as we do, seeing that we buy most of the mere effects of these things
and that they are really produced by a class of people with whom we do
not associate. No man is really learned who speaks his wisdom instead
of practicing it. No woman is really cultured because she is up on
art and music and literature, or because she wears beautiful clothes
designed by a modiste, or because she lives in a splendid house, or
because she is surrounded by people who think and speak well about
what they know and see and exquisitely feel. She is merely the living
portrait of many arts accomplished by other people. I should call her
the decadent mollusk of refinement, never to be confounded with that
woman depicted a while ago in these pages as the more endearing type
of Southern woman. They have their occupations. They are amazingly
executive when it comes to ordering others to do it. They have taste
and piety and know how to exercise these virtues.
The effects of the theories about the art of living which I have been
recording in these pages are plainly visible in this valley. The gaping
logs of the one-room cabin left by the Cherokee Indians have been
restored, and so many rooms added that it stretches a distance of one
hundred and thirty feet--pieced together with open entries, winged
with a long vine-covered court on one side and a living porch on the
other side. So you may see through this house to the valley below or
the hills beyond, as one should see through a good man’s heart to the
scenes and Scriptures which account for his existence. I doubt if an
architect could have drawn plans of a house so satisfying to the spirit.
There is no color scheme inside. To my mind, a house furnished in a
strictly harmonious manner seems to be designed for publication and
read by guests, but not to be lived in at ease in your own private
everyday moods lest you break a note by moving something of a blue
shade to that place which calls for orange-yellow, or by dropping your
old green coat upon the divan covered with iridescent tapestry. Even
the company bedrooms in this house are so plain and comfortable that a
guest might feel at home in them, clean and fragrant, but faded; little
messy conveniences in every one of them to delude the occupant into
thinking he or she is not a transient there, but may stay a long time.
And the living-room is such a humanly gifted place that I may leave my
walking shoes on the hearth upon a winter evening and they will add a
note of peace to the firelit scene, as if they were warming and drying
and resting after a hard day’s walking out of doors in bad weather.
Not one thing in this house is to be admired, but is to be appropriated
and used for your ease. You are to shine and talk, hold a book in your
hand to taste now and then, as in the old days a gentleman sipped his
wine. I have seen very dull people exhilarated before my fire on a
winter evening; I have also seen very bright ones let go their weary
wits and nod. These are triumphs which color-scheming hostesses rarely
enjoy, because you feel that you must sit up with their harmonies and
take note or be damned.
Besides, these women are never contented for long with their furniture
or draperies. They must tear them up, send for the decorator and try
some other effect. I do not change my furniture or move it about. Let
the scenes of the world and all fashions change. I have laid my inside
scenes like one of those prayers for peace and honor to be found in
the Episcopal prayer book written and finished. All you have to do is
recite it. God has been familiar with it for a long time, and would
probably be astonished to hear a new word or phrase in it.
There is an old-man chair here which, by all the canons of art, should
never be found in a cabin; mahogany, with hideously carved legs, toe
nails sticking out, the arms finished with two human heads, females,
but not goddesses--houris, I should say. The springs in the seat have
weakened in precisely the right place to make sitting in it more
restful. About as often as an old man is barbered, this chair is rubbed
up and the faces of the ladies polished; but it is never moved from
the corner beside the fireplace. I have observed that the elderly men
who come here invariably choose it as their resting place. There is a
huge couch beneath a long row of casement windows on the living porch
which has enticed some of the stiffest, most elegant people known to
modern society in this section to relax upon it and fall asleep, when
by all the rules of polite conversation they should have been erect and
vocative.
This is boasting--I admit it--but not of my possessions. I am simply
showing the kind of mind I have toward a house, to fill it with snares
of peace and good will whatever happens to art. It is not a bad idea.
You excite less criticism and confer more happiness. It cannot be done
by an interior decorator. He has an expensive eye and a furniture
collector’s intellect.
