should confide our grammar-school teaching of boys only to women who
have been married. My reason is not the one the reader is imagining,
however. It is not because she will have had children. No. I do not go
so far as that. I merely demand that she shall have had a husband. He is
quite sufficient. He is a male. A year's association with him will have
softened her fibre, will have aroused in her mind doubts of the
perfectibility of mankind. Then, then she will be ready to teach boys.
Yet it must be admitted that every teacher who has managed to remain
human is confronted by a dilemma. As a teacher, he is expected to
inculcate ideals of perfection, not only in studies, but in deportment;
and yet, when he happens to come upon a student who approaches
perfection, it is a mournful occasion. The student may be admirable, but
he is dull company. It has been suggested that teaching can be a
satisfying profession only to very big or very little natures. I suppose
that the idea is that the big nature sees the future in the instant,
tolerates the present imperfection, dreaming of a distant flawlessness;
while the little nature satisfies itself by attaining perfection in
trifles.
The average man or woman who has drifted into the profession is saved
from despair or insanity by that biological interest in, and curiosity
about, humanity, which we call humor. He knows that everlasting concern
with perfection in trifles is a belittler of souls; that correcting
sentences and paragraphs and Latin and German exercises and algebraic
problems and geometrical proofs is poor food for a human mind. On the
other hand, instinct tells him that the larger perfection is cold; that
it dwells in the rarefied air of the mountain-tops; that it is un-human.
To love the derelict student is treason to his profession; yet, as he
looks back over the long line of pupils who have passed through his
hands, he sees that the ones who remain warm and vivid in his memory are
those who fell most short of the very ideals which he tried to
inculcate.
Among all the students in a certain school, I have a living recollection
of just one, and he was the most imperfect student in it. He refused to
study, he refused to behave, he insisted on fighting and bringing snakes
to school in his pocket and--I do not exaggerate--standing on his head
in the middle of a recitation. He passed most of his days sitting in the
headmaster's office, studying demurely when that gentleman was present,
and making paper flying-machines when surveillance relaxed. Yet, as I
search my heart, I find that my memories of him are pleasant; that I
should like to see him again, even at the price of having to recapture
his garter-snakes, or of having to turn him right-side-up during a
recitation. He was much misunderstood. Some of his teachers, having no
faith in my theory of the interestingness of the imperfect, found him a
thorn in the flesh, and predicted for him a sudden end by suspension;
and there were doubtless times when, in an access of impatience, I
longed for the end to come and was ready to officiate at it. He
shattered the pedagogic ideal. Try as I would, I was unable to discover
in him ideals of any sort, and he refused to adopt any that I offered,
however edifying. Yet all the good little boys to whom he administered
black eyes with the utmost generosity have faded from my memory and he
stands out the brighter for the years that have gone. If he had been
good, he, too, would long since have been consigned to the limbo of 'the
dream of things that were.' Viewed in the narrow light of class
discipline, he was a burden, like the grasshopper; in the broad and
genial glow that falls from a humorous philosophy of life, he was a joy,
a heart-filling atomy of mischief, a triumphant example of the
imperfectness of humanity and the humanness of imperfection.
We can postulate so much of the imperfect thing and so little of the
perfect. Flawlessness leaves the weaker imagination so little to take
hold of: it is slippery. Even woman, with that inconsistency which makes
her adorable, really loves perfection no more than we. Every one knows
that a little girl loves an old doll, or a rag doll, or a one-legged
doll, better than the most expensive Parisian wax doll with real hair,
and eyes that open and shut. The Parisian beauty has been longed for for
months, but now that it has become an entity, it leaves the child cold.
If it is so lucky as to lose an arm or some sawdust, there may be hope
for it; but so long as it remains new and whole, it can never hope to
enter the warmest precincts of the little girl's heart. 'To keep in
sight Perfection,' says a contemporary poet, 'is the artist's best
delight,' and his bitterest pang that he can do no more than that; yet
in another epigram the same poet speaks as follows:--
The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
At last the temple's difficult door we win.
