The Hills of Hingham Part 1

The Hills of Hingham.

by Dallas Lore Sharp.

PREFACE

The is not exactly the book I thought it was going to be--though I can say the same of its author for that matter. I had intended this book to set forth some features of the Earth that make it to be preferred to Heaven as a place of present abode, and to note in detail the peculiar attractions of Hingham over Boston, say,--Boston being quite the best city on the Earth to live in. I had the book started under the t.i.tle "And this Our Life"

. . . exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees,"

--when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of h.e.l.l swung wide open into Belgium, and Heaven began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, a series of lesser local troubles had been brewing--drouth, caterpillars, rheumatism, increased commutation rates, more college themes,--more than I could carry back and forth to Hingham,--so that as the writing went on Boston began to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but a nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly sprayed.

And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing was growing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book--a defense of Life--my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the garden and woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home and books to read, yes, and books to write--all of which I had taken for granted at twenty, and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty, when I moved out here into what was then an uninfected forest.

That was the time to have written the book that I had intended this one to be--while the adventure in contentment was still an adventure, while the lure of the land was of fourteen acres yet unexplored, while back to the soil meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture it, and my summer in a garden had not yet pa.s.sed into its frosty fall. Instead, I have done what no writer ought to do, what none ever did before, unless Jacob wrote,--taken a fourteen-year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to find the enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown by the time Jacob got her, into a philosophy, and like all philosophies, in need of defense.

What men live by is an interesting speculative question, but what men live on, and where they can live,--with children to bring up, and their own souls to save,--is an intensely practical question which I have been working at these fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham.

I

THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

"As Surrey hills to mountains grew In White of Selborne's loving view"

Really there are no hills in Hingham, to speak of, except Bradley Hill and Peartree Hill and Turkey Hill, and Otis and Planter's and Prospect Hills, Hingham being more noted for its harbor and plains. Everybody has heard of Hingham smelts. Mullein Hill is in Hingham, too, but Mullein Hill is only a wrinkle on the face of Liberty Plain, which accounts partly for our having it. Almost anybody can have a hill in Hingham who is content without elevation, a surveyor's term as applied to hills, and a purely accidental property which is not at all essential to real hillness, or the sense of height. We have a stump on Mullein Hill for height. A hill in Hingham is not only possible, but even practical as compared with a Forest in Arden, Arden being altogether too far from town; besides

". . . there's no clock in the forest"

and we have the 8.35 train to catch of a winter morning!

"A sheep-cote fenced about with olive trees"

sounds more pastoral than apple trees around a house on a hill in Hingham, and it would be more ideal, too, if New England weather were not so much better adapted to apples, and if one did not prefer apples, and if one could raise a family in a sheep-cote.

We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder when all the world was twenty or thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree. But one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold of cherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a time in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, then we got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying our olives, but not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk melons, nor our wood for the open fire. We buy commutation tickets, and pay dearly for the trips back and forth. But we could n't make a living in Arden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise.

Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live in Arden. We are forty now and no longer poets. When we are really old and our gra.s.shoppers become a burden, we may go back to town where the insects are an entirely different species; but for this exceedingly busy present, between our fading dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, a hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an almost strategic position, Hingham being more or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill, though not in the Forest of Arden, something of an escape from Hingham, a quaint old village of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors. Not that we hate Boston, nor that we pa.s.s by on the other side in Hingham.

We gladly pick our neighbors up and set them in our motor car and bring them to the foot of the hill. We people of the hills do not hate either crowds or neighbors. We are neighbors ourselves and parts of the city crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and bring folk to their inns. But we cannot take them farther, for there are no inns out here. We leave them in Hingham and journey on alone into a region where neither thief nor anyone infests the roadsides; where there are no roads in fact, but only driftways and footpaths through the spa.r.s.ely settled hills.

We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave the kind neighbor at his front gate, and travel on, not very far, but on alone into a wide quiet country where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of meeting with ourselves--the day's great adventure, and far to find; yet this is what we have come out to the hills for.

Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hens and a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; not for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it. Stay in town for that. There "you can even walk alone without being bored. No long, uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, where nothing moves, not even the train of thought. No benumbed and self-centered trees holding out pathetic frozen branches for sympathy. Impossible to be introspective here. Fall into a brown or blue study and you are likely to be run over. Thought is brought to the surface by mental ma.s.sage.

No time to dwell upon your beloved self. So many more interesting things to think about. And the changing scenes unfold more rapidly than a moving-picture reel."

This sounds much more interesting than the country. And it is more interesting, Broadway asking nothing of a country lane for excitement.

And back they go who live on excitement; while some of us take this same excitement as the best of reasons for double windows and storm doors and country life the year through.

You can think in the city, but it is in spite of the city.

Gregariousness and individuality do not abide together; nor is external excitement the cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this "mental ma.s.sage" of the city is to real thinking about what a mustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant. The thinker is one who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then finds himself _interesting_--more interesting than Broadway--another impossibility within the city limits. Only in the country can he do that, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, and isolation--necessary conditions for the enjoyment of one's own mind.

Thought is a country product and comes in to the city for distribution, as books are gathered and distributed by libraries, but not written in libraries. It is against the wide, drab background of the country that thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of a man discovering himself, as he is compelled to do, where bending horizon and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's constant endeavor to swing around and center on him. Nothing centers on him in the city, where he thinks by "mental ma.s.sage"--through the scalp with laying on of hands, as by benediction or shampoo.

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the hills of Hingham with their adventure possible? Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty except that he now is neither young nor old, nor rich, the chances are; nor a dead failure either, but just an average man; yet he is one of G.o.d's people, if the Philistines were (He brought them from Caphtor) and the Syrians (those He brought from Kir). The man of forty has a right to so much of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. But he is afraid to possess it because it is so far from work and friends and lighted streets. He is afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down upon a stump for converse with himself. He is afraid he won't get his work done. If his work were planting beans, he would get none planted surely while on the stump; but so he might be saved the ungracious task of giving away his surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the summer.

