Chapter VI: Part 6

The trouble is that we can use the Scriptures only as far as they will go, and those we have do not seem to be complete. I have a vague hungry feeling that we have not discovered all of them. There must be a few tablets still buried somewhere thousands of years deep in brighter dust which record a little happiness, something to ease the strain of so many sacrifices and holy joys. I have had such joys. It is like coming up through great tribulations and sitting for a moment beneath your halo with tears on your cheeks. I am not complaining, you understand; it is a grand feeling, but too poignant to be really restful, as if you had been exalted by a deed or a sacrifice and must choose just holiness when you are still in the flesh and feel the mortal need of relaxing some.

I know by the witness of my own spirit that we have missed a Gospel or two which contained the strictly human touch in words. Paul comes somewhere near it in his tender letters to Timothy, but all these apostles were made too grave by their suffering to catch the light of that message we should have. The place where it really belongs is in those passages quoted from Jesus. I am certain they failed to record all he said, or that it has been lost, or that it is still hidden away in the archives of time. He was fearless, merciful, so good at remembering that we are dust, he would have made a little allowance for that kind of happiness humans need; not an indulgence in sin, but an indulgence in life.

I do hope it is not blasphemous to say that I can almost see Jesus in such a mood; His people at ease about Him. It would be a quiet, bright morning before the multitudes began to gather. And He will have looked at these chosen to keep and defend the Word with that blessing look even we can bestow upon children whom we love. And He will have said, ‘Little children, be happy!’ Something like that He must have said, knowing what travails they were to pass through and how greatly they would need the respite of light-heartedness. But nothing of the kind is recorded anywhere in the Bible.

The word ‘happy’ does occur at rare intervals, but it is too fearfully qualified. ‘Happy is the man that feareth alway,’ says Solomon. And Job in great pain catches his breath with this: ‘Happy is the man whom God correcteth.’ And James says, ‘We count them happy which endure.’ All of which means, fortunate are they who are prepared for the worst, take their punishments with meekness, and endure with courage. These are the evidences of a good character and a noble mind, but not my idea of real happiness. One wearies of worrying all the time with his best attributes, especially in plain sight of the wicked, who do seem to flourish without any such attributes. I have never taken this as hard as Jeremiah did; still, I have had my feelings.

One day Jeremiah’s virtues irked him. He was too aloof and lonesome. And he had what you may call an altercation with the Lord:

‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins.’

He goes on reminding the Lord of his own obedience and how he has borne his trials until his sense of outraged justice gets the better of him, and he exclaims, ‘Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter.’

I do not suppose the very treacherous are happy and I have never wanted the wicked pulled out like sheep for the slaughter, but I have always wanted to ask a truly bad man who seemed to be having a good time if he really was enjoying himself.

I have always had a hankering after some cheerful salvation, suitable and sanctifying to me as a human being in this present world, where I know what I am doing and what I want. I feel that I have a buried talent for just happiness, a sort of incandescence of my own nature which longs to shine. It seems to me that I have never made my happy sounds in living. I have missed that laughter which is the speech of a merry heart. But I have heard it many a time in a crowd and always flirted my head around to see who made it. Usually a young person whose burdens are still being borne by others.

But once, I remember, it was an old woman standing in her own dooryard watching two children, serious and absorbed in their play. Such a figure! Tall and gaunt, so straight and finely posed, her homely dress might have been a rag flung over an imperishable ideal. Such a face! Wrinkled, brown, rough, like a crude verse written by somebody like Ossian; the wind and the weather of life had passed over it, but now the sun in her eyes, the simplicity of the deepest wisdom made humorous upon her smiling lips. No comeliness anywhere, but that beauty of honest happiness in every line. I think of her as a song I saw once in the flesh set to a good stout tune of laughter.

I have a distinct recollection of such people through the whole of my life. They do exist--women who have survived all their fears and learned their burdens by heart and stand canonized by that undefeated look of happiness. I have seen someone go by who looked like a joyful traveler on his way to some happiness he had earned, carrying himself, you may say, with the long light stride of a good conscience. At such times I have felt the light of my wings as if I had seen the witness of my own hopes go by.

These are the only people I have ever envied. They have an expression of animation not intellectual, but vital, so different from that conquered look of peace which I am always fearing will settle upon my face before I know what they have learned, not by thinking, but by some happier use they have made of living.

I cannot now recall when this idea first took possession of me, but it was far back in the years--that the life I was living was not mine, but a sentence imposed upon me by fate, to be served faithfully. And then as a reward further on I should have my very own life, which would be different. I was not so concerned as my husband to win heaven. I had an impression then which has persisted with me to this day, that for all we know this life may be a rest the Lord gives us between long spells of eternity. I anticipated some place in my years where happiness would begin, as tired people look forward to a vacation.

Shortly after ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was published, it seemed to me I saw it, as you look a long way down the road and see a wider brighter place where you turn in through a gate and enter your own house. I remember saying something to Lundy about this. We would get away presently from all the cares we had ever had, take a little house in the country and begin to live happy ever after. I remember his silence, the look he gave me. If in the last day when we are called there is one who hears, but cannot rise from his dust, he will have just that look of terrible comprehension.

It comforts me now to remember that not even in this dark time when the shades were deepening about him did I ever raise my hands to heaven and cry, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ I think well of myself that my one concern was to keep him and comfort him as long as I could reach him. Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one thing I have had--the terrible wisdom of love. I cannot doubt that I have received the best of my life and nearly every gift that prospered in me from my association with Lundy. What really troubles me sometimes is whether or not he might have fared better in the spirit if he had been free as a monk to seek his sacrifices and renunciations.

I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it. And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one great anxiety--and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about it by having missed it.

I came nearer to what happiness must be, a sort of deliverance from the things that are, after I began to do creative work. Once I had a pen in my hand and the use of my faculties, the casements of all my darkness were flung wide and I escaped into a very bright, quiet, good world of thoughts. Every memory from my earliest childhood came back to me, luminous substances to be worked into words. It was like weaving love and deeds and the beautiful colors of every sensation upon the loom of my mind. What I accomplished was as nothing to the visions I had. If, as Matthew Arnold claimed, genius consists in the power to recall, I may lay some claim to having genius. In one small room all my lights and darkness came; people that I had seen, but never knew, were suddenly revealed to me, so that I could write down the very secrets of their hearts. Men and women, long since dead, lived again and waited there close as life to be used in case I needed them for a paragraph or two. Things that Lundy had said, poetry and philosophy that he had read to me, piled up like notes on my desk, changed, you understand, by the alchemy of my own mind, but still the parents of my thoughts. When I think of the vast stores of material I have had, the wonder and grief to me is that I have made such a dim and poor use of them.

Once you get away from the Word, any discussion of religion is unprofitable and apt to become acrimonious. For this last page or two I have felt my own spiritual gorge rising, a mean and distasteful sensation which has no place in this record. It is better to go back to my original speculations on happiness.

This is not a thing to tell, for it concerns the more intimate annals of my mind and is set down here with the same apology one should make for shouting in public when in an exalted spiritual mood. But here it is. Many a time when I have filched a grand thought or some finer truth out of life to write down, I am too moved to do it. I get up and pace the floor. I cast a thankful look through the ceiling at my heavenly Father, or I rush bareheaded out of doors in the bleakest weather to cool off this happiness, so that presently I may return and copy it into words.

If this is happiness, I have had it; but my suspicion is that I may have experienced then only the pangs of a great joy. It is not a thing achieved by inspiration, even if you write an epic or paint a noble picture. You have produced something. My idea of happiness is something you get. It is intaking, not creative. You cannot think it. It comes to you in the reality of personal experience, selfish and satisfying. What I want to know is how I have missed it. Is it by some infernally digestive attitude of my mind toward common human experience which consumes my illusions, or is it on account of circumstances over which I have no control, or have I just led myself like a wanderer walking in a blind circle between two worlds?

XXXV

THE LATTER DAYS

I have often wondered what becomes of us here in this life. For what we were in the beginning does pass away, and we become the millstone around our own neck. No matter how good we try to be or how bad we actually are, we barely keep up appearances. It is not time that changes us, but our own desires, ambitions and the fierce struggle we make to get what we want. The body breaks under the strain, our faculties begin to wabble like shooting stars, even if they leave a trail of light behind them. We lose our grip, let go and stand aside, but not satisfied. No matter how wise we have been, we grow simple. No matter how rich, we become mendicants searching the faces of youth for a little praise or recognition, ready to accept any flattery, however obvious, disposed to keep our noses and let out that long plaint of weariness and disillusionment peculiar to our condition.

Many years ago there was a distinguished Methodist preacher in Tennessee. He rose so high in the ranks of his brethren that we called him a divine, and he had some kind of double-D title conferred upon him. He was a good man and did valiant service for his Lord and for the Church. At last his strength began to fail. Some power of the Presence went out of him as it always does when the magnetism of personality dies down in a preacher. His sermons lengthened intolerably, which is the final symptom a minister in our Church shows before the bishop and presiding elders superannuate him. No congregation wants the Word drooled to it even by a saint. So this old man was retired on his niggardly little pension and went to live with his married daughter.

One day I met him on the street, pushing a baby carriage with his youngest grandchild in it. He wore his pastoral clothes, stiff collar, and white bow tie. His linen was as white as the apron of a neat nursemaid. But what a look in his eye, an expression of tears! Isaiah demoted! Nothing humanly unkind had happened to him. His daughter had probably taken this method of airing the baby and getting her father to take exercise at the same time. But when you have preached salvation with power from the pulpit for fifty years, it is worse than a fall from grace to be reduced to pushing a baby carriage.

I halted to wish him good-morning and to admire the baby. He did not care much for this morning, and let the baby go for a moment; he wished to say something to me.

‘If you knew what old age really is, you would pray for death while you are young!’ he quavered.

I tried to comfort him, but he was too terribly wise to be comforted.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am not supposed to be of sound mind. So they give me little tasks like this to keep me occupied,’ regarding the infant ruefully.

‘When you have been ordained and preached the gospel for many years, and moved men by the spirit, it’s a terrible experience to be set aside as of no further consequence. I may act a little queer; you do when misfortune and defeat overtake you in your old age. But if I behaved as senselessly as a lot of young men do, I’d be hailed before a lunacy commission!’

And this was twenty years ago, when nobody thought of summoning an alienist to determine the mental responsibility of a youth who had run amuck and committed a crime.

As I grow older and feel the changes that wisdom and experience make in me, and learn to sit down more to husband my failing strength and to keep silent longer when younger people are exploiting the foolishness of their wits, I often think of that old man toddling feebly behind the baby carriage, shorn of all his earthly glories save the insignia of his long pastoral coat tails, despised because his mind had passed the spring and summer seasons of animal wit and aggressiveness, but pathetically wise.

I am determined to avoid his fate by taking thought now while my will is strong, and I have fairly good business sense, and still reign supreme in my own estimation to be spoofed or cajoled by the flattery of being merely humored. I am already old enough to fix a measuring eye upon any younger person who undertakes to pacify me with the mere assurance that such-and-such a thing is all right; nothing is going to break; everything is greased and the clutch is working properly. I have known myself to get out of the car and find something wrong and ready to break, and much of it not greased, and the clutch needing to be relined.

This sort of enterprise does not enhance your reputation for sweetness and light among young people, but we must simply keep up our courage and stand the gaff. If you are a woman, and have passed the age of control by your merely feminine charms, the only thing left is to exercise sufficient authority to put the fear of God in these youngsters and sit tight. My grandfather was not so far wrong when he was dying and ordered us who were about to supersede him in living out of the room! That was the last act of authority performed by a gallant gentleman who showed a proper contempt for sniveling youth.

