handkerchief.
"Why--yes"--I hesitated--"for a fat man, perhaps."
"Just so," he replied, running me over rapidly with a professional eye;
"but you know, Professor, that when a man's forty, or thereabouts, it's
the nature of him to stouten. Once past forty he's liable to pick up
any day. And when he starts, you know as well as I, Professor, when he
starts there's nothing fattens faster than a man of forty. You ought
to have one of these 'Friends' on hand."
"But fat does n't run in my family," I protested, my helpless,
single-handed condition being plainly manifest in my tone.
"No matter," he rejoined, "look at me! Six feet three, and thin as a
lath. I 'm what you might call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint,
as the poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I would do if 't
wa'n't for this little 'Friend.' I can't eat without it. I miss it
more when I am eatin' than I miss the victuals. I carry one with me
all the time. Awful handy little thing. Now--"
"But--" I put in.
"Certainly," he continued, with the smoothest-running motor I ever
heard, "but here's the point of the whole matter, as you might say.
_This_ thing is up to date, Professor. Now, the old-fashioned way of
tying a knot in the corner of your napkin and anchoring it under your
Adam's apple--_that's_ gone by. Also the stringed bib and safety-pin.
Both those devices were crude--but necessary, of course, Professor--and
inconvenient, and that old-fashioned knot really dangerous; for the
knot, pressing against the Adam's apple, or the apple, as you might
say, trying to swallow the knot--well, if there isn't less apoplexy and
strangulation when this little Friend finds universal application, then
I 'm no Prophet, as the Good Book says."
"But you see--" I broke in.
"I do, Professor. It's right here. I understand your objection. But
it is purely verbal and academic, Professor. You are troubled
concerning the name of this indispensable article. But you know, as
well as I--even better with your education, Professor--that there 's
nothing, absolutely nothing in a name. 'What's in a name?' the poet
says. And I 'll agree with you--though, of course, it's
confidential--that 'The Fat Man's Friend' is, as you literary folks
would say, more or less of a _nom de plume_. Isn't it? Besides,--if
you 'll allow me the language, Professor,--it's too delimiting,
restricting, prejudicing. Sets a lean man against it. But between us,
Professor, they 're going to change the name of the next batch.
They're--"
"Indeed!" I exclaimed; "what's the next batch going to be?"
"Oh, just the same--fifteen cents each--two for a quarter. You could
n't tell them apart. You might just as well have one of these, and run
no chances getting one of the next lot. They'll be precisely the same;
only, you see, they're going to name the next ones 'Every Bosom's
Friend,' to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of sex. Ideal
thing now, is n't it? Yes, that's right--fifteen cents--two for
twenty-five, Professor?--don't you want another for your wife?"
No, I did not want another for her. But if _she_ had been at home, and
I had been away, who knows but that all six of us had come off with a
"Friend" apiece? They were a bargain by the half-dozen.
A bargain? Did anybody ever get a bargain--something worth more than
he paid? Well--you shall, when you bring home a Dustless-Duster.
And who has not brought it home! Or who is not about to bring it home!
Not all the years that I have searched, not all the loads that I have
collected, count against the conviction that at last I have it--the
perfect thing--until I _reach_ home. But with several of my
perfections I have never yet reached home, or I am waiting an opportune
season to give them to my wife. I have been disappointed; but let no
one try to tell me that there is no such thing as Perfection. Is not
the desire for it the breath of my being? Is not the search for it the
end of my existence? Is not the belief that at last I possess it--in
myself, my children, my breed of hens, my religious creed, my political
party--is not this conviction, I say, all there is of existence?
It is very easy to see that perfection is not in any of the other
political parties. During a political campaign, not long since, I
wrote to a friend in New Jersey,--
"Now, whatever your particular, personal brand of political faith, it
is clearly your moral duty to vote this time the Democratic ticket."
Whereupon (and he is a thoughtful, God-fearing man, too) he wrote
back,--
"As I belong to the only party of real reform, I shall stick to it this
year, as I always have, and vote the straight ticket."
Is there a serener faith than this human faith in perfection? A surer,
more unshakable belief than this human belief in the present possession
of it?
There is only one thing deeper in the heart of man than his desire for
completeness, and that is his conviction of being about to attain unto
it. He dreams of completeness by night; works for completeness by day;
buys it of every agent who comes along; votes for it at every election;
accepts it with every sermon; and finds it--momentarily--every time he
finds himself. The desire for it is the sweet spring of all his
satisfactions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of many of his
woes.
Apply the conviction anywhere, to anything--creeds, wives, hens--and
see how it works out.
As to _hens_:--
There are many breeds of fairly good hens, and I have tried as many
breeds as I have had years of keeping hens, but not until the poultry
show, last winter, did I come upon the perfect hen. I had been working
toward her through the Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the Plymouth
Rocks. I had tried the White and the Barred Plymouth Rocks, but they
were not the hen. Last winter I came upon the originator of the Buff
Plymouth Rocks--and here she was! I shall breed nothing henceforth but
Buff Plymouth Rocks.
In the Buff Rock we have a bird of ideal size, neither too large nor
too small, weighing about three pounds more than the undersized
Leghorn, and about three pounds less than the oversized Brahma; we have
a bird of ideal color, too--a single, soft, even tone, and no such
barnyard daub as the Rhode Island Red; not crow-colored, either, like
the Minorca; nor liable to all the dirt of the White Plymouth Rocks.
Being a beautiful and uniform buff, this perfect Plymouth Rock is
easily bred true to color, as the vari-colored fowls are not.
Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is _the_ layer, maturing as she
does about four weeks later than the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping
that fatal early fall laying with its attendant moult and eggless
interim until March! On the other hand, the Buff Rock matures about a
month earlier than the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good
start before the cold and eggless weather comes.
And such an egg! There are white eggs and brown eggs, large and small
eggs, but only one ideal egg--the Buff Rock's. It is of a soft lovely
brown, yet whitish enough for a New York market, but brown enough,
however, to meet the exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact it
is neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate blend of the two--a
new tone, indeed, a bloom rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender.
So, at least, I am told. My pullets are not yet laying, having had a
very late start last spring. But the real question, speaking
professionally, with any breed of fowls is a market question: How do
they dress? How do they eat?
If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in her feathers, she is even
more so plucked. All white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs,
look cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, with their
tendency to green legs and black pin-feathers, look spotted, long dead,
and unsavory. But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows that
consonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh to feather that makes the
plucked fowl to the feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint and
far-off dawn--a glow of golden legs and golden neck, mellow, melting as
butter, and all the more so with every unpicked pinfeather.
Can there be any doubt of the existence of hen-perfection? Any
question of my having attained unto it--with the maturing of this new
breed of hens?
For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the ideal
hen is the pullet--the Buff Plymouth Rock pullet.
Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep them pullets!
The trouble we husbands have with our wives begins with our marrying
them. There is seldom any trouble with them before. Our belief in
feminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth. And the
perfection is just as real as the faith. Youth is always bringing the
bride home--to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She turns out to
be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black--this
perfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!
The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my children after me. They
learn only after themselves. Already I hear my boys saying that their
wives--! And the oldest of these boys has just turned fourteen!
Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen. No, the trouble began
with Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since. Adam
had all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden.
Nevertheless he wanted Eve. Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! but
she wanted something more--if only the apple tree in the middle of the
Garden. And we all of us were there in that Garden--with Adam thinking
he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciating
perfection in Adam. The trouble is human.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Prythee quickly come to me!
For my wife, Dame Isabel,
Wants strange things I scarce dare tell."
"And what does she want _now_?" asks the flounder.
"Oh, she wants to _vote_ now," says the fisherman.
"Go home, and you shall find her with the ballot," sighs the flounder.
"But has n't she Dustless-Dusters enough already?"
It would seem so. But once having got Adam, who can blame her for
wanting an apple tree besides, or the ballot?
'T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, but--but Eve had Adam,
too, another perfect man! Don't forbid her, for she will have it
anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is. But did
you turn out to be all that she thought you were? She will have a bite
of this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because such
disobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to a
larger life from within. Eve's discovery that Adam was cheese-cloth,
and her reaching out for something better, did not, as Satan promised,
make us as God; but it did make us different from all the other animals
in the Garden, placing us even above the angels,--so far above, as to
bring us, apparently, by a new and divine descent, into Eden.
The hope of the race is in Eve,--in her making the best she can of
Adam; in her clear understanding of his lame logic,--that her
_im_perfections added to his perfections make the perfect Perfection;
and in her reaching out beyond Adam for something more--for the ballot
now.
If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is continuance, if there
is immortality for the race and for the soul, it is to be found in this
sure faith in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disappointment
every time we think we have it; and in this abiding conviction that we
are about to bring it home. But let a man settle down on perfection as
a present possession, and that man is as good as dead already--even
religiously dead, if he has possession of a perfect Salvation.
Now, "Sister Smith" claimed to possess Perfection--a perfect infallible
book of revelations in her King James Version of the Scriptures, and
she claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty years. I was fresh
from the theological school, and this was my first "charge." This was
my first meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one of the
official brethren, with whom Sister Smith lived.
