From the Bottom Up Part 27

Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill, And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head.

And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music--all those that do and know.

For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair."

In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter--a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics.

Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for "Queen and Const.i.tution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race.

I divided humanity into two camps--the goats and the sheep. I had a literal h.e.l.l for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality.

I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circ.u.mstance.

I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of G.o.d and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of Jesus is to find G.o.d in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race.

Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as if G.o.d had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New York]

The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.

"Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked when buying.

"Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure.

One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge standing a hundred feet high. I walked to the edge, pushed the branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword!

On that ledge I have built a platform of white birch and behind the platform a bungalow from the window of which I have a full view of the valley, the Westchester County hills and the river. I have named the ledge "Ascension Point" in memory of the valued friendships formed at the church on Fifth Avenue.

On the edge of the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by elm, maple and walnut trees.

There is nothing to boast of in the arrangement; it was built quickly and not over-well. If the man who planned it had any more taste than a cow he must have expressed it on the building of the barn, not on the house. It had been heated with stoves for years, but I tore away the boards that covered the open fireplaces. I built a cistern on the hill and a cesspool down in the meadow, and between them, in a large room in the house, arranged a bathroom, a big bathroom, big enough to swing a cat around.

I am now knocking a wall down here and there, wiping some outbuildings off the map, and by degrees making it habitable throughout the year.

There is a five-acre orchard on the hill east of the house and through it runs a brook that can be turned to good account.

I had a population of twenty-five during the summer. They were encamped within a few hundred yards of each other in tents, overhauled barns, etc. We were all hand-picked Socialists--dreamers of dreams.

Of course we had to eat and as the raw-food fad did not appeal to us we had to have a fire on which to cook; and as there was an abundance of wood I inst.i.tuted a wood pile!

To any one about to form a cooperative community I can recommend this inst.i.tution as an infinitely better gauge of human character than either the ten commandments or the royal eight-fold pathway! We didn't need much wood and there were plenty of men. We had good tools and--I was going to say, "wood to burn."

"It was jolly good fun, don't you know," to hack up about three sticks; then the woodcutter would have a story to tell or he "had something he had left undone for days." There was an atmosphere around the pile that affected us as the hookworm affects its victims in some Southern communities--we grew listless, dull, flaccid.

The influence was baneful, subtle. None of us ever confessed to being affected. It rather emphasized our idealism.

"In the future," said one comrade as he laid the axe down after his second stick, "wood will be cut by machinery!" We looked interested.

"Yes," he said as he rolled a cigarette, "there will be a machine that will cut a cord a second!"

"Why don't you invent one?" we asked.

"How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke.

"That's true," we said, and piped down.

He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for firewood. He smiled--he was a jolly good-natured chap.

"Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone--a new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the axe and went after the cow.

The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes; then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on his face, "That's a mucker's job!"

"Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly.

"The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said.

Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, pa.s.sed with his ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had made of hickory bark.

"That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a plug of dynamite!"

We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the lane.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Happy Hollow" in the Winter, Looking From the House]

We had one poet in our midst--just one. He had lately completed a poem on the glories of our valley. Two men stooped to pick up the axe.

Gaston and Alphonse like, they stooped together. As they did so the poet came along with a beaming face. "Stop!" he said; "listen, boys, listen."

We all straightened up, and stood at attention. He read:

"Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying waves Of life's antagonisms that delude the world-- Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and caves That mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurled The crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat, To linger in the depth as symbols that all power Is at the will of the Supreme--in this retreat, Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour, And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for which Is given by the thought that all is mine, that none Do rob, that love adds to each stroke its rich And sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won----"

The housekeeper rudely broke the spell!

"You comrades had better eat that poetry for dinner," she said.

We all looked and all understood--all save the poet. He looked aghast, thinking in Yiddish.

"Go on," somebody said, but the poet was a sensitive youth and could sense an atmosphere quicker than most of us.

"Wood," said the housekeeper, pointing at the few sticks lying around the block.

"Ah," exclaimed the poet as he took up the axe, "you shall have it, comrade--have it good and plenty."

He laid the poem in the white birch frame against a stone and proceeded. We moved away, every man to his own place.

In a community where the communers have to chop the fire-wood, canned salmon is a good standby.

That day we had salmon for dinner.

Just as a matter of encouragement I had the artist of the community print a Latin motto in fine Gothic characters: