The Jonathan Papers Part 17

"I was delayed. I dropped one in the ditch. He was only wounded. I couldn't leave him."

"Then you got some?"

"Feel!"

I felt his game pockets. "One, two--oh, three! I didn't hear you shoot except twice. Well"--I was stamping and flinging my arms around myself in the endeavor to thaw out--"I think they're very well off: they're bound for a warm oven."

"Cold? Thunder! I ought to have left you the bottle. Here!"

I took it and gulped, protesting: "Detestable stuff! Wait, I'll take some more."

"This from you! You _must_ be cold! Come on! Run! Look out for the little ditches! Jump where I do."

We started stiffly enough, in the teeth of the big, dark wind, till the motion, and the bottle, began to take effect. A haymow loomed. We flung ourselves, panting, against it, and, sinking back into its yielding bulk, drew long breaths.

"Did we think it was cold?" I murmured; "or windy?"

We were on the leeward side of it, and it gave generous shelter. The wind sighed gently over the top of the mow, breathed past its sides, never touching us, and we gazed up at the stars.

"The sky is fairly gray with them," I said.

"Perhaps," said Jonathan lazily, "it's that bottle, making you see ten stars grow where one grew before."

"Perhaps," I suggested, choosing to ignore this speech, "it's the wind, blowing the stars around and raising star-dust."

We lay in our protecting mow, and the warmth of our bodies drew out of it faint odors of salt hay. We did not talk. There are times when one seems to exist in poise, with eternity on all sides. One's thoughts do not move, they float.

"Well?" said Jonathan at last.

I could hear the hay rustle as he straightened up.

"Don't interrupt," I answered.

But my spirit had come down to earth, and after the first jolt I realized that, as usual, Jonathan was right.

We plunged out again into the buffeting wind and the starlit darkness, and I followed blindly as Jonathan led across the marshes, around pools, over ditches, until we began to see the friendly twinkle of house lights on the edge of the village. On through the lanes to the highroad, stumbling now and then on its stiffened ruts and ridges. As houses thickened the gale grew noisy, singing in telephone wires, whistling around barn corners, slamming blinds and doors, and rushing in the tree-tops.

"O for that haymow!" I gasped.

"The open fire will be better." Jonathan flung back comfort across the wind.

Ten minutes later we had made harbor in the little house by the sh.o.r.e.

The candles were lighted, the fire set ablaze, and as we sat before it cooking chops and toast I said, "No, Jonathan, the open fire isn't any better than the haymow."

"But different?" he suggested.

"Yes, quite different."

"And good in its own poor way."

He turned his chop. Chops and toast and a blazing fire give forth odors of distracting pleasantness under such circ.u.mstances.

"I think," I said, "that each gives point to the other."

"Aren't you glad I took you for ducks?" he asked.

I mused, watching my toast. "I suppose," I said, "no one in his senses would leave a comfortable city house to go and lie out in a marsh at night, in a forty-mile gale, with the mercury at ten, unless he had some other motive than the thing itself--ducks, or conspiracy, or something.

And yet it is the thing itself that is the real reward."

"Isn't that true of almost everything?" said Jonathan.

XVI

Comfortable Books

Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark into "The Virginians," and, closing the fat green volume, began to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the bricked sides of the fireplace.

"'The Virginians' is a very comfortable sort of book," he remarked.

"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why."

He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, because it's so good and long.

You get to know all the people, you get used to their ways, and when they turn up again, after a lot of chapters, you don't have to find out who they are--you just feel comfortably acquainted."

I sighed. I had just finished a magazine story--condensed, vivid, crushing a whole life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In that s.p.a.ce I had been made acquainted with sixteen different characters, seven princ.i.p.al ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly drawn. I had found it interesting, stimulating; as a _tour de force_ it was noteworthy even among the crowd of short-stories--all condensed, all vivid, all interesting--that had appeared that month. But--comfortable?

No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had been reading "The Virginians"

all winter. His bookmark was at page 597, and there were 803 pages in all, so he had a great deal of comfort left.

Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one should expect from one's reading. Certainly it is the last thing one gets from the perusal of our current literature, and any one who reads nothing else is missing something which, whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his soul's sake to have--something which Jonathan roughly indicated when he called it "comfort." The ordinary reader devours short-stories by the dozen, by the score--short short-stories, long short-stories, even short-stories laboriously expanded to a volume, but still short-stories. He glances, less frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at columns of jokes, at popularized bits of history and science, at bits of anecdotal biography, and nowhere in all this medley does he come in contact with what is large and leisurely. Current literature is like a garden I once saw. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity, I invited my soul.

It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five days,"--nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my friends,--my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.

Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand to be had for the seeking.

Jonathan finds refuge from business and the newspapers in his pipe and "The Virginians." I have no pipe, but I sit under the curling rings of Jonathan's, and I, too, have my comfortable books, my literary rye-fields. Last summer it was Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," whose book I found indeed a comfortable one--most comfortable. I read much besides, many short stories of surpa.s.sing cleverness and some of real excellence, but as I look back upon my summer's literary experience, all else gives place to the long pageant of Malory's story, gorgeous or tender or gay, seen like a fair vision against the dim background of an old New England apple orchard. Surely, though the literature of our library tables may sometimes weary me, it shall never enslave me.

But they must be read, these "comfortable" books, in the proper fashion, not hastily, nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get on" in them.

They must lie at our hand to be taken up in moments of leisure, the slowly shifting bookmark--there should always be a bookmark--recording our half-reluctant progress. (I remember with what dismay I found myself arrived at the fourth and last volume of Malory,) Thus read, thus slowly woven among the intricacies and distractions of our life, these precious books will link its quiet moments together and lend to it a certain quality of largeness, of deliberation, of continuity.

For it is surely a mistake to a.s.sume, as people so often do, that in a life full of distractions one should read only such things as can be finished at a single sitting and that a short one. It is a great misfortune to read only books that "must be returned within five days."

For my part, I should like to see in our public libraries, to offset the shelves of such books, other shelves, labeled "Books that may and should be kept out six months." I would have there Thackeray and George Eliot and Wordsworth and Spenser, Malory and Homer and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Montaigne--oh, they should be shelves to rejoice the soul of the hara.s.sed reader!

No, if one can read but little, let him by all means read something big.

I know a woman occupied with the demands of a peculiarly exigent social position. Finding her one day reading "The Tempest," I remarked on her enterprise. "Not a bit!" she protested, "I am not reading it to be enterprising, I am reading it to get rested. I find Shakespeare so peaceful, compared with the magazines." I have another friend who is taking entire charge of her children, besides doing a good deal of her own housework and gardening. I discovered her one day sitting under a tree, reading Matthew Arnold's poems, while the children played near by, I ventured to comment on what seemed to me the incongruity of her choice of a book. "But don't you see," she replied, quickly. "That is just why!

I am so busy from minute to minute doing lots of little practical, temporary things, that I simply have to keep in touch with something different--something large and quiet. If I didn't, I should die!"