VII
MERE BEANS
"God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it;
he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited."--Isaiah.
"A farmer," said my neighbor, Joel Moore, with considerable finality,
"has got to get all he can, and keep all he gets, or die."
"Yes," I replied with a fine platitude; "but he's got to give if he's
going to get."
"Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with wrath as it traveled the
trail of the fox across the dooryard; "just so, and I 'll go halves
with the soil; but I never signed a lease to run this farm on shares
with the varmints."
"Well," said I, "I 've come out from the city to run my farm on shares
with the whole universe--fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, summer and
winter. I believe there is a great deal more to farming than mere
beans. I 'm going to raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going to
cultivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the stars."
He looked me over. I had not been long out from the city. Then he
said, thinking doubtless of my stone-piles:--
"Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece of land. And it's just
as you say; there's more to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it,
beans are beans anyway you cook 'em; and I think, if I was you, I would
hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city."
It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I have raised beans that
were beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts,--a perfectly
enormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to the
stars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' job
in the city.
Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong about the beans, for beans
are not necessarily beans any way you cook them, nor are beans mere
beans any way you grow them--not if I remember Thoreau and my extensive
ministerial experience with bean suppers.
As for growing mere beans--listen to Thoreau. He is out in his patch
at Walden.
"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an
instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor
I that hoed beans."
Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed? And, if not beans, what was it
that he hoed? Well, poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a
more delightful chapter in American literature than that one in Walden
on the bean-patch, I don't know which chapter it is. That patch was
made to yield more than beans. The very stones were made to tinkle
till their music sounded on the sky.
"As _I_ see it, beans are beans," said Joel. And so they are, as he
sees them.
Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of
life largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?
Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor!
how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans are
beans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life is
pretty much all beans. If "beans are beans," why, how much more is
life?
He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and there the sharing stops,
and consequently there the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the
soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should give
to the skies as well?--to the wild life that dwells with him on his
land?--to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?--to the trees
that cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, give
anything back?
Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopes
shoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brook
wind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant and
gravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelier
in their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark and
sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, and
gleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them
from my windows, cannot help lingering over them--could not, rather;
for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent a
man over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords of
snowy firewood.
It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over and
spoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case by
saying,--
"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's a
gray birch."
We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, no
doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here
in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country,
where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living
things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is coöperation
with the divine forces of nature--the more astonishing, I say, that
under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere
beans.
There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness to
share largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with the
soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm on
shares with the "varmints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on
this particular occasion.
But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of
farm life--out of any life--its flowers and fragrance, as well as its
pods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to
one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as
useful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is as necessary on the
farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.
But to come back to the fox.
Now, I have lived long enough, and I have had that fox steal roosters
enough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. I
fully sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for the
fox?
At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great. More than once
(three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I
have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, many
more. Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster is
almost a poem. So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost a poem,
standing on the bare knoll here near the house, his form half-shrouded
in the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned
toward the yard where the hens were waking up.
Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, something
furtive, crafty, cunning--the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at
sight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that whole
tame day.
I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For that is too gross, too
cheap a price to pay for a glimpse of wild life that set the dead
nerves of the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather I would
ask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have a
woodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?
Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods,
better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given
all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material,
mere beans--only more of them--until the farm is run on shares with all
the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the
sunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and rich
crop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independence
and liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks.
But, if farm life tends constantly to become earthy, so does business
life, and professional life--beans, all of it.
The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the merchants, the preachers,
doctors, lawyers, educated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere
beans? A great fortune, a great congregation, a great practice, a
great farm crop, are one and all mere beans? Efficiency is not a whole
education, nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the whole man.
And I said as much to Joel.
"Beans," I said, "must be raised. Much of life must be spent hoeing
the beans. But I am going to ask myself: 'Is it _mere_ beans that I am
hoeing? And is it the _whole_ of me that is hoeing the beans?'"
"Well," he replied, "you settle down on that farm of yours as I settled
on mine, and I 'll tell you what answer you 'll get to them questions.
There ain't no po'try about farmin'. God did n't intend there should
be--as I see it."
"Now, that is n't the way I see it at all. This is God's earth,--and
there could n't be a better one."
"Of course there could n't, but there was one once."
"When?" I asked, astonished.
"In the beginning."
"You mean the Garden of Eden?"
"Just that."
"Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is the Garden of Eden."
"But it says God drove him out of the Garden and, what's more, it says
He made him farm for a livin', don't it?"
"That's what it says," I replied.
"Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't it? God puts a man on
a farm when he ain't fit for anything else. 'Least, that's the way I
see it. That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose that's why I
stay here."
"But," said I, "there's another version of that farm story."
"Not in the Bible?" he asked, now beginning to edge away, for it was
not often that I could get him so near to books as this. Let me talk
books with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farming and neighboring are
Joel's strong points, not books. He is a general farmer and a kind of
universal neighbor (that being his specialty); on neighborhood and farm
topics his mind is admirably full and clear.
"That other version is in the Bible, right along with the one you've
been citing--just before it in Genesis."