By the same token, I have declined the services of a landscape
gardener. My idea of a landscape is a good deal of it, preferably
green, and merely frilled with flowers, with the trees of an original
forest surrounding the whole thing. I planted my flowers years ago,
perennials, with much the same mind the Lord had when he said to the
original creatures and little leaves, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ They
do. Poppies, peonies, gladioli, zinnias, marigolds, phlox, dianthus,
snapdragons, like good hardy people of the soil in bloom, making a
thousand wreaths of loveliness around this green hill in their seasons.
No wet-nursing to keep them alive during a drought, no coddling to
preserve them through the winter. They die down as we do, and come
again, as we shall do.
During these first years here I was near the verge of happiness, at
least by anticipation. If my mind could have rested I might have made
it; but what with writing a book or two every year, conducting the farm
and building everything from barns to stone walls that popped into my
head, I lacked the leisure to be glad.
It seems to me now that I indulged in too much self-expression without
looking for the reward of gratified vanity such persons usually crave.
Comparatively few people have ever seen this valley or know what has
been accomplished here. I have occupied it much as I shall presently
occupy my grave, alone, but doubtless with a great deal more activity
than the narrow confines of a grave with a tombstone over you can
possibly afford.
I cannot think what made me so furiously industrious laying scenes
so rarely to be praised. As to that, we must always wonder why the
Lord required such limitless spaces for His creation and made so many
unintelligible stars. Fewer would have been rarer and shown to a better
advantage. And what measly sight-seers of the heavens we make, always
snooping and squinting at His handiwork without being able to find
out anything about it, with no mind to comprehend the glory of these
populous heavens.
There must be another audience somewhere. Surely the Almighty has
had more encouragement than we could give Him, more inspiration
than our pathetically inadequate existence affords Him. I am so
religious at times that I can conceive of a great council chamber of
creators located upon one of the grander stars between burning suns.
Not that I crave more than one Lord to serve. When we consider the
Ten Commandments and the rules laid down for our obedience in the
Scriptures of our Jehovah, it is apparent that no man could serve more
than one God; but in certain moods one likes to speculate in gods by
way of the most gallant and adventurous spiritual exercise.
The thing that confounds and depresses me is, Why are so many of us
born? Why is there so much of everything anyhow, when we can understand
and use so little of anything? And what strange madness is this in us
which perpetually compels us to add to the sum total of everything? I
have had fearful thoughts along this line--the dreadful fate we are
under to keep on thinking and doing, because if we stop something
happens to us, a slow and monstrous decay. And at the end of it all,
poor old Solomon--after he had been King of Jerusalem and ruled a long
time, after he had built his golden temple and won his reputation for
being the wisest man--sitting in his royal robes, tired of his crown,
tired of his wisdom, calling to us down the ages, ‘Vanity, vanity, all
is vanity and vexation of spirit.’
He gives this conclusion a note of authority by signing it, ‘Thus saith
the Preacher.’ But I have always felt that if Solomon had been a better
man he might have been a better preacher. Like father, like son. David
was a fine, true singer of the hearts of men; but I cannot think he
set a good example for Solomon in his youth, which accounts for the
depressing wisdom he acquired by living.
I never take one of these headers in spiritual speculations, however,
without falling to pieces afterwards. I seem to suffer from some kind
of nervous prostration of the soul. In these ailing moods no wise
man or great divine could comfort me. I am longing to hear the Word
preached by a simple man who has lived a good little life and who can
pray like a child. It is like taking the shortest, narrowest path back
home by faith.
I never have believed it is a far journey to the real kingdom of
Heaven. If you start off with great preparations for a long pilgrimage,
you may be sure you have missed your way. There is in the heart of
every man a fair and lovely land, never betrayed by his transgressions,
never sold to the world and never darkened by mortal wisdom. I have
been there sometimes, an ineffable place. As a child I lived there.
These little old preachers mentioned a while ago are the only pastors
of the children we have been left among us. They do not know us now,
they are not acquainted with the world in which we have learned so
much; but they know where every man’s land of Canaan lies, and they
have only one Rock of Ages tune that leads to it.
Looking back, we can see how smart we were when at the time we simply
followed some instinct in the right direction.
For years I went on trying to create my own little kingdom of Heaven
here behind these hills. A place visible to the naked eye, very
deceptive in its loveliness and silence. I had sense enough to keep
the world out, which was not difficult, since I have never been one of
those popular writers whose doorsill the people seek. And I was rarely
tempted out into the world.
XXXIX
WAR
During the spring and summer of 1914 I put seventy acres of the valley
under cultivation, added eight rooms to the old cabin, and wrote a
serial. The inspiration of love or of any consuming ambition greatly
augments the powers of even an ordinary person to achieve. This is the
reason why men in love frequently accomplish so much for a time, then
fall back into their former state of indolence. The illusion of love
has failed. It is by nature a brief enchantment. This is the reason why
the man fired by ambition frequently accomplishes prodigious tasks far
beyond his normal capacity to achieve.
I was inspired at this time with the hope of winning a happy ending
to what had been a harsh sentence in living. I was creating a very
small world to fit me behind the world at large; and this period, I
should say, was about the morning and evening of the third day at the
business. Things were beginning to turn green. I could see my little
herbs of the field glistening in the early morning dew, and my sun was
shining. I remember a certain notion I had then, which has remained a
part of my personal definition of the Lord--that besides being almighty
and obviously beneficent He must be a happy God every time he created
another world, divided the light from the darkness in that place and
set up all the miracles of life there.
This notion was not so blasphemous as it sounds written out in words.
One cannot copy His omniscience or His almightiness, but it does _not_
seem to me nearly so profane to give one’s self a few airs about having
imitated Him in a small way that turns out green and triumphant like a
field of corn, as it does to dig down and snoop the heavens with the
idea of proving there is no God at all.
I had only to take a whiff around the farm in those days, have an
altercation with the carpenters about another window needed to keep the
cabin from looking too much like a fortress, then retire to my study
upon the farther rim of the forest and copy the green leaves of my
thoughts for the next chapter of the serial.
On the third day of August in that year the Great War began in Europe.
The editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ sent his first batch of war
correspondents across the following week. I was to have been one of
them, but I had promised another serial for another magazine which
was still to be written. The editor would neither release me from the
contract nor risk me in the war zone until this copy was delivered.
I suppose it would require one of those latest expositors of the
mysteries human beings are, an alienist, to explain why disappointment
over being detained brought on the first attack of hay fever I ever
had. There is more psychology than pathology in our diseases.
But I was determined to go to France in 1914. I had been living at
such a high tension nervously for some time that nothing short of a
bloody war could have quieted me and reduced me to a normal condition.
The motive here confessed was overlaid with the usual noble emotions;
but this is a truthful record of my mind, which is sufficiently nearly
related to human minds in general for me to risk the assertion that
a great many other people did valiant service in France who were
attracted there by a similar motive. We seek reactions from what we are
in excitement. The use made of us under these circumstances proves the
shrewd economies of Providence by employing our lower instincts to trap
us into the performance of the greatest, most unselfish services, else
very few men would volunteer for military service, and very few women
would have volunteered for canteen service in France.
I hurried off somewhere, wrote that serial, returned to New York and
sailed for Liverpool all within thirty days.
I have written briefly of my impressions during this harrowing period
in ‘My Book and Heart.’ What we know now is that the most victorious
battles and the most disastrous defeats never settle the issues
involved. The Great War has increased our debts, doubled our problems
and added incredibly to the moral confusion of our times. Still, if
there should be a call to arms in this country to-morrow, I doubt if I
could bear the mortal ignominy of being a pacifist.
There is no sense in war. It is the way we are made that brings on the
red fury of arms. Neither the ambition of politicians nor the greed
of financiers could draw a nation into war if the people were not so
easily moved by an invitation to shed blood. It seems invariably to
produce a state of terrific exaltation, similar to a religious revival.