There was an ominous silence at the table for which I could hardly
account--unless it had to do with the one empty chair. Then Sister
Smith appeared and took the chair. The silence deepened. Then Sister
Smith began to speak and everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laid
down his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into her lap until the
thing should be over. Leaning far forward toward me across the table,
her steady gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger pointing
beyond me into eternity, Sister Smith began with spaced and measured
words:--
"My young Brother--what--do--you--think--of--Jonah?"
I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, dipped it up and down in
the cup of mustard and tried for time. Not a soul stirred. Not a word
or sound broke the tense silence about the operating-table.
"What--do--you--think--of--Jonah?"
"Well, Sister Smith, I--"
"Never mind. Don't commit yourself. You needn't tell me what you
think of Jonah.
You--are--too--young--to--know--what--you--think--of--Jonah. But I
will tell you what _I_ think of Jonah: if the Scriptures had said that
Jonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as easy to believe as it is
that the whale swallowed Jonah."
"So it would, Sister Smith," I answered weakly, "just as easy."
"And now, my young Brother, you preach the Scriptures--the old genuine
inspired Authorized Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!"
Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite of her theology. Dear
old soul, she sent me many a loaf of her salt-rising bread after that,
for she had as warm a heart as ever beat its brave way past eighty.
But she had neither a perfect Book, nor a perfect Creed, nor a perfect
Salvation. She did not need them; nor could she have used them; for
they would have posited a divine command to be perfect--a too difficult
accomplishment for any of us, even for Sister Smith.
There is no such divine command laid upon us; but only such a divinely
human need springing up within us, and reaching out for everything, in
its deep desire, from dust-cloths dyed black to creeds of every color.
This is a life of imperfections, a world made of cheese-cloth, merely
dyed black, and stamped in red letters--The Dustless-Duster. Yet a
cheese-cloth world so dyed and stamped is better than a cloth-of-gold
world, for the cloth-of-gold you would not want to dye nor to stamp
with burning letters.
We have never found it,--this perfect thing,--and perhaps we never
shall. But the desire, the search, the faith, must not fail us, as at
times they seem to do. At times the very tides of the ocean seem to
fail,--when the currents cease to run. Yet when they are at slack
here, they are at flood on the other side of the world, turning already
to pour back--
". . . lo, out of his plenty the sea
Pours fast; full soon the time of the flood-tide shall be--"
The faith cannot fail us--for long. Full soon the ebb-tide turns,
"And Belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know"
that there is perfection; that the desire for it is the breath of life;
that the search for it is the hope of immortality.
But I know only in part. I see through a glass darkly, and I may be no
nearer it now than when I started, yet the search has carried me far
from that start. And if I never arrive, then, at least, I shall keep
going on, which, in itself maybe the thing--the Perfect Thing that I am
seeking.
[Illustration: Spring ploughing]
VI
SPRING PLOUGHING
"See-Saw, Margery Daw!
Sold her bed and lay upon straw"
--the very worst thing, I used to think, that ever happened in Mother
Goose. I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom the Piper's Son, but
never would I do such a thing as Margery did; the dreadful picture of
her nose and of that bottle in her hand made me sure of that. And
yet--snore on, Margery!--I sold my _plough_ and bought an automobile!
As if an automobile would carry me
"To the island-valley of Avilion,"
where I should no longer need the touch of the soil and the slow simple
task to heal me of my grievous wound!
Speed, distance, change--are these the cure for that old hurt we call
living, the long dull ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet pain
of spring? We seek for something different, something not different
but faster and still faster, to fill our eyes with flying, our ears
with rushing, our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which are our
souls, with the thrill of curves, and straight stretches, of lifts, and
drops, and sudden halts--as of elevators, merry-go-rounds, chutes,
scenic railways, aeroplanes, and heavy low-hung cars.
To go--up or down, or straight away--anyway, but round and round, and
slowly--as if one could speed away from being, or ever travel beyond
one's self! How pathetic to sell all that one has and buy an
automobile! to shift one's grip from the handles of life to the wheel
of change! to forsake the furrow for the highway, the rooted soil for
the flying dust, the here for the there; imagining that somehow a car
is more than a plough, that going is the last word in
living--demountable rims and non-skid tires, the great gift of the God
Mechanic, being the 1916 model of the wings of the soul!
But women must weep in spite of modern mechanics, and men must plough.
Petroleum, with all of its by-products, cannot be served for bread. I
have tried many substitutes for ploughing; and as for the automobile, I
have driven that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, summer and
winter; but let the blackbirds return, let the chickweed start in the
garden, then the very stones of the walls cry out--"Plough! plough!"