Perfect upon his pedestal, the god
Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.
The little girl is tasting this experience. The contemplation of elastic
joints, mechanical eyes, and waxen complexion warmed the cockles of her
heart, but the embodiment of these in a palpable doll freezes her
hopeless. If the poet, with more imagination, suffers too, and the
highest natures--those which we call the transcendental--whiff the
sadness that lies in the attainment of the perfect, surely the
unimaginative mass of mankind can be excused if they find the
inter-lunar regions chilly.
In reckless moments I wonder whether the Greek statues did not suffer
more happily at the hands of fate when they lost their arms and heads
and legs than we are accustomed to think; whether their dilapidation has
not given them a place in our hearts instead of merely in our heads; has
not couched them in our love instead of merely pedestaled them in our
reverence.
Or, to take an illustration from a lower plane, may it not be that we
get a keener pleasure out of eating an imperfect apple? It is neither
the best possible apple, which would be perfect, nor the worst possible
apple, which would have a kind of negative perfection; it has a worm at
the core; but I wonder whether we do not enjoy it more because we have
to eat the more carefully to keep from eating him. Besides, he arouses
in our mind all sorts of questionings. Why is he there? What kind of
worm is he? How did he get in? How would he have got out if we had not
ousted him? And--note this--what sort of an apple would it have been if
he had taken up his residence elsewhere?
I am rather proud of this little apologue of the apple. For the perfect
apple could have roused no queries which the defective apple does not.
The same subtle influences went to make both: the same elements, the
same forces, the same chemical processes. But the defective apple has in
addition to all these--the worm.
There is 'some strangeness' even 'in beauty.' The perfect rhythm is
intolerable. We demand chiaroscuro in life as in color. The preciousness
of the ointment is the more evident for the fly. 'We love people for
their vices,' so the vices do not make them despicable.
If the gods that sit above have a sense of humor, they must find us
grown men and women as funny and as sad as we find the boys and girls
and dogs. Not knowing the sentiments of the gods, we have to content
ourselves with those of the poets and humorists who, we fondly imagine,
have in them something of the god-like vision. They look at humanity
from above. And they find that the spectacle of humanity trying to be
what it cannot be, facing both ways, on the threshold of heaven casting
a longing, lingering look behind, is comic and tragic in its very
essence; for comedy and tragedy differ chiefly in degree. In the
imperfection of humanity lie its tragedy and its humor. Without it, this
would be a happier world; but with it, it is a merrier.
[Illustration]
Exile and Postman
By Jean Kenyon Mackenzie
It used to make me homesick, in our little African clearing, to see the
albino woman. She would move about among her brown companions like a
flame--and her white body, that flickered in the sun and glimmered in
the shade, used to knock at the door of nostalgia. Homesick people
always long for a visit, and that albino was so white!
Once, to our neighborhood, where in those days white women did not come,
there came a white woman. She did not lodge with us; she lodged with the
white officer because she was an officer's wife. We used to wonder if
she would call upon us. One of us had a pair of field-glasses, and we
used to watch her little figure coming and going about the clearing on
the government hill. When one day she was seen to come down into our
valley by the zigzag trail, we thought we had a Visit. I cannot tell you
how anxious we were, in that little bark house, to make a good
appearance--or what fresh disposals were made, with our eyes upon that
descent, of our properties. I do not wish to make you too sad, but that
white woman did not visit us. She went away. She did not know about us,
or about exiles--that they are always dreaming of a Visit.
It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the
little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of
exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort,
based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished
until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are
perceived by the mind's eye--which like a cat's eyes sees them better
for the dark--to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude.
Dusk is altogether the most illuminating hour for the exile; he then
knows so exactly where he is; he has a perfectly visual sense of his
surroundings. He sees where he is, but how came he to be there? The
geography of his circumstance is plain, but not the logic. He who has no
other companions than himself suspects this companion, in that hour of
dusk, to be a fool. It must be a poor fool, he thinks, who has drifted
into such a clearing by such a river!
