the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery
capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all
this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are
small, but too big _for them_, and make a little clatter as they go over
the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or
somewhere that I do not know of.
The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The
trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp
from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh
and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but
if one moves quickly they all run away.
I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old
gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There
were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must
have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready.
Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a
friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and
spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with
me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn
much more about them.
* * * * *
... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low
street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was
something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might
think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep,
but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped
short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me
something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of
the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told
her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:
"... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one
thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me
something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or
tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can
get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
asked for."
I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for
fulfilments at once.
"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every
day, and perhaps something will come."
These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
Roses:
If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
pull me right out of the body and out into another world
where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
tea roses.
I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very
much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that
sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
every day.
A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.
"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
is!"
"Which one do you like best?" I asked.
"The red one, of course," the girl answered.
"Why, the other two are much----" I began.
"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
likes them red ones best?"
I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
Nature, know her better from their reading than country
people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk
on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
people like red roses because they are like them. The red
roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow
teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow
bigger. They are not ashamed.
A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put
into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it
is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down
under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose
spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have
been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is
fine enough for them, and it has come--and others. Months
afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses
come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all
wonderful?
I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey
Day:
Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan
shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little
wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the
crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of
wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the
harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday
scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had
begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the
window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I
could not finish that essay; I had to write something about
the grey happy day.
On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always
so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was
on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made
us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water,
cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see
that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only
one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if
they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you,
they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander
through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many
different faces, different and strange lands and people.
Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and
everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge
dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away.
The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new
ones come.
A TALK
What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole
lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time
spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I
have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to
the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short
talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes
the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally
wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from
going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.
At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the
angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard,
flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange,
wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little
brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the
fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so
to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a
whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the
green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just
go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of
brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves
are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their
hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love
them. But that is all, for they are working hard.
If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be
able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together,
and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And
one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any _old_ thing.
What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has
stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all
the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking
up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that
woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy
by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches
would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many
other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.
12
TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT
It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable,
the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I
concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a
house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been
seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles
of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:
"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
another look at your little stone study."
I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He
found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped
some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father
fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine
stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass,
the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he
was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the
picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff,
casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work,
even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.
"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I
can frame it up for you."
When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty,
and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward
there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the
afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested
to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so
positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the
contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the
lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a
bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.
This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my
well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in
his own cellar:
"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let
me."
He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and
spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.
"And it's all paid for?" I asked.
He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."
"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for
it?"
"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."
That was not to be forgotten.
So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When
they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had
pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.
As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had
learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors,
merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores
or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social
system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.
There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in
the village still, but different.
Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a
small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched
their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted
upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields
for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of
enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one
evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a
kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of
the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An
old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap
out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky
patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted
the paddle.
There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening
and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw
the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it.
The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and
the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.
The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like
a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us
the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of
a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No
word.
The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty,
picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't
even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night
the Canadian said:
"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old,
even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one
pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's
tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring
anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to
the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them,
sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring,
the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the
race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live
differently."
Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it
would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have
amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town,
when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups
of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build
the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another
incident:
... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so
well--had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his
bare flesh--that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how
well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the
water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and
the interurban lines), and for what they do not get of the natural
beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't
miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
shameless.
Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in
most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious
of itself--and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either
shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the
trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent
these shores.
The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that
is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth--and vision
requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive,
scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they
are prone to sink.
It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not
come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to
satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of
human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards,
and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work,
that subject.
In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have
debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not
beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this
heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of
this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.
The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to
educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not
appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would
frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one
may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin
white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting
mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while
each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing
his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to
express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in
the case of the countryside which complained.
They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face
to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is
above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all
the living lights--the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not
glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to
Questing--man's real and most significant business. They do not know
that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in
houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto
themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes
this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their
churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with
tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the
hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and
only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of
spirit to rise above the resistance.
As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly
naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find
some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a
descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where
the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian
rather than individual. The year around, these people wear
clothing,--woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron,
touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering
quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.
They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with
as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh
and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a
price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with
the sense of possession.
They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret
of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and
the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold
the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and
half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men,
static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering
from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them
the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be
erect in other than bone and sinew.
They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their
minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_
They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint
of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to
reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the
world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and
motion-photography.
The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is
ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask
of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each
other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is
deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a
community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is
merely an unlettered thing.
No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind
that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's
treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive
in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously
furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have
found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of
appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor
generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will
hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.
All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the
soul just as every other fine thing comes.