It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed voices of earlier
primitive selves far back in my dim past; those, and the call of the
boy I was yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, perhaps, from
walking in the furrow. When that call comes, no
"Towered cities please us then
And the busy hum of men,"
or of automobiles. I must plough. It is the April wind that wakes the
call--
"Zephirus eek, with his sweetë breeth"--
and many hearing it long to "goon on pilgrimages," or to the Maine
woods to fish, or, waiting until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat and
go up and down the shore to see how fared their summer cottages during
the winter storms; some even imagine they have malaria and long for
bitters--as many men as many minds when
"The time of the singing of birds is come
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."
But as for me it is neither bitters, nor cottages, nor trout, nor
"ferne halwes couth in sondry landës"
that I long for: but simply for the soil, for the warming, stirring
earth, for my mother. It is back to her breast I would go, back to the
wide sweet fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines about my
shoulder, to the even furrow rolling from the mould-board, to the taste
of the soil, the sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and
bluebirds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of Highhole over the
sunny fields.
I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth, and as I follow
through the fresh and fragrant furrow I am planted with every footstep,
growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the spring. I can catch
the blackbirds ploughing, I can turn under with my furrow the laughter
of the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so much as turn in
my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; if I shout, Highhole is silent; if I
chase the breeze, it runs away; I might climb into the humming maples,
might fill my hands with arbutus and bloodroot, might run and laugh
aloud with the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could catch
it in my hands, and in my heart could hold it all--this living earth,
shining sky, flowers, buds, voices, colors, odors--this spring!
But I can plough--while the blackbirds come close behind me in the
furrow; and I can be the spring.
I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. But I sold it for five
dollars and bought a second-hand automobile for fifteen hundred--as
everybody else has. So now I do as everybody else does,--borrow my
neighbor's plough, or still worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing,
being still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and simple as to
possess a plough. But I must plough or my children's children will
never live to have children,--they will have motor cars instead. The
man who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning for
posterity. But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purring
cityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are following
the plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children in
the furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motored
off to possess the land.
I see no way but to keep the automobile and buy another plough, not for
my children's sake any more than for my own. There was an old man
living in this house when I bought it who moved back into the city and
took with him, among other things, a big grindstone and two
long-handled hayforks--for crutches, did he think? and to keep a
cutting edge on the scythe of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones?
When I am old and my children compel me to move back near the asylums
and hospitals, I shall carry into the city with me a plough; and I
shall pray the police to let me go every springtime to the Garden or
the Common and there turn a few furrows as one whom still his mother
comforteth.
It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A half-day and it is all
over, all the land ploughed that I own,--all that the Lord intended
should be tilled. A half-day--but every fallow field and patch of
stubble within me has been turned up in that time, given over for the
rain and sunshine to mellow and put into tender tilth.
No other labor, no other contact with the earth is like ploughing. You
may play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house down
on it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with your
ploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the long
fresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through the
oaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of a
closer union,--dust with dust,--of a more mystical union,--spirit with
spirit,--than any other approach, work, or rite, or ceremony, can give
you. You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond the
furrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yours
as if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak and
maple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet and
gold.
And so, until I get a new plough and a horse to pull it, I shall hire
my neighbor--hire him to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough!
This is what I have come to! _Hiring_ another to skim my cream and
share it! Let me handle both team and plough, a plough that guides
itself, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a furrow,--a long
straight furrow that curls and crests like a narrow wave and breaks
evenly into the trough of the wave before.
But even with the hired plough, I am taking part in the making of
spring; and more: I am planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat of
chickweed,--lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chickweed,--in the earth,
whence, so long ago it sometimes seems, I was pulled up.
But the ploughing does more--more than root me as a weed. Ploughing is
walking not by sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something he
cannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of faith. In all time men
have known and _feared_ God; but there must have been a new and higher
consciousness when they began to plough. They hunted and feared God
and remained savage; they ploughed, trusted, and loved God--and became
civilized.
Nothing more primitive than the plough have we brought with us out of
our civilized past. In the furrow was civilization cradled, and there,
if anywhere, shall it be interred.
You go forth unto your day's work, if you have land enough, until the
Lord's appointed close; then homeward plod your weary way, leaving the
world to the poets. Not yours
"The hairy gown, the mossy cell."
You have no need of them.
What more
"Of every star that Heaven doth shew
And every hearb that sips the dew"
can the poet spell than all day long you have _felt_? Has ever poet
handled more of life than you? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom
of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than you of your field? Has
he ever found anything sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome
toilsome round of the plough?