The forest of the Cameroon is as good a place as any to be homesick; but
I will not be saying that the members of my profession--and I am a
missionary--are chronic sufferers. Missionaries are, in the main, gay,
and for excellent reasons--some of them pagan reasons, for they are
little brothers of Antaeus; some of them Christian reasons, for they are
of the company of successful fishermen. A fisherman with a good catch
can defy even the dusk; his string of silver fish is a lantern to his
feet.
No, if there were an altar and a service to placate nostalgia it would
not be that fisherman who would most attend that service. The path to
that altar would be worn brown by the feet of the trader. I think the
trader is lonelier than the missionaries are; he is better versed in
solitude. He goes into the forest with a backward look; he comes out of
the forest sometimes with a secret and a stricken countenance. More than
missionaries do, he does. More often than they, he builds out of his
lonely horror and the license of solitude a perverse habitation for his
soul. Sometimes--and this is very sad--he is afraid. He lingers and
lingers on the margin of that green sea of forest.
'The heart,' say the Bulu, 'has gone to hide in the dark.' And this is a
Bulu way of saying that the heart is not worn upon the sleeve. Well,
upon the sleeve of the white-drill suits that beach-traders wear there
is, I will agree, no device of hearts. But those lonely inland
traders,--those that have traveled ten, twenty, thirty days from their
kind,--what is that they sometimes seem to wear upon the sleeve of their
singlets? And who cares where he wears his heart if there is never a
white man's eye to fall upon it! In those little bark huts on the
trading posts, where young white men pale with the passing hours, there
comes to be a careless fashion in wear, whether of hearts or of collars.
In the warm dusk of those little houses, where there is an earthen
floor, where there are tin trade-boxes as bright as jockeys' jackets,
where there are trade-cloths printed with violent designs, where there
is salt fish and cheap scent and tobacco,--where all these desirable
things may be had for ivory and rubber,--there the trader may wear his
heart upon his sleeve without shame. None of those brilliant eyes, set
in those dark faces, know a white man's heart when they see it. There in
his hut is a monotony of brown bodies quick with vehement gestures;
there is a tumult of controversy in a tongue he does not know. The
sudden glitter of brass ornament is there, and the glitter of brass
spears. There are fantastic head-dresses studded with buttons and shells
and beads, and scented with the odor of wood-fires. Between those brown
bodies and the body of the white man lies the counter. More lies between
them than this. There are between them such barriers that the white man
is not more lonely when he is alone.
Yet how still it is of an idle day under the thatched leaves of that
little house! The sun does its exaggerated violence to the yellow earth
of the clearing; the forest hangs its arras over its secret. How far it
is, in this place not named on the map, from Manchester! How, when the
rain falls, it is other than rainfall on the Clyde! How the pale fruit
that hangs high on the _ajap_ tree is not like the apples that ripen in
Wishaw!
Do not speak of apples! Nostalgia in her cruel equipment carries a
scented phantom apple.
At night there is about that young trader a trouble of drums that never
rest. There is the sharp concerted cry of the dancers. There is the
concerted wail for the dead. There is about him all the rhythmic beating
of the mysterious life of his neighborhood, tormenting him where he lies
under his mosquito net. For this he will rise and walk about, the ember
of his pipe drifting back and forth in the dark, and his gramophone,
roused by himself, making its limited obedient effort.
There is this about a gramophone: it is a thing that speaks the home
tongue. I have seen him sitting under the eaves of his little hut, by
his little table spread with a checkered cloth, his gramophone beside
him, trying, with its tale of the old grouse gunroom, to divert that
lonely meal. Now that I think of it, the gramophone is a kind of hero of
my little piece--a kind of David with five tunes to do battle with
nostalgia. Back in the tent broods Saul, and this poor patient David
plays the endless round of five tunes. Until some day there is a javelin
in the wall, and a proud black man goes away with a gramophone into the
wilderness.
The night sky does more permanent ministry to the homesick, and of all
the bright ministers the moon is the most effectual. It is the great
reflector of lights; there it comes, swinging up its old path in the
sky, and the fires of home are mirrored on its disk. You who read have
spread your hands, in your hour of homesickness, to those phantom
fires--and other hands are always spread. Some of us were sitting on our
heels about a little flame in a new clearing; all of us were alien in
that clearing; one of us was white. And the black woman said to the
white woman when the moonlight fell upon all those women faces,--
'The moon looks upon the villages and upon the home village. We black
people, when we sit in the towns of strangers and the moon shines, we
say, "Now by the light of this same moon the people at home dance to the
drums!" However far we walk, we look upon the moon and we remember our
friends at home.'
Upon another moonlight night, sitting in a forest camp with young black
girls for companions, these sang for me a little set of songs--the
songs, they told me, of the moon:--
'Ah, mone zip, alu a daneya! Ah mone zip'[B]
[Note B: 'Ah, little gazelle, the night has deepened! Ah, little
gazelle!']
This little refrain they sang, clapping their hands ever so lightly, and
the meaning of the singing was a warning.
It was a song of the moon, a song for wanderers. And the moon on that
remembered night, dragging its net of broken silver cords in among the
trees of the forest, caught everywhere the wandering hearts and drew
them back on the little rough trails to the home fires. Every night that
is a moonlight night there is the casting of that silver net upon far
rivers and forests deeper than rivers--wherever aliens make a bed of
leaves or sleep on a canvas cot.
On such a night, and caught in such a net, I have met the postman. Yes,
on just such a night, when the world appeared as it hangs in space, a
crystal globe, and when so observed from a little clearing in an African
forest, it was seen to be charted for voyagers, and all its little paths
ran readily about the globe to that gilt side which is home. On such a
night, and upon such a path, I met the postman.
To hang upon a little wicket gate under the moon at the end of a
moon-filled clearing in a breach of the forest,--to see the black body
of the postman suddenly darken the checkered light upon the path from
the west,--how to speak of this adventure with moderation! How to speak
of postmen at all with moderation! And of those postmen who thread the
lonely forests of the world, their loads upon their backs, their rations
of salt fish on top of their loads; how to recall their aspects, their
monthly or bi-monthly or semi-annual arrivals, the priceless treasures
they carry! how speak of these things to men and women who have never
followed the little gazelle into those forests where the night has
deepened; who have never felt the divinity in postmen!
Imagine that there is a people in this world who let a postman walk up
the path unattended, and who wait until he knocks on the door! Who do
not shout to their neighbors when they receive a letter, and who receive
one every day! These items alone prove the truth of the Bulu proverb
that there are tribes and tribes, and customs and customs.
And I will agree that there are, even on the trails of the wilderness,
postmen and postmen. There are even, though I hate to dwell upon it,
postmen whom I do not trust. Not all postmen have wings upon their
heels. The ideal postman does of course fly. He is like
The bird let loose in eastern skies
When hastening fondly home.
He avoids idle wanderers. But they do not all do so. I remember to have
been wakened one night in a village by the gossip of two old headmen.
They had met before my tent; there in the moonlight they chatted
together. All the little life of the village was sleeping; the two old
men alone were abroad. They were about the business of the post. It is a
pioneer custom in Africa, east and west, that the white man's local
letter is franked from town to town. The black man to whom the white man
gives his letter carries it to the headman of the next settlement, who
carries it in turn to his brother headman down the trail; and so from
hand to hand, by day and by night, with a glance from any passing white
man, the letter goes forward. Such a letter--carried as the custom is,
in a split rod from which there hung, like a flag, a bit of turkey
red--changed hands that night before my tent. And now I write it in a
white man's book that the postmen loitered.
To stand and chat there in the moonlight with the exile's letter in your
hands--how could you do that, you two old heartless headmen? I watched
you from my little green tent. It is remembered of you that you so
delayed, while in some lonely hamlet under that same moon a white man
sickened for a letter. And when one gave the forked stick to the other,
it was then too late. If indeed, as you would say, you spoke no more
than five words of gossip one to the other, those words were five too
many. It is remembered of you, and a thousand nights since when I have
waited for the mail, if it were a moonlight night, I have told myself
with an extreme self-pity and a bitterness, 'The carrier is gossiping in
some clearing.' I have seen in my heart that man with the load of mail
upon his back, standing for hours by a friend of his, laughing and
asking news one of the other. This conjured vision of two black men
holding up the mail is the sad issue of an imagination infected beyond
cleansing. You see, _I saw them do it_.
Some postmen have come in late because their feet were sore. And some,
in passing through their home town, have permitted themselves an illness
or a marriage. Some have waited, with the mail in their loads, to bury
the dead. Such a postman, so given to misadventures and clumsy ill-timed
tragedies, was once late to the tune of eleven days. Who remembers what
delayed him or what exquisite reasons he gave? And who of us in that
little clearing forgets the long hours of that year of days?
Another postman, of an extreme beauty and an extreme speed, arrived
before his time. There was a shouting when he came. All the inhabitants
of that little settlement of white men called to each other; the four or
five of them filled a room of a bark house--those white faces that were
growing daily like the face of the Asra, 'bleich und bleicher,' were all
lit by the flame of the mail. In all that little commonwealth, with its
pioneer trades and its pioneer gardens and its pioneer hospital and
school and church--in all that settlement all the busy crude wheels of
industry slackened and stood still while the white men opened the load
of the mail.
'Now they will be reading the _books_ from home!'
And of Ebenge, that young carrier, it is still remembered that he
arrived before he was due. 'Ah, Ebenge.' you still say to him from time
to time, 'that was a fine walking you walked that walk so long ago when
you slept but three nights with the mail!'
Another postman, never to be forgotten by those exiles whom he served,
never came at all. This was a boy, too young, you would think, for his
great office. The letters in his little pack were from husbands to
wives, and they must travel a hundred miles of forest-trail in time of
war. Not twenty miles they traveled when the postman, surrounded by
black soldiers, was called to deliver. He did not deliver. He could not
give the white man's letters to another hand. He said, No, he could not.
And for this they killed him. That young body tarried forever upon the
trail, witnessing in that interminable delay--as Ebenge had witnessed in
his swift coming--to the sacred element in the mail.
Here is the king's touch for the king's evil--the hand of the postman
dropping a letter. For this the victims of nostalgia do long service.
For this they scribble, in their lonely and various dwellings, their
letters. There is a night, in those alien settlements all about the
world, that is unlike other nights. It is the night before the mail is
closed. The lamp is full of oil that night, and the cup of coffee is at
the elbow. On and on, while the stars march, the white man's hand runs
upon the page. In villages where there are no street lamps, the white
man's window is a lamp all night of the night before the mail. From
steamers that are tied to trees among the rushes, in rivers that you do
not know, the officer on watch may look all night through such a window
at such a man writing, writing a long, long letter--the beating heart of
man, articulate in all that heartless darkness.
How quick a seed, you would say, the seed in such a letter! How such a
letter must bear, some sixty-, some an hundred-fold! Yet myself I saw
this: I saw the harbor-master of Kabinda, a settlement of white men on
the west coast of Africa, come aboard the monthly steamer to get the
mail. He was an old Portuguese, coffee-colored in his gray linen suit. A
long time he had been harbor-master, and many times he had taken the
brown bag of mail ashore. This day, when he lifted his bag, he 'hefted'
it: the lightness of it in his hand made him smile. Some irony that was
the fruit of his long experience of exiles and their letters made that
old indifferent man curl the lip. I think that in Kabinda that night
there went white men hungry to bed.
I would not like to live in Kabinda, where the postman is so old and so
wise. These white postmen know too much; they can count more than ten.
And other things they know: they know a thing too sad to tell. Better
Ebenge, who ran so swiftly with his load, or little Esam, who thought
that for a load of letters some would even dare to die.
[Illustration]
The Life of Adventure
By Edgar J. Goodspeed