He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in his eye, a ring of
certainty, not to say triumph, in his tones:--
"You 're sure of that, Professor?"
"Reasonably."
"Well, I 'm not a college man, but I 've read the Bible. Let's go in
and take a look at Holy Writ on farmin',"--leading the way with
alacrity into the house.
"My father was a great Bible man down in Maine," he went on. "Let me
raise a curtain. This was his," pointing to an immense family Bible,
with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath the plush family album, also
clasped, on a frail little table in the middle of the parlor floor.
The daylight came darkly through the thick muslin draperies at the
window and fell in a faint line across the floor. An oval frame of
hair-flowers hung on the wall opposite me--a somber wreath of
immortelles for the departed--_of_ the departed--black, brown, auburn,
and grizzled-gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the
reddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the room stood a closed
cabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemed
to light the dimmest corners of the room. There was no fire in the
stove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of soot
and the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay under
the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, and the heavy brass-clasped Bible.
There was no coffin in the room; but Joel took up the Bible and handed
it to me as if we were having a funeral.
"Read me that other account of Adam's farm," he said; "I can't see
without my specs."
In spite of a certain restraint of manner and evident uneasiness at the
situation, he had something of boldness, even the condescension of the
victor toward me. He was standing and looking down at me; yet he stood
ill at ease by the table.
"Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority in his house that I saw
he could not quite feel.
"I can't; I 've got my overhalls on."
"Let us do all things decently and in order, Joel," I continued,
touching the great Book reverently.
"But I never set in this room. My chair's out there in the kitchen."
I moved over to the window to get what light I could, Joel following me
with furtive, sidelong glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners.
"We keep this room mostly for funerals," he volunteered, in order to
stir up talk and lay what of the silence and the ghosts he could.
"I 'll read your story of Adam's farming first," I said, and began:
"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth"--going on
with the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no man to till
the soil; then to the forming of Adam out of the dust, and the planting
of Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in the
Garden, of the rib made into Eve, of the prohibited tree, the snake,
the wormy apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns--and how, in order to
crown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth from
the Garden and condemned them to farm for a living.
"That's it," Joel muttered with a mourner's groan. "That's Holy Writ
on farmin' as _I_ understand it. Now, where's the other story?"
"Here it is," I answered, "but we 've got to have some fresh air and
more light on it," rising as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the
front door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and throwing
myself forward, swung the door wide to the open sky, while Joel groaned
again, and the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise and
shock of it. But the thing was done.
A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over us; a breeze,
wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in out of the broad meadow that
stretched from the very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and
through the air, like a shower in June, fell the notes of soaring,
singing bobolinks.
Joel stood looking out over his farm with the eyes of a stark stranger.
He had never seen it from the front door before. It was a new prospect.
"Let's sit here on the millstone step," I said, bringing the Bible out
into the fresh air, "and I 'll read you something you never heard
before," and I read,--laying the emphasis so as to render a new thing
of the old story,--"In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth, and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And
God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the
darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called
night.
"And the evening and the morning were the first day."
Starting each new phase of the tale with "And God said," and bringing
it to a close with "And God saw that it was good," I read on through
the seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all living things, to man
and woman--"male and female created he them"--and in his own likeness,
blessing them and crowning the blessing with saying, "Be fruitful and
multiply and replenish the earth and _subdue_ it,"--farm for a living;
rounding out the whole marvelous story with the sweet refrain: "And God
saw _everything_ that he had made, and behold it was _very_ good.
"And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."
"_Thus_, Joel," I concluded, glancing at him as with opened eyes he
looked out for the first time over his new meadow,--"_thus_, according
to my belief, and not as you have been reading it, were the heavens and
the earth finished and all the host of them."
He took the old book in his lap and sat silent with me for a while on
the step. Then he said:--
"Nobody has got to the bottom of that book yet, have they? And it's
true; it's all true. It's just accordin' as you see it. Do ye know
what I'm going to do? I 'm going to buy one of them double-seated red
swings and put it right out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannah
and I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen a little to them
bobolinks."
[Illustration: A pilgrim from Dubuque]
VIII
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE
It is a long road from anywhere to Mullein Hill, and only the rural
postman and myself travel it at all frequently. The postman goes by,
if he can, every weekday, somewhere between dawn and dark, the absolute
uncertainty of his passing quite relieving the road of its wooded
loneliness. I go back and forth somewhat regularly; now and then a
neighbor takes this route to the village, and at rarer intervals an
automobile speeds over the "roller coaster road"; but seldom does a
stranger on foot appear so far from the beaten track. One who walks to
Mullein Hill deserves and receives a welcome.
I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I was the day the Pilgrim
from Dubuque arrived. Swinging the horses into the yard with their
staggering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill by the road in
front. He stopped in the climb for a breathing spell,--a tall, erect
old man in black, with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him something,
even at the distance, that was--I don't
know--unusual--old-fashioned--Presbyterian.
Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the stranger, though I saw he
carried a big blue book under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agent
had ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never seen one anywhere I
should have known this man had not come to sell me a book. "More
likely," I thought, "he has come to give me a book. We shall see."
