Child and Country Part 1

Child and Country.

by Will Levington Comfort.

FOREWORD

... To-day the first glimpse of this ma.n.u.script as a whole. It was all detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time....

The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture, and sh.o.r.e-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a sh.o.r.e-acre or two.

Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country people and the meshes of possession.

In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children in school--the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and physical--the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.

We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens and woods and sh.o.r.e rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of their struggle.

It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could possibly give them. They have monopolised the ma.n.u.script. Chapter after chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the t.i.tle.

Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our children and to every conception of home--not the war itself, but the forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are to follow the wreckers of war.

Making a place to live on the lake sh.o.r.e, the development of bluff and land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol of the intenser activity of the natures within.

Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the cas.e.m.e.nts--these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised receptivity--a conception of its utilities that has come from long need.

A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in mating with a woman or fathering a child.

There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.

The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning--a work so joyous and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep breathing of each mind--a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them.

Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of to-morrow.

It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense.

Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of life--artists, if possible, but in any case, men.

... To-day the glimpse of it all--that this is to be a book of the younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy than to raise roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial in his soul. Then the truth appeared--greater things that were going on here--the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid, eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day (an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.

STONESTUDY, March, 1916.

CHILD AND COUNTRY

1

BEES AND BLOOMS

In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good district, but there was no peace there. I felt _forgotten_. I had not the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little plot. There was no inner order in my heart--on the contrary, chaos in and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the healing of Nature.

So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.

I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would sink into a bovine rumination.

Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the roads of the many--the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the devil is the voice of the crowd.

Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of the larger issues:

"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more essential become s.p.a.ce, leisure and soul-expression for bringing children into the world. When evolving persons have reached individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them, they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. The race that produced Emerson and Th.o.r.eau and Whitman, that founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red Indian _westward_ off the face of the earth.

"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision which was their birthright."

It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American ent.i.ty has already remained too long in the ruck of life.

There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it, and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to me, and all that the elm-tree meant--hill-cabins and country dusks, bees and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for all that the elm-tree knew--as if I were exiled from the very flesh that could bring the good low earth to my senses again.

Could it be that something was changed within--that we were ready at last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars--one that would take us to the Lake St. Claire sh.o.r.e, and another that crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern indentations for nearly ten miles.

"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.

It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by one mind regarding the locality we were pa.s.sing through. He suggested that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy--the tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:

"He can tell you more than I can."

I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth edited. He called men by 'phone--names strange to me then that have become household names since--while we sat by smiling and silent in his little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank, when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.

Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of the car had been rigid among beer-cases.

We were given the values and disadvantages of the East sh.o.r.e and also of the West sh.o.r.e, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages.

That boy you shall be glad to know.

We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now from where I sit--to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to the very edge of a willowed bluff--to the end of the land. Erie brimmed before us. It led to a new life, too.

I had always disliked Erie--as one who lived in the Lake Country and chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie heretofore had meant only something to be crossed--something shallow and petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain where he lived by the nearest map in a j.a.panese house, or in a Russian peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the Inland Sea is to us. I had heard j.a.panese children repeat the names of the Great Lakes. When you come to a sh.o.r.e like this you are at the end of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think--we are pausing still.

One must pause to project a dream.

... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cl.u.s.ter were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year.

Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had given. There were days in which we were so happy--that another summer of such life would have seemed too much to ask.

I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully every night across the Lake--a h.e.l.l of trials and jealousy and suicide, obscenity and pa.s.sion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like the smell of blood.

... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country; literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants--turning back with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded s.p.a.ce, and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be free.

The City, intolerable as it is in itself--in its very nature against the growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time--is nevertheless the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.

Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of s.p.a.ces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet and pa.s.s through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a pa.s.sage through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole is an ascent.