*CHAPTER XII*
*WORK AND MINE ACRE*
There is but one balm for a heartache, and that is work.
Nothing in all my life had left me so stranded; had killed so utterly
the sweetness of all my dreams as this giving up of Eloise. And with no
dream there is no life.
I felt that she was lost to me now: if she were not engaged to Colonel
Goff, there was nothing in me now, I thought bitterly, that could awaken
in her the real love she had never felt for anyone. Yet with all her
spirit, her apparent indifference, and even recklessness, I knew she had
a throne in her heart of hearts for love on a higher plane than those
who love easily. I knew that only one side of her had ever been
revealed, either to herself or to the world; that beautiful as she was
there was a yet more beautiful side to her; and that brave as she was
there were yet deeper depths of bravery within her, a moral bravery
which under the spur of her soul would take another leap, as far greater
than that she took on Satan as the brave leap of Pegasus over the
clouds. I had known her always. I knew what she did not know: that I
was loving an Eloise that was yet, and forever would be, an unseen star
in an unknown heaven, above the head of the man who had never yet
learned to look up. Should I sit still and let him take her, let him do
this irreparable wrong both to himself, and to her and to me? My heart
cowered a moment at the thought of its hopelessness. Then--how
wonderful is the word of the soul unto the soul, the passed soul to the
passing soul, the absent soul to the present soul,--I thought of the
words of Aunt Lucretia: "What would Andrew Jackson do, Jack?" Into my
soul came the steel of Andrew Jackson. With the quickness of the
thought came the change. "_Aye, my unseeing old grandsire," I said,
"you shall see whether I am a fighter or not! ... For Eloise._"
From that moment I resolved to fight. God's blessings on the memory of
Andrew Jackson!
But I would fight in my own way. For I knew that Eloise's idea of love
was a love of life and death: she who would ride a mad horse over a
five-foot fence for the conquering instinct of a mastering nature, what
would she not do for love--_her love_--and she a woman? For let it be
writ both of history and life, 'tis woman at last who loves. Man knows
not love. Even as his own life came to him the babe of Love and
Passion, so only can he give that unto another. But she who gave it
being, _her name was Love_! Oh, to win such a love as I knew Eloise
would bring to me; which she herself knew not was there.
I lost my bitterness of it all when it came clear to me. Before, I had
been maddened to think she would barter this love of hers for title and
wealth and the place it bought. But now I saw clearly, now I knew that
she was blameless, because never having had that love, she knew not what
she was giving away. Like an Indian princess, who owned an island of
pearls, but did not know their value, she would give them to the first
foreigner, coming down in ships, for the baubles of his forecastle.
But I would show my Princess what her pearls were worth. I would string
them in globes of beauty around her neck, and brow, and belt, and I
would put my crowning Great Pearl of Sacrifice into the diadem of her
hair, and then I would lead her down to the sweet glassy sea of her own
unbartered, unbought home, her own sweet kingdom of kindness and
content, and by the still waters, in God's own groves, I would lead her
until her feet dipped into the mirroring pools, and, kissing her, bid
her look for the first time and behold Love crowned.
Would she barter herself for baubles then? Would she not know the
difference between pearls and paste beads? I, yes, happy I, would show
it to her; I would introduce Eloise to herself--Eloise loveless to
Eloise in love.
I laughed now in the happiness of my little conceit. Very distinctly I
could hear my Aunt Lucretia say: "_Sure, Jack, that is the way Andrew
Jackson did--took her from the toad who had deceived her, right out of
his arms, and then killed every other toad who croaked about it.
Sure!_" ...
There was much for me to do, both of love and duty. My duty was work,
and that came first. For I had faith both in God and myself, and if I
did my duty and my work, God would give the rest to me.
Work--the glory and sweetness of it! And to find one's work in one's
life--that One Work which fits the One Life: this to me has always been
the greatest gift of the Giver.
There was so much for me to do. I was the pioneer of a great truth in
the world's greatest country. In all great causes it is the pioneer who
is the sacrifice, it is he who is held up to contempt and scorn.
Strange that it should be so! That he who sees first the Great New
Truth, the Blessing that has been withheld because of no one to see it,
the Great Invention uplifting through one man all men into a new world,
that it is he who must suffer....
The hurt does not matter from those who love us not. I was willing that
the herd should think of me as it would, as its own little light
permitted, but I had that pride of race which every honest man has, and
I wanted the love of my fighting old grandsire. And he openly despised
my profession, and he secretly despised me. "What's the use of worrying
about making more on an acre of this rich soil?" he would say. "Ain't
The Home Stretch rich enough? And fiddling about saving trees--why damn
it, ain't there too many of them already? Didn't I have all the hard
work of my life clearing some of the land, and my father before me, that
it might make us a living!"
He would never understand me, of course. The discoverer is never
understood, and the forester falls in the same class, more maligned than
any of them. He would never understand that it was not a sentimental
dream to save trees because they are trees, but to grow them and harvest
them in the right way, even as wheat is harvested: that we did not want
to see rich acres, the homes of unborn people, covered only with trees,
when the land was needed for bread, but the unfertile hillside, and the
heads of our water streams. There, we insisted, trees should remain
because that was Nature's own way of protecting the land from droughts
and floods. Nor could I hope to make him understand that rich as the
land was--even as a man of genius--it should have a chance to bring
forth all the fruit that was in it. That our waste was something
appalling, our methods crude, and that our people, with all their
plenty, were only half fed; that while we were rich and The Home Stretch
was a garden, the poor farmers of the hills and less fertile places were
living only half lives, they and their families, because there was no
one to show them something better.
My Aunt I knew was sorry for me; but I could see she hoped and believed
I would yet get over it. And in my own heart I felt that if I had
chosen West Point, perhaps Eloise--
I flushed, ashamed. How prone our little weak Self always is to play
Arnold with our Soul!
I began at once to work. It is what one does with one's own acre, not
what one preaches should be done to the acres of others, that convinces
his neighbors at last, and settles the standard of his life's text among
them.
I started it on a gullied hillside of The Home Stretch. These gullies I
filled. Young trees were easy to transplant from the over-crowded
growth of the woodland. Nature is at last her own greatest doctor. I
gave her the soil she had been begging for, and very quickly she studded
it with little pioneers of the game black locust, to hold back that
which she had, to shadow it with coolness and damp that grass might grow
beneath, and mold form, and the blistered soil have yet another chance,
and that later the trees might rear their great heads high, stealing
from the clouds the moisture for the earth.
My neighbors knew me, had known me from a boy, and it was not difficult
to get them to meet me at the little schoolhouse once a week and hear my
talk. Now talks all depend upon one's honesty and earnestness, not on
one's brightness; in a month they became interested and were one with
me. They had always looked upon a forest as a necessary evil, as a
great wood put there to be cut down, burnt, destroyed, that man might
till the land. Indeed, from their pioneer fathers, whose greatest
burden was clearing the land, there had come down to them the instinct
of forest hatred, just as had come their instinct of Indian hatred, bear
and wolf and panther hatred. But at the same time I knew that they had
in the heart of their pedigrees another and sweeter instinct, and that
it came from their forest-loving Briton and Saxon and even remote Aryan
sires, whose ancestors before them, had long ago gone through the same
fight with the primeval forest, but whose children after them for a
thousand years, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, were forced to
go back to tree-planting, to forest preservation, or die with their
soil. It did not take much to make this forest preserving,
land-preserving, life-preserving instinct outcrop again among their
children here. It was a revelation to them when I explained that the
true forester was he who assisted the farmer and the lumberman in
rearing more trees and better trees where they should be, and destroying
the worthless ones, even all of them if need were, where they should not
be. In their prejudice they thought a forester was a dreamer, an
impractical person, who preached forest preservation from sentiment, and
would let the trees grow where children ought to grow. I won them all
when I explained that a tree, when ripe, should be garnered, just as
corn or wheat, or any other product of the soil. But during the years
while it ripens for the saw, the young things beneath it, which should
take its place, must be protected, and their life preserved in the
harvesting of the ripe trees; or if the land was to be cleared for
tilling, other places on the farm, especially the unproductive hillside,
and the sources of the stream, should be given over to forestry. This
would save the hillsides from washing and depositing their flinty soil
over the rich valleys below, and guarding the water head, preserve the
springs. But when the tree is ripe it should be harvested, unless it
stood in some park or yard or town for a street ornament or shade. If
it were in any of these places it should die in the ripeness of
beautiful old age, a younger one taking its place. It was not long
before I had a class of forestry, and there was much of the German
methods I had learned in every branch of farming which I gave them for
nothing, that helped me greatly. It is what one gives for nothing that
brings in the greatest returns at last.
But my greatest help was in a flood early in May. The headwaters of the
Cumberland lie in the Appalachian range, that great wooded mountain
strip which mothers the headwaters of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the
Cumberland, and so of all the states they water. That long ridge of
wooded slope had been a sponge, the gauge that controlled the flow from
half the tillable Union. On the Tennessee, the forest had been brutally
butchered, and on the Cumberland as badly treated. The flood came.
There was but little to hold, and check it, and we had a deluge such as
was never known before. Even my grandsire, seeing it, admitted what I
said. The seemingly wasted word had fallen as the drift of the elm
tree's shaft had taken root in a corner of the old field.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*THE UNATTAINABLE*
My work took me daily to Tammas's cottage. There was nothing so restful
to me as these two good people, and their sweetness and cheer, and Elsie
held my interest. I had always been fond of her, and now that she had
grown into this rare, delicate flower, so sensitively turned, so
romantically original, I found the greatest pleasure in studying her,
and, in humoring her, as everybody did who came into her sphere. She
commanded obedience as readily as she gave it. Every day was a different
mood, and always a romance with her. One day she had on a large white
apron, and was helping Tammas with the churning.
"I am playing a new game, to-day, Jack," she said, pulling me to a
corner of the dairy where the spring water whirled through the stone
troughs. "You'll laugh when you hear it," she added, her eyes shining
into mine.
"I'll not," I said, "I'll be more apt to play with you. What is the
game to-day?"
She laughed merrily. "Well, to-day I am a duke's daughter, who was
secretly exchanged in her cradle with the dairyman's baby. Now only
three people know it; the dairyman, who is old, and about to die; and
who is so sorry that he ever did it, but he did so want his own daughter
to be a lady in the land; and me, whom he has told at the last minute,
and the bad, bold knight, very dashing, who has bribed the dairyman to
tell him, and who wishes very much to marry me. But I want to marry my
own bonny prince, you see."
"I should think he'd be proud and loyally love his dairymaid bride," I
laughed, pinching her cheek.
"But, Jack, you are so stupid," she said, pouting. "You don't catch on.
I can't play a game by myself. I want you to play the prince."
Tammas stood looking on, his face in its favorite Scotch grin. "Weel,
weel, did ye ever hear the like o' that, an' it's no' leap-year either!"