A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. He might not finish the freshman themes either. But when was the last freshman theme ever done? Finish them if he can, he has only baked the freshmen into soph.o.m.ores, and so emptied the ovens for another batch of dough. He shall never put a crust on the last freshman, and not much of a crust on the last soph.o.m.ore either, the Almighty refusing to cooperate with him in the baking. Let him do the best he can, not the most he can, and quit for Hingham and the hills where he can go out to a stump and sit down.

College students also are a part of that world which can be too much with us, cabbages, too, if we are growing cabbages. We don't do over-much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. Buy a little hill in Hingham, and even out here, unless you pray and go apart often to your stump, your desire will be toward every hill in sight and the valleys between.

According to the deed my hill comprises "fourteen acres more or less"

of an ancient glacier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel, which now these almost fourteen years I have been trying to clear of stones, picking, picking for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is gravelier than mine. By actual count we dumped five hundred cartloads of stones into the foundation of a porch when making over the house recently--and still I am out in the garden picking, picking, living in the Stone Age still, and planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more that are worse than these I now have, nine times worse for stones!

I shall never cease picking stones, I presume, but perhaps I can get out a permanent injunction against myself, to prevent my buying that neighboring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my own and sit down among the beautiful moth-infested oak trees.

I do sit down, and I thrust my idle hands hard into my pockets to keep them from the Devil who would have them out at the moths instantly--an evil job, killing moths, worse than picking stones!

Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere than time to sit down with yourself, except the ability to enjoy the time after finding it,--even here on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods. There are foes to face in the city and floods to stem out here, but let no one try to fight several acres of caterpillars. When you see them coming, climb your stump and wait on the Lord. He is slow; and the caterpillars are horribly fast. True. Yet I say. To your stump and wait--and learn how restful a thing it is to sit down by faith. For the town sprayer is a vain thing. The roof of green is riddled. The rafters overhead reach out as naked as in December. Ruin looks through. On sweep the devouring hosts in spite of a.r.s.enate of lead and "wilt" disease and Calasoma beetles. Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlot planted with saplings that the caterpillars do not eat. Sit still my soul, and know that when these oak trees fall there will come up the fir tree and the pine tree and the s.h.a.gbark, distasteful to the worms; and they shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

This is good forestry, and good philosophy--a sure handling of both worms and soul.

But how hard to follow! I would so like to help the Lord. Not to do my own share only; but to shoulder the Almighty's too, saying--

"If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well It were done quickly";

and I up and do it. But it does not stay done. I had sprayed, creosoted, cut, trimmed, cemented, only to see the trees die, until I was forced to rest upon the stump, when I saw what I had been blind to before: that the pine trees were tipped with cones, and that there in the tops were the red squirrels shucking and giving the winged seeds to the winds to sow; and that even now up the wooded slope below me, where the first of the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future grove of seedling pines.

The forests of Arden are not infested with gypsy moths, nor the woods of Heaven either, I suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham are.

And yet they are the trees of the Lord; the moths are his also, and the caring for them. I am caring for a few college freshmen and my soul.

I shall go forth to my work until the evening. The Lord can take the night-shift; for it was He who inst.i.tuted the twilight, and it is He who must needs be responsible till the morning.

So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered woodlot I sit with idle hands, and no stars falling, and the universe turning all alone!

To wake up at forty a factory hand! a floor-walker! a banker! a college professor! a man about town or any other respectably successful, humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a square tight hole! There is an evil, says the Preacher, which I have seen under the sun--the man of about forty who has become moderately successful and automatic, but who has not, and now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This is a vanity and it is an evil disease.

From running the universe at thirty the man of forty finds himself running with it, paced before, behind, and beside, by other runners and by the very stars in their courses. He has struck the universal gait, a strong steady stride that will carry him to the finish, but not among the medals. This is an evil thing. Forty is a dangerous age. The wild race of twenty, the staggering step of eighty, are full of peril, but not so deadly as the even, mechanical going of forty; for youth has the dash in hand; old age has ceased to worry and is walking in; while the man of forty is right in the middle of the run, grinding along on his second wind with the cheering all ahead of him.

In fact, the man of forty finds himself half-way across the street with the baby carriage in his hands, and touring cars in front of him, and limousines behind him, and the hand-of-the-law staying and steadying him on his perilous course.

Life may be no busier at forty than at thirty, but it is certainly more expensive. Work may not be so hard, but the facts of life are a great deal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the here-and-now of all things, the dead levelness of forty--an irrigated plain that has no hill of vision, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill in Hingham with a bit of meadow down below.

Mullein Hill is the least of all hills, even with the added stump; but looking down through the trees I can see the gray road, and an occasional touring car, like a dream, go by; and off on the Blue Hills of Milton--higher hills than ours in Hingham--hangs a purple mist that from our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision.

The realities are near enough to me here crawling everywhere, indeed; but close as I am to the flat earth I can yet look down at things--at the road and the pa.s.sing cars; and off at things--the hills and the distant horizon; and so I can escape for a time that level stare into the face of things which sees them as _things_ close and real, but seldom as _life_, far off and whole.

Perhaps I have never seen life whole; I may need a throne and not a hill and a stump for that; but here in the wideness of the open skies, in the sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these deep woods, I sometimes see life free, not free from men and things, but unenc.u.mbered, coming to meet me out of the morning and pa.s.sing on with me toward the sunset until, at times, the stepping westward, the uneventful onwardness of life has

". . . seemed to be A kind of heavenly destiny"