I do not know how it happens, but as we grow older our friends and relatives become miraculously younger. We seem to survive too many of those companions with whom we started in life and passed our achieving years. As our infirmities increase, they wax stronger, and we become no more than a memory sitting in the chimney corner. However generous and considerate they are of your feeling and comfort, you have lost your standing among them. The consequences are inevitable. You cannot hold your hand with them. With the best intentions, they are ready to take up your burdens and manage your affairs, which is really a tender way of taking your life away from you and leaving you in your old age without the means of supporting your own vanities and self-respect.

Never again can you show how much better judgment you have than they have in matters of management and economy! You may be permitted to hold your dear old yellow deeds, though frequently in a weary moment you also surrender them; but they have come into real possession of your property and they are inclined to use it recklessly, according to this speeding, spending new world they are making for themselves, while you become the helpless pensioner upon your own hard-earned bounties.

Nothing like that shall happen to me. I have observed young people very carefully. They are really the pensioners upon our wisdom and reared upon our earnings. If every man and woman past sixty should suddenly die, there would be one grand wake of a funeral, then this world would rock upon its foundations and go to pieces. I give youth thirty days to destroy the whole thing. What I mean is that we are very important the older we grow, and for conscience’ sake should endeavor to live as long as possible in full possession of our powers and affairs.

I have sometimes considered passing my last days writing a book of gospels for the aged, designed to stimulate their courage and sense of self-importance. I have observed that we begin to lose them when we lose the purely physical attributes of strength and animation. This is that period when the mind clears and can be used most effectively according wisdom and experience, instead of those emotions which inevitably affect our actions and judgments during our younger years.

The time comes when these friends and these relatives who have grown up long after we grew up will gather around you out of respect, affection, and politeness; but you are a short circuit. There will be such a divergence in your point of view from their points of view that no common ground of conversation or comradeship remains. They will be sitting up with you off and on in this manner as if you were the dear dead body of an ancestor, although you may be getting your breath as usual and looking straight through those innocent young things, too polite to read aloud what you see going on inside of them.

The thing to do then is not to retire to your own room like a sundown old cat, or like a pathetically forgiving old woman, but to exile them. Send them back to sink or swim in the world they have made for themselves, and keep yours. Live and die under your own roof, even if you do it alone. I have a suspicion that it is a lonely passage, even if everybody is present.

I willed the world to these young powers and princes ten years ago when I came to this valley. They can have it. I am willing any time to spare them a few words of advice about how to conduct it, and I like to step around in it once in so often to see how things are going. But I reserve this small one, laid off like a garden between these hills and fitted to me as a fine old tune is fitted to the simple words of a good old hymn.

Once you begin to fumble according to your own light with a denominational idea of God or to mix politics with your religion, your light goes out and you find yourself being tried for heresy or in some brotherhood which denies the divinity of Jesus, whereas if you had your own right mind toward the Lord you would know that any brotherhood which denies Jesus is apt to be a vindictive corporation organized against all men who do not belong to that union. We are not brothers except according to the way and the life of the great Galilean. I myself cannot pretend to be more than the disgusted stepbrother of all modernists in the Church and of red radicals in general.

But after all we spend most of our centuries maneuvering in the right direction. It is only now and then that a demoniacal cat-fit starts somewhere, as in Russia at the present time. The hysteria spreads as demoniacal dancing did in the middle centuries, but it dies down. The whole thing comes from some monstrous mob ignorance of the spirit. The individual Russian still believes in his God, but the evil forces of stronger minds are exploiting him.

The thing that grieves is the casualties among the innocent along the way.

Here is a poor old bishop who has written a book in which he denies a personal deity and doubts there ever existed such a historical character as Jesus Christ. On the cover of his book is the emblem of Soviet Russia, the hammer and the sickle. Beneath that is the red star, emblem of the workers’ party in America, and the first sentence of the book is a quotation from Karl Marx, ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ I am touched by that old man’s predicament as I am sometimes at the sight of an old Confederate soldier who had a brave record, but who has lost his wits and goes about decorated with cheap pewter and brass medals; only this poor soul has got them published on the cover of his book instead of being pinned upon his breast.

I have noticed a certain thing especially about brilliant men. They retain the use of their faculties long after they lose their judgment. If one of them remains in business too long after the prime of life, he is apt to slip up and make an investment which costs him the whole of a hard-earned fortune. If he is a thinker and an authority upon some obtuse subject, he is apt to lose his grip, take a header and show up among the spiritists, as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, who appears to have retained his thinking powers long after he lost the sense to use them.

It would not surprise me if H. G. Wells turned out to be a religious fanatic in his last days. These people suffer some kind of reverse in mind. They go off on tangents. So this innocent old bishop with the ascetic countenance and a noble Christian life behind him lost the rudder of his faculties, and is now being exploited by those arch madmen, the communists. He has apparently reached the mimetic stage of senility, got his metaphors mixed, and is trying to impersonate both the grand old bishop and the grand old communist so magnificently interpreted in the first chapters of ‘Les Miserables.’

Old men are sometimes subject to great vanities of the soul without any wisdom. How else does one of them get the idea of calling himself the Episcopus Bolsheviscum et Infidelium? Instead of being tried for heresy, he should be rescued, put away in a quiet, comfortable place and allowed to fan himself out according to his illusions. He is obviously a good old man who has been tricked and flattered by designing men and their still more designing propaganda. Somebody has reversed the lever of his mind, else his training in spiritual consciousness would have insured him against being upset by discovering traces of our Scriptures in mythology and every heathen religion and philosophy. These pagans, the very barbarians and savages, naturally borrow, plagiarize and take the truth as we do, frequently veiled in tradition. We all have the same God and must feel the stirrings of His image in us. If this man had been in his right senses, does any one believe that the study of astronomy could have possibly upset his strictly Christian faith? Can what we know or suspect about a purely physical universe affect the everlasting fact that our spirit does bear witness to the truth of such Scriptures as the Ten Commandments, the twenty-third Psalm and the Sermon on the Mount?

Words are dangerous things. They lead to heresy trials now, and they formerly led many martyrs to the stake. I suppose the good Bishop still believes in Providence, but here he is in his old age trying to liquidate his God into natural law. Somebody has stolen that many pages of his mind or he would know there never was a law without a lawmaker.

‘Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!’ he cries.

Well, that has been done in Russia. Religion certainly is the opium of the people there. Never has the world seen such a politically pious people. They sleep, indeed, but what uneasy slumber is this that filches all a man has and degrades him by his very sacrifices! Imagine living under a government which permits its people to prosper for a few years, in order that it may step in and confiscate their wealth and thus reduce them once more to the direst poverty of a national ideal where the only capitalist is this rogue of a government and the only god is the pickled body of an arch-fiend who even in death imposed his monstrous will upon them.

My feeling is that every man is entitled to his own God, which is the same God no man can escape. And heaven deliver me from living in a country where there are no capitalists! My idea would be to live in one where everybody would be in neighborly reach of one. But at that I am this close kin to the bishop in the perversity of my mind; I should like to see all communists and radicals banished from this country before they pollute the minds of the ignorant, irresponsible, and unwary, who are the real poor we have always with us, even if some of them are learned and rich.

My tides are falling. I have no longer the mortal power to believe everything and hope everything. I must leave hopes now for those who need them more than I do.

When you are passing into the afternoon of your years it is wise to break the habit you used to have of planning for the future, because your future is behind you, as some Smart Aleck has said. It is sensible to economize in hopes, because they are depleting when you no longer have the power to achieve them. I have planted all my trees years ago. Presently I shall be obliged to sit beneath their shade and fold my hands. Even then I know I shall not be contented with just peace. I shall be looking and wishing for a little happiness.

When you are about to matriculate into old age you speculate a good deal about how you will feel then. I am thinking it would be a grand thing to live long enough to grow simple and full of faith and the artless happiness I had as a child. Old people do sometimes; they come again into that eager, snooping curiosity the very young have. They go about wondering and getting themselves happily deceived as we keep terrors and anxieties from little children. It is a sweet and blessed state.

Heaven preserve me from becoming a grand old woman and being obliged to keep my dignity and mind sitting up overwhelming others to the last! I should hate to pass out as one of my grandfathers did. He was very old, but he retained to the end an outrageously overbearing use of his faculties. All of us who were his meeker posterity had gathered respectfully about his bedside, not tearful, because he was intolerant of tears and we dared not weep. Presently he swept the whole bowed company with one glittering gray glance and commanded us to leave him alone.

‘I will not be stared out of countenance at the very last!’ he gasped.

So he died with all of us hidden behind the bed peeping at him.

I want some one to hold my hand then, and to hear many kind voices soothing me and praising me as if I had been a dear good old child for a long time. I want to be reduced to that innocency of the ‘such as’ when I go hence, and maybe trailing some fragment of the same cloud of glory with which I came from God who was my home.

XXXVI

WHY WORSHIP EUROPE?

We never can be sure what it was that gave us a bad cold, and for some reason we invariably speculate about that as if it made a difference. So it is with getting to be an old person when we have always felt young. I suppose we do grow old, but we do not know it until suddenly the fact comes upon us. The curtain drops behind us, all those years when we were young pass into memory, and we see the whole of life from a soberer, wiser, different point of view. Our very self-consciousness gets a stoop in the shoulders, and though we may go on for a time with a square-shouldered air we are not the same.

About this time that change took place in me. I shall never know whether it was the death of my husband, ill-health, or that six months spent in Europe, but some vivacity of the spirit was gone when I came home. Life had been bent somewhere within. I felt the weariness of wisdom, such as one gets from the world. And I never had it until this time--a curious depression about the mortal fate of man. I was so outrageously tamed that I lost the habit of making dogmatic statements, which had always been a refreshing insolence of the mind with me, as bearing arms must be with a soldier of fortune. It seemed to me that I had been demoted and suddenly civilized.

Whatever may have been the cause I do not know, but in my opinion it was Europe, that aged me. It is an old book of history, illustrated with the scenes and architecture of former, younger, more spirited races of men. The countries I saw could never have been produced by the people who are now living in them, with the possible exception of England. I do not like Britishers, but involuntary respect compels me to hand it to Englishmen wherever I see them. They have the weakest chins in the Old World and the strongest wills still to survive and achieve.

I cannot understand Americans who worship the life, culture, and mental attitude of these failing civilizations. But they do. Nothing, not even the Great War and our experiences then with their rapacity and their resentment of our qualities can cure us of this obsession. If the League of Nations had been called the League of Arts, nothing could have kept us out of it. We spend more every year staring at their scenery, buying their pictures, statues, tapestries, and the very stones of their ancient castles than would be required to open every door in the world to our commerce, our inventions, our morals, and our institutions, all of which are more vigorous and vastly superior to anything along the same lines in Europe.

But we seem determined to degrade our own powers to achieve better things by this idealism of old things abroad. We note disparagingly the imitative characteristics of the negro race in their relation to the white races, which has in fact delayed the development of their peculiar genius in many ways; but we show the same tendencies toward European culture with less excuse. I suppose we buy their old things because we feel the lack of the tone of time in our civilization and collect this stuff to produce that effect.

As a matter of fact, there is no virtue in the tone of time. Virtue comes alone from our own achievements. We cannot mellow what we are by what we hang on our walls. This is cheating, in my opinion, such as we do when we chase our ancestors back until we derive a coat of arms from some old swashbuckling knight of the fourteenth century. Very few of them would be acceptable now in decent society. It seems to me safer and more respectable not to admit descending from any further back than our original pioneer American blacksmith ancestors. This is good stock, cleaned and charged with the noblest virtues by the courage with which they endured hardships and built a great civilization. Benjamin Franklin’s sister made soap and sold it to her patrons in Philadelphia for a livelihood. It seