THE BUILDING OF THE FENCE.
An ax, a maul, a yoke of oxen; these are the great requisites for him
who would build a rail fence through a forest. Grant Harlson made the
bargain for the work, hired a yoke of oxen, as you may do in the
country, and secured the right to eat plain food three times a day at
the cabin of a laborer. A bed he could not have, but the right to
sleep in a barn back in the field, and there also to house his oxen for
the night, was given him. He slept upon the hay-mow. He went into the
forest and began his work. The wood was dense, and what is known all
through the region as a black ash swale, lowland which once reclaimed
from nature makes, with its rich deposits, a wondrous meadow-land. He
"lined" the fence's course and cleared the way rudely through the
forest, a work of days, and then he made the maul.
The mace of the mediaeval knight is the maul of to-day. No longer it
cracks heads or helmets, but there is work for it. And it has
developed into a mighty weapon. There are two sorts of maul in the
lake country. As the stricken eagle is poetically described as
supplying the feather for the arrow by which itself was hurt to death,
the trees furnish forth the thing to rend them. Upon the side of the
curly maple, aristocrat of the sugar bush, grows sometimes a vast wart.
This wart has neither rhyme nor reason. It has no grain defined. It
is twisted, convoluted, a solid, tough and heavy mass, and hard,
almost, as iron. It is sawed away from the trunk with much travail,
and is seasoned well, and from it is fashioned a great head, into which
is set a hickory handle, and the thing will crush a rock if need be.
This is the maul proper.
There is another maul, or mace, made from a cut of heavy iron-wood, a
foot in length and half a foot in thickness, with the hickory handle
set midway between iron bands, sprung on by the country blacksmith.
This is sometimes called the beetle.
The beetle is a monster hammer, the maul a monster mace. Each serves
its purpose well, but the beetle never has the swing and mighty force
of the great heavy maple knot. Grant Harlson bought a seasoned knot of
an old woodman and shaped a maul. He had learned the craft in youth.
The ash trees fell beneath the ax, the trunks were cut to rail lengths,
and the oxen dragged logs through muck and mire and brush and bramble
to the line of fence, and there the maul swung steadily in great
strokes upon the iron and wooden wedges, the smell of timber newly
split was in the air, and the heavy rails were lifted, and the fence
began its growth.
And it was lonesome in the depths of the wood, for the black ash swale
is not tenanted by many birds and squirrels as are the ridges, and only
the striped woodpecker or a wandering jay fluttered about at times, or
a coon might seek the pools for frogs. Harlson had circumstance for
thought. Only the hard labor cleared his blood and brain, and helped
him.
Could fortune come to him who had such a load upon his conscience? Was
not he a violator of all law, as he had learned it,--law of both God
and man? Had he an excuse at all, and what was the degree of it? He
could not endure the time when it became too dark in the wood for work,
and when he drove the jaded oxen out into the field and to the barn,
and it was yet too early for seeking the hay-mow, which was of clover,
and there seeking sleep. A clover mow is a wonderful sleep-compeller.
There are the softness and fragrance, but, sometimes, even with that,
he would be wakeful. To avoid himself, the young man would, at last,
go in early evening to the older farmers' homes,--for it was his own
country and he knew them all,--and there, with the sons and hired men,
pitch quoits in the road before the house.
Quoits is still a game of farmers' sons, and the horseshoe is superior
to the quoit of commerce and the town. The open side affords facility
for aggressive feats of cleverness in displacing an opponent's cast,
and the corks upon the shoes reduce some sliding chances, and the game
has quality. And Harlson found rather a distraction in the contests.
He found, maybe, distraction, too, in chatting with slim Jenny Bierce,
who was a very little girl when he was in the country school, but who
had grown into almost a woman, and who was a trifle more refined,
perhaps, than most of her associates. She had a sweetheart, a stalwart
young farmer named Harrison Woodell, one of the schoolmates of
Harlson's early youth, but she liked to talk with Harlson. He was
different from her own lover; no better, of course, but he had lived
another life, and could tell her many things.
And Woodell, who expected to marry her, glowered a little. She did not
care for that. Grant Harlson had not noticed it.
But neither quoits nor Jenny Bierce sufficed at all times for
forgetfulness. Harlson was in the grasp of that enemy--or friend--who
gives vast problems, and with them no solution. He could not rest. He
read his Bible, but that only puzzled him the more, because there
seemed to him, of necessity, degrees of wrong, and he could not find a
commandment which was flexible. He chafed because there was no measure
for his sentence.
A pebble at the rivulet's head will turn the tiny current either way,
and so change the course of eventual creek and river. The pebble fell
near the source in Grant Harlson's case, for never before in his life
had he studied much the moral problem. His had been the conventional
training, which is to-day the training which asks one to accept,
unreasoning, the belief of yielding predecessors, and, until he felt
the prick of conscience, he had never cared to question the
inheritance. Now he wanted proof. If he could not plead not guilty,
might he not, at least, find weakness in the law? Then fell the pebble.