I doubt if this is due so much to the survival of brutal instincts in
men as to some provision of Providence against the ultimate emergencies
of mankind. When law, civilization and the artificial restraints of
society fail him, he will still have his fists and a faculty for
believing in God. These two capacities alone should reproduce men of
better quality than the shrinking creeds of pacifism. Whatever we
believe theoretically about peace, we should always be ready by nature
to fight.
But another set of youths must grow into the pugilistic period now
before we could actually stage another World War. My observation has
been that the soldiers who fought in the recent one are more or less
shell-shocked. I have employed more soldiers here than any other class
of men since the war, because they are more intelligent and better
trained; and no matter how brave the record is they have left behind
them in the Saint-Mihiel drive or the Argonne Forest, they are more
concerned than other men to avoid personal difficulties. One must
think it out to understand them; their reputation for courage has been
established beyond any shadow of a doubt so long as history lasts.
There is no reason why a battle-scarred man should prove his courage,
which is probably the chief reason why men fight. They are the only
admirable pacifists in the world; and if it comes to the test, they
will have more to do with keeping this nation out of war than a World
Court or any other talking method we can devise, however wise or
diplomatic.
War, however victoriously ended, is not a profitable subject to discuss
in the retrospect. It dies down in the emotions of men and passes into
history. After that, the next generation reads history and discovers
what burdens and strange defeats were entailed upon their future by
these victories. But I am setting down one incident in connection with
my experiences in France by way of proving a theory I have--that merely
by living we fulfil more prophecies than the seers of the Old Testament
ever dreamed of. We are becoming terrible predicators of the future.
It was in October of 1914. A clear starlit night. A battle was on. News
from the front ran through Paris in whispers all day. Now darkness and
silence. No one could sleep. I came down from my room in the old Saint
James Hotel and stood in the street, reaching a long look through this
tomb of terrors that had been the gayest city in Europe three months
ago. Not a soul in sight, not the sound of a voice or the rumble of a
wheel, peopled now only with the shadows of great shapes. Yet in this
fearful stillness these very palaces and spires seemed to listen, to be
waiting for something about to happen.
Then from the high distances came a rhythmic sound, thunder throttled
down, stars purring, a pulse beating faster in the heavens. Now the
ominous roar of motors. Swift as swallows in flight, I saw them rise
above the horizon and flash by like great silver birds through the
searchlights above the city--German aeroplanes coming to drop bombs
on Paris! Red blasts, earth-rocking detonations! This tomb of terrors
gave up its dead, a frightful population of men and women rushed half
clad and disheveled from their hiding places into the open street. They
shrieked, babbled, waved their arms, milled and circled, frenzied with
fear and hate.
I stood aside like a mere leaf of life not yet caught in this whirlwind
of dreadful passions. The scene was no longer linked in my mind with
war, but with something else far back in memory, associated with
quietness and peace. Then it came back to me, that night so many years
ago, the world not yet in sight, the quiet heavens, father thrusting
his arm out in a gesture like a scythe aimed at all the spaces
overhead; the child I was then, bare feet resting staunchly upon the
toes of his boots, clinging to him, face upturned to him, feeling
like any other young bird about to be borne aloft upon magnificently
gesticulating wings.
Through all this uproar of a panic-stricken people, in a strange city
on the other side of the world, forty years later, I heard again the
very tones of father’s voice: ‘You will live to see airships up there
flying like a flock of birds.’ Then mother’s sharper tones breaking
in upon this rumbling prophecy: ‘Come in and go to bed,’ calling me
away from the temptation of so great an imagination, anxious lest I
should be birthmarked mentally with that mad passion to fly which had
frequently cropped out in father’s family.
Well, I had lived to see his prophecy fulfilled. But what a
fulfillment! This happens frequently to the best efforts made by seers.
The world twists the tail of their prophecy and makes it come true like
a disaster.
