Child and Country Part 9

"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 sh.o.r.e. 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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, cas.e.m.e.nt-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"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 sh.o.r.e 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 Sh.o.r.e.

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 sh.o.r.e of a pine-shadowed river. I watched their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted upon the hard, gamey ba.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.es.

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 p.r.o.ne 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 a.s.sociate 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 a.s.sociated with darkness, and the place of this a.s.sociation in our minds is of corresponding darkness.