It was only a country newspaper, and it was only the chance verses
clipped from some unknown source which turned the tide that might have
grown yet have run forever between narrow banks.
For the verses--who wrote them?--were those of that brief poem which
has made more doubters than any single revelation of the
hollow-heartedness of some famed godly one; than any effort of oratory
of some great agnostic; than any chapter of any book that was ever
written:
I think till I'm weary of thinking,
Said the sad-eyed Hindoo king,
And I see but shadows around me,
Illusion in every thing.
How knowest thou aught of God,
Of His favor or His wrath?
Can the little fish tell what the lion thinks,
Or map out the eagle's path!
Can the Finite the Infinite search!
Did the blind discover the stars?
Is the thought that I think a thought,
Or a throb of a brain in its bars?
For aught that my eyes can discern,
Your God is what you think good--
Yourself flashed back from the glass
When the light pours on it in flood.
You preach to me to be just,
And this is His realm, you say;
And the good are dying with hunger,
And the bad gorge every day.
You say that He loveth mercy,
And the famine is not yet gone;
That He hateth the shedder of blood
And He slayeth us every one.
You say that my soul shall live,
That the spirit can never die:
If He was content when I was not,
Why not when I have passed by?
You say I must have a meaning:
So must dung, and its meaning is flowers;
What if our souls are but nurture
For lives that are greater than ours?
When the fish swims out of the water,
When the birds soar out of the blue,
Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge,
And your God be no reflex of you!
One night in after life I sat with Grant Harlson, in his rooms in a
great city, and he told me of this, his time of doubt and tribulation,
and repeated to me the poem.
"The questions it asks have not yet been answered, so far as I know,"
said he, "and I do not think they can be by the alleged experts in such
things."
Then a sudden fancy seized him, and he broke out with a novel
proposition:
"You have little to do to-morrow, nor have I much on my hands.
Speaking of this to you has awakened an old interest in me and made me
curious. Help me to-morrow. We'll make up now a list of twenty
leading clergymen. I know most of them personally, and some of them
can reason. We'll each take a cab and each visit ten, exhibiting these
verses, going over them stanza by stanza, explaining the doubts they
have aroused, and asking for such solution as the clergymen have, and
such solace as it may afford. That will be rather an interesting
experiment, will it not?"
I fell in with his whim, and the next day we made the rounds agreed
upon.
What a curious thing it was! How men of various creeds felt confident
and repeated the old platitudes, and would be anything but logical!
How one or two were honest, and said they could not answer.
And how absurd, we said at night, the keeping of men to tell us what
can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith
shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea! Yet
there was no scoffing in it. We were neither irreligious.
To this young man building the fence there came a resisting mood, and
he was puzzled still, but slept more pleasantly again upon his
clover-mow. He was groping, but less despondent, that was all. It
seemed all strange to him, for the old farm life had become largely a
memory, and it was but yesterday that he was in college, one of a
thousand, full of all energy and lightsomeness, and here he was alone
in the wood as in a monastery, and all else was somehow like a dream.
Only the oxen and the logs and the ax and the maul and the growing
fence were real by day. But, in the evening, there was Jenny Bierce,
and she was very real, as well as charming.
Ho wondered if she cared for him. She was apparently pleased when he
found her, and they had taken long walks alone in the twilight. Once
he had kissed her, and she had not been angry. What sort of drift was
this, and why was he so carried by it? How different it all was from
even the life of a few weeks ago! Then there came before his eyes a
picture of the great, splendid animal in town, and it remained with
him. It bothered him for many a day and night.
If the Hindoo king were right, if all were so undefined, why not do as
did the birds and squirrels, and seek all sunny places? He could not
work at his fence Sunday. He had not done that yet, but he would walk
the miles Saturday night and spend his Sunday in the town.
As he thought, so he did. He did not swing the maul late the next
Saturday that came, but took up his journey and reached home in early
evening.
He had been absent but three weeks, yet his family had much to ask, and
his father laughed at his hardened palms, and congratulated him. He
changed his garb and took the way toward Mrs. Rolfston's. She had not
looked for him sooner, though she knew men well, for she had seen his
growing trouble and she knew his will. Her eyes blazed as might the
eyes of some hungry thing to which food is brought. It was late when
he reached his home again, and the next day he must read a book, he
said, that he had found at Mrs. Rolfston's. At night he was stalking
across the country again, to his couch on the dry clover; and he
thought not even of the Hindoo king. Mrs. Rolfston's school of
theology was not of the sort which worries one with puzzling things,
and he had been in a receptive mood.
The next day he worked like a giant. In the early evening he found
Jenny Bierce. She questioned him, but he had not much to answer.
"Is there some one in the town ?" she asked.
"There are several hundred people there."
"You know what I mean. Is there any one in particular?"--this
poutingly.
He said that of late the only one, to speak of, he had found anywhere
was a girl in a calico dress.