On the twenty-third day of December in this same year of 1914 I was at
home again in the valley, sitting beside my own log fire, very quiet,
but not serene. I was suffering from a curious pallor of the mind,
not due entirely to the dreadful scenes I had passed through in the
war zone. We were homeward bound from Liverpool when the boat struck
a mine off the coast of Ireland. This catastrophe happened in the
middle of the night, and I was still convalescing from the peculiarly
sickening sensation of suddenly standing on my head in the berth with
no such acrobatic intentions. I could not forget the tremors which
passed through that ship as if it had been a living body pierced to the
heart, the awful heaviness with which it settled back into the sea,
the moments like ages of dreadful silence that followed, then the roar
and confusion on deck, the sibilant sounds of many voices hushed to
whispers by fear, the rush of bare feet along the corridors inside as
the passengers fled for the lifeboats, which were not needed after all.
And I shall never entirely recover from the recollection of that jagged
hole in the side of the boat, so frailly mended, nor from the sound of
the water pouring in and the rhythmic strokes of the pumps upon which
our lives depended.
I am wondering if the critics who found ‘My Book and Heart’ the record
of a narrow and monotonous existence can claim one year filled with so
many varied activities as the year 1914 was for me. And I am merely
offering it as a sample of my years in general.
XL
WIDOWHOOD
The older you are the greater risk to your happiness, and even to your
peace, there is in marriage. I cannot conceive of a husband revolving
comfortably in the widow’s orbit I have measured off and made for
myself. Least of all can I conceive of his sitting still in it with any
peace of mind. I suppose many other women feel the same way, else there
would not be four times as many widows as widowers in this country,
according to the United States census.
A widower is probably the most transient manifestation of man there is
among us. I have often wondered why this is so. I am no alienist, which
is now that supreme authority among us for determining our character
and conduct according to our glands; but my suspicion is that marriage
once contracted becomes a habit with a man, and that he is the most
invincible habit-forming creature on this earth.
You may feed one only three articles of food for a year and he will
stick to them as long as he lives! I knew one who cured himself of
indigestion twenty years ago by taking a cup of tea and two pieces of
dried apricot for lunch. He has never varied his midday meal from that
day to this. If his wife died, I suppose he would marry again precisely
as he goes to his club and orders that cup of tea and the preserved
apricots for lunch.
On the other hand, marriage is a state of love for women--barring
the alimony class, of course--and they are so narrow and personal in
their devotion that they do not so readily transfer their allegiance
to another husband. Apparently they are not so enterprising or
broad-minded in their romantic emotions as men are, though we seem
to be widening out considerably in these latter years. It would not
surprise me if the time comes when even widows may become obsolete, and
we shall have no such wisdom among us as a sad, sweet-faced elderly
woman wearing her widow’s weeds and sitting in the amen corner, or
ambling about doing good deeds in the neighborhood. She may have her
second or third husband and be engaged in a campaign for a better
sewerage system in the city where she lives.
What I mean is that we seem to be growing more like men mentally and
morally every day and in every way. I reckon it is all for the best,
but it does feel queer if you are a woman and a widow who cannot keep
up with the quick step of your times and know yourself to be dwindling
away into the narrow, withered-faced relict of your former husband.
I remember one day years ago, decorating myself with such ladylike
views as these in a conversation with Mark Sullivan, who had just
refused a story I offered for Collier’s Magazine. He listened kindly
and patiently until I had probably exhausted my repertoire of noble
sentiments for that day. Then he seized his hat and made for the door,
thought better of it, paused, looked back at me curiously and delivered
himself of this warning:
‘You may be that good, but if you are, you are bound to be lonesome.’
For a moment I experienced some kind of faint alarm, as sinners must
when the preacher gives them one last chance at the end of a revival to
repent and be free men. It occurred to me that I had better hurry out
while the spirit moved me and do something rash. But I could think of
nothing sane, discreet, and becoming to do that would also be rash. I
am not so sure it is conscience that makes cowards of us all. It may be
the vanity of self-respect that holds us in check.
After all, I have not been so very lonely, only slightly peeved as I
grow older at the implication of having lived a narrow, dreary life.