part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs,
knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their
wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the
routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run
away--to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who
are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our
friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those who set us
free--they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give--a
surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin--our dynamics
is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way----"
The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she
said.
"... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her
sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was
filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root
systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She
read one of Henry Ward Beecher's _Star Papers_ and verified many of its
fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The
Shore is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain
is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She
looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of
the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how
full the days are."
"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.
"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she
wanted to be."
"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.
"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her
music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her
deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her
little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the
highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and
the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it
work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of
processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by
intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one
of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only
expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."
The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.
"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the
left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we
receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving
formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know
the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of
that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was
amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have,
who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an
arsenal of laws and fears."
"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"
"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as
instruction even."
"And spelling?"
"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she
is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.
These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather
completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the
real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page
manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that
being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose
God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world
with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection
to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from
children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his
neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different
and higher organs."
"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.
"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh
to me," I said.
"The little girl is ten, you say?"
"Yes."
"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me
to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"
"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.
"Still you are taking her away from us."
I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.
"What do you mean--taking her away?"
"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work.
Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I
believe you have established the point that one can learn best from
within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost
between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each
day."
I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me
straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that
more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to
possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced
to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep
open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and
flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines
around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is
all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of
her--lifting her apart from the many?
There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
the job would be done more and more completely.
"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will
happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin
searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be
found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will
not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know
who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were
Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not
have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneliness and the
heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world
that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and
productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. _Quest_, that
is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on
the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which
we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are
fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more
poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"
The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that
all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
imagination?"
"But children have it," I said.
5
WILD GEESE
I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the
extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some
days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold
mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come
forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now
sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken
only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of
geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest
farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't
occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is
one of the tragedies of being city-bred.
Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force
and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with
the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of
their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his
second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the
V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice
as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined,
because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in
passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece
by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings.
Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.
It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of
ducks--darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions
sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and
canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the
distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders
with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a
suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.
Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments
of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time
into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the
self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist
before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the
presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to
common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the
spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory,
they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or
crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the
flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance
of the soul.
Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many
think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of
the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a
derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old
fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after
that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some
time _really_ to go to sea.
Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking
its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven
hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back
on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old
steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart
memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will
be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only
become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a
magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the
stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose
yesterdays are lives.
* * * * *
Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
mentioned the flying wedge.
"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the
waiting-room.
I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the
place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the
District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any
business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the
wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the
farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June
afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular
once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside
for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay,
and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese
are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they
fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black
powder.
Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would
have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks
afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack
Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.
Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch
of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of
geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A
farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of
_wanderlust_ when he observed the geese that he kept on going without
return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:
"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
mabe. Steve."
Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little
nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't
come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople
from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the
farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect
that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and
get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical
month of April.
Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving
much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The
geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year
or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty
drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser
heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding
fields. That was the second beginning.
The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six
hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the
artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot,
others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five
bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.
"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
man to feed six hundred."
He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it
evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An
automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of
his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing
his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the
States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk
who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying
overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on
the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for
strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack
Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse
blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.
Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table
from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't
know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has
time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one
seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect
him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.
"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an
eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're
drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any
outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen
them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the
wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"
I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.
It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper
impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not
come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural
mysteries--at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand--a
spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long
and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no
run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can
calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are
continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know
the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains--Jack Miner's
door-yard and Hudson's Bay.
"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.
"You don't have to. Come on."
He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.
"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was
heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have
some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came
home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine,
but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to
be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain;
anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he
healed."
The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at
me--something liquid and venomous in the sound--the long black beak as
fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the
core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die--perhaps he felt out
of the law because of that.
"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it
out."
I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the
past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy
which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.
An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind
was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself
clean--its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back
to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining
to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full
of feathers.
And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long,
powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary,
an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for
captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird
and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise
and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the
rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in
the mocking ruins of plenty....
Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
back from the chores.
6
WORKMANSHIP
As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string
of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of
asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply
of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and
goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.
Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a
shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of
a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in
a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and
tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire
piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad
day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.
"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will
make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next
corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."
That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.
I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my
thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing
something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that
word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to
do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded
with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad
workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A
man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the
stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.
... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked
for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.
Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads
down to the Lake--a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his
back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.
"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese,"
he explained, as I came up.
It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like
the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The
geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep
listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them
fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I
passed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.
Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his
not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus
first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to
the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman.
I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover,
I knew the man who would make it for me.
At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not
missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said
that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back
fouled. That was all he said.
I passed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous
community. There were many children--a stilled and staring lot. They
sat in dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their
father had never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother
would have spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came
to the door as I passed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the
door-stone, and vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The
virtue of fatherhood is not to be measured numerically.... April was
nearly over, but the unsightly heaps that the snows had covered were not
yet cleared away. Humped, they were, among the children. This is a
world-old picture--one that need not be finished.
Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father--a
burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of
the human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred
as reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplarship. He was a
complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.
Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people.
In his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the
low mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as
it is, the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.
Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by--and in his own weak
heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't "hit one of them geese." All
his life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him
into real production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless
exhausted. That is the pace that kills--that sitting.