up, perhaps; and finally it became the
accepted rule. So in childhood we were taught that women shouldn’t
smoke--that good women didn’t smoke. We grew up unaccustomed to see
women smoking. Therefore when we encountered an occasional individual
who did smoke, she was considered immoral. But why immoral? What is
there immoral about placing a cigarette between one’s lips, lighting
it, and inhaling and exhaling the smoke? Injurious it may be, but we’re
not discussing that phase of the subject. A man may thus injure himself
with impunity, but if a woman does so she is immoral. Now isn’t that
illogical?”
“Logic plays a small part in our lives,” said Shonto. “We’re not on
very friendly terms with logic. Logic means thinking and shaking off
the old ideas that are handed down to us from the ancients, and we’re
too lazy to do that. Logic calls for reasoning, and why reason when our
beliefs and our behaviour have been regulated for us for seventeen or
eighteen hundred years? Why think for ourselves, when the ancients went
to so much trouble to prescribe for us our taboos and our religious
beliefs and our standard of morals? Why think, in short? It’s such hard
work. And it has a tendency to uproot old beliefs in which we are quite
comfortable. We might feel the urge to clean house if we sat down and
thought a little, and everybody knows how upsetting is house-cleaning
day!”
“And isn’t there any hope for us, Doctor Shonto? Will nothing make us
think?”
Shonto’s dull eyes brightened. “Yes, we’re beginning to think. The
great war did that much for us here in America, anyway. I really
believe there is a serious attempt being made to-day to think. People
are at least trying to think. They are at least reading more thoughtful
books than ever before, and, thank God, we have a few men who are
capable of writing thoughtful books! There’s a whisper going along
the line, a faint and timorous suggestion that maybe all is not as it
should be on this earth--that maybe we are selling our heritage for a
mess of pottage--that perhaps we are trampling life’s riches under our
feet, like swine trampling into the mud nuggets of gold as they rush to
the swill trough.
“But as yet only the people who have been trying for some time to think
are absorbing the books which will help them to think. These books are
beyond the masses. The authors of many of them are slaves to style and
big-sounding words. The newspapers are the unthinking man’s school--and
what a farce, what a seedbed of corruption they are! Reporters and
editors must remain loyal to the policies of their papers, regardless
of their own opinions. They who could help us to think are forbidden to
do so on the penalty of losing their jobs.
“And the children of this country, and doubtless every other so-called
civilized country, must depend upon the schools to learn to think.
And every thinking teacher who takes the rostrum is fired for his
attempt to break down the walls of superstition and slash the hedges
of tradition. But for all that, the youth of this country at least are
gradually--no, pretty swiftly--breaking away. The world-old conflict
between Age and Youth is at its hottest now. In the past thirty years
the world has made revolutionary discoveries which are daily changing
our lives and methods of thinking. All this came about after Age had
settled down to an acceptance of life without any changes. At forty or
fifty one does not readily change his views. The sutures of his skull
are closed, and it is difficult for him to learn new ideas. He is
beyond the plastic period, and his head is as hard as his arteries. He
is entirely unable to accept the electron theory in the place of ‘in
six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them
is.’ Simply because he never heard of the electron theory at the age
when his brain was capable of accepting a new idea. It’s too late for
him--he’s hopeless. But he’s dying off! To-morrow he won’t be running
the world. His sons and his daughters will be in the saddle.
“And they have come upon the earth and grown to young manhood and young
womanhood while these radical changes were taking place. They are able
to consider, even accept, the findings of modern science because they
are presented to them while their brains are still in the receptive
period of life. What seems most plausible to them they accept, and they
naturally will laugh at the old traditions, superstitions, taboos, and
beliefs that have come down to us from the days of savagery, and which
were ingrained in the lives of their parents when _they_ were of a
receptive age. Fifty years, I think, will show many a mossy institution
crumbled to ashes. The Aged of to-day will be gone, without having
been able to force their lifelong beliefs on Youth. Then Youth will
become Old Age, and if we have progressed at all, the coming generation
will refuse to accept what _their_ fathers and mothers believed in and
made the ruling factor in their lives. So the conflict between Age and
Youth, between conservatism and change, between receptive minds and
locked minds, goes on to the end of time.”
“My stars!” cried Charmian. “You’re more pessimistic about it--more
hopeless--than I am, even!”
“I hadn’t finished,” said Shonto dreamily. “That will be the result
unless men learn to think. They have brains, why don’t they think?
Because they have been relieved of the necessity for thinking by the
ancient spellbinders whom we still worship to-day. That’s why they
don’t think. Man is naturally lazy--more so mentally than any other
way. If others have done his thinking for him, he should worry! It
gives him time to pursue the things that he likes--money, pleasure,
love, self-aggrandizement.”
“Well, I understand all that. But it doesn’t help.”
“We’re going to make him think in spite of himself,” said Shonto.
“We’re going to give him a quicker brain, so that he will be compelled
to think willy-nilly. His brain is good, but it needs exercise. And he
has not been obliged to exercise it. Hence it has become slothful.
Considering the progress that our few thinkers have made, the brain of
the average man is far below normal. We must bring it up to normal so
that it will exercise itself and grow whether he wants it to or not.
Then he’ll shed his stupidity and open his eyes, and maybe something
will go bust in the wheels of the system that rules us. We’re going
to feed him the extract of the thyroid glands of sheep, sharpen his
intellect, put the zip of life into him. Then he’ll think, and he’ll
probably get mad. But we are only at the beginning of this great study
of the glands and their secretions, and what they may do for man.
“The thyroid is the gland of energy. It controls the growth of
certain organs and tissues of brain and sex. The internal secretions
of our thyroid glands, mind you, are not necessary to life. If these
secretions are inadequate, we may go on living, but we shall be below
normal mentally, and our level of energy will remain low. But when more
thyroid is introduced into the system our vital chemical reactions will
speed up. It has been proved and accepted without qualification by
men of science that the more thyroid a person has the more energetic
will he be. Our dull people are, in many cases, only victims of an
insufficiency of thyroid. One’s memory is affected by his thyroid
glands. And without memory, who can learn? Judgment depends on memory,
doesn’t it? It requires memory, the association of experiences. Quick
thinking calls for thyroid glands that are normal. Do you know,
Charmian, that many criminals are only the victims of their glands--and
that science can probably correct this in time by supplying the
unfortunates with the gland secretions which they lack? Do you realize
that it is, even now, an established scientific fact that idiocy can
be cured by feeding the subject the extract of the thyroid glands of
sheep? And--and-- Well, I simply have great hopes for the race if
science eventually finds it possible to quicken the thinking apparatus
by the introduction of gland extracts.”
“Has anything been accomplished along that line?” she asked. “Have you
accomplished anything?”
“I have,” he told her. “I am convinced that we are on the right track.”
“Tell me of some case,” she begged.
He seemed to be searching his mind. “The greater part of the cases that
I have handled,” he said at last, “were concerned with subjects whose
maladies I cannot discuss with you because of their delicate nature. In
brief, subjects who were troubled with the problems of sex. And such
cases as I have had that called for the introduction of thyroxin are
still in the experimental stage. Only time will tell whether we are
right or not.”
“But can’t you notice results?”
“Oh, yes--in many cases. But whether or not the results will be
permanent no one can say at present.”
“For a little,” she said thoughtfully, “I imagined you were about to
tell me something, but you’re still reticent and I shan’t press you.
Well, here we are, all alone together, on the outskirts of nowhere, and
between us we have solved many riddles of the race. And I have been
immoral and smoked a cigarette, if I wasn’t immoral in the first place
in coming here with you. But it seemed that in no other way could I
find the Valley of Arcana--and here I am. I wonder if we’re to begin
crawling to victory to-morrow?”
“I don’t like those clouds that we saw at sunset,” he remarked. “But
they’re all gone now. The sky’s as clear as ever.”
Charmian gaped, placed a slim hand over her distorted mouth, and patted
the aperture, ending with a burst of air that was wrenched out of her
until her jaw muscles seemed to creak.
“Pardon me,” she laughed. “I couldn’t help it--I’m about all in. That
means the blankets for mine. Good night, Doctor.
“How you have interested me,” she sighed, as she rose to her feet and
stretched her arms and torso as unreservedly as a young panther would.
“You have worked so much--have accomplished so much. You make me feel
like a baseball fan in the grandstand, yelling his head off over the
good work of some famous player in the field. I hate fans. They’re so
willing to get entertainment from the achievements of others. They dote
on baseball, know all the players by name and their records from A to
Z. They never miss a game, never fail to bloat their blood vessels by
shouting their approval. Yet not one of them can toss a rubber ball
twenty feet in air and be sure of catching it!
“I’m not picking on baseball fans in particular. I just used them as
a handy example. All of us in this world but the thinkers are fans.
We’re wild about the conveniences that electricity has brought to us,
but not one out of a hundred of us could splice a broken electric
wire. We rave over a famous lecturer or writer, but how many of us try
to become lecturers or writers? Can you imagine a man--I know him--who
never misses a professional billiard game, knows all the professional
players, all the niceties of their work, but never takes a billiard cue
in hand?
“Most of us are fans--we admire and worship and gloat over the success
of the few, particularly if it is designed for our entertainment, but
never make an effort at being anything ourselves. Oh, I’m sick of
shouting from the grandstand, Doctor! I want to do something. I want to
be one of the few who make the world go round for the others!”
“Leave the grandstand, then,” said the doctor softly, “and come down on
the diamond with me.”
Charmian caught her breath at the suddenness of it. She had not
suspected that she was leading herself into a trap. And she had given
herself to Andy! She had let him fondle her, had told him that she
loved him, with her lips pressed to his.
“I--I haven’t finished thinking about it,” she said hurriedly, and
hastened off to her blankets.
For an hour she lay looking up at the black sky and the tracery of
pine branches against it, thinking, thinking, groping patiently but
fruitlessly.
Next morning at an early hour they climbed the hill again, crossed
the wooded plateau, came upon the thinning trees and the encroaching
brush. That afternoon they left all traces of the forest behind them,
and faced a desolate sweep of chaparral, stretching away as far as the
eye could see, hemmed in on the south by snowy peaks barely outlined
against the paleness of the sky. And somewhere in the midst of that
seemingly unbroken sea of hoary grey and antique gold the undiscovered
Valley of Arcana lay in hiding.