Yet I could not quite make him out, for while he was surely
professional, he was not exactly clerical, in spite of a certain
Scotch-Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had never preached
at men, I knew, as instinctively as I knew he had never persuaded them
with books or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa. He had a fine, kindly
face, that was singularly clear and simple, in which blent the shadows
and sorrows of years with the serene and mellow light of good thoughts.
"Is this Mullein Hill?" he began, shifting the big blue copy of the
"Edinburgh Review" from under his arm.
"You're on Mullein Hill," I replied, "and welcome."
"Is--are--you Dallas Lore--"
"Sharp?" I said, finishing for him. "Yes, sir, this is Dallas Lore
Sharp, but these are not his over-alls--not yet; for they have never
been washed and are about three sizes too large for him."
He looked at me, a little undone, I thought, disappointed, maybe, and a
bit embarrassed at having been betrayed by overalls and rolled-up
sleeves and shovels. He had not expected the overalls, not new ones,
anyhow. And why are new overalls so terribly new and unwashed! Only a
woman, only a man's wife, is fitted to buy his overalls, for she only
is capable of allowing enough for shrinkage. To-day I was in my new
pair, but not of them, not being able to get near enough to them for
that.
"I am getting old," he went on quickly, his face clearing; "my
perceptions are not so keen, nor my memory so quick as it used to be.
I should have known that 'good writing must have a pre-literary
existence as lived reality; the writing must be only the necessary
accident of its being lived over again in thought'"--quoting verbatim,
though I was slow in discovering it, from an essay of mine, published
years before.
It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage. Had he learned this passage
for the visit and applied it thus by chance? My face must have showed
my wonder, my incredulity, indeed, for explaining himself he said,--
"I am a literary pilgrim, sir--"
"Who has surely lost his way," I ventured.
Then with a smile that made no more allowances necessary he assured
me,--
"Oh, no, sir! I am quite at home in the hills of Hingham. I have been
out at Concord for a few days, and am now on the main road from Concord
to Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa,
and"--releasing my hand--"let me see"--pausing as we reached the top of
the hill, and looking about in search of something--"Ah, yes [to
himself], there on the horizon they stand, those two village spires,
'those tapering steeples where they look up to worship toward the sky,
and look down to scowl across the street'"--quoting again, word for
word, from another of my essays. Then to me: "They are a little
farther away and a little closer together than I expected to see
them--too close [to himself again] for God to tell from which side of
the street the prayers and praises come, mingling as they must in the
air."
He said it with such thought-out conviction, such sweet sorrow, and
with such relief that I began now to fear for what he might quote next
and _miss_ from the landscape. The spires were indeed there (may
neither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terrible
memory the man has! Had he come from Dubuque to prove me--
The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; and
to my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders of
Mullein Hill--my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as
John Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of my
books somewhat after the manner of modern _literary_ foxes. Literary
foxes! One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with a
gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, no
naturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or under
the stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things that
they cannot find outside the book. I had often wondered what I would
do if such visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might on many
pages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfully
kept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my main
theme.
This morning, with heaps of gravel in the yard, the hilltop looked
anything but like the green and fruitful mountain of the book, still
less like a way station between anywhere and _Concord_! And as for
myself--it was no wonder he said to me,--
"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the land
about Mullein Hill
"'Whether the simmer kindly warms
Wi' life and light,
Or winter howls in gusty storms
The lang, dark night.'"
But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that will
wait. Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age.
There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque
must be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked--of books and
men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,--books I had written,
and other books--great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns." Then we walked--over the ridges, down to the meadow and the
stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange
visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume
somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on--reading on--from
memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or
to comment upon some happy thought.
Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather-bound copy
of Burns that he drew from his coat pocket he did not give me, however,
but fondly holding it in his hands said:--
"It was my mother's. She always read to us out of it. She knew every
line of it by heart as I do.
"'Some books are lies frae end to end'--
but this is no one of them. I have carried it these many years."
Our walk brought us back to the house and into the cool living-room
where a few sticks were burning on the hearth. Taking one of the
rocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time looking
into the blaze. Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyes
fixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, and
while he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak with
some one--not with me--with some one invisible to me who had come to
him out of the flame. I listened as he spoke, but it was a language
that I could not understand.
Then remembering where he was he turned to me and said, his eyes going
back again beyond the fire,--
"She often comes to me like this; but I am very lonely since she left
me,--lonely--lonely--and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau's
grave."
And this too was language I could not understand. I watched him in
silence, wondering what was behind his visit to me.
"Thoreau was a lonely man," he went on, "as most writers are, I think,
but Thoreau was very lonely."
"Wild," Burroughs had called him; "irritating," I had called him; and
on the table beside the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr.
Burroughs, in which he had taken me to task on behalf of Thoreau.
"I feel like scolding you a little," ran the letter, "for disparaging
Thoreau for my benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may
be more human, but he is certainly more divine. His moral and ethical
value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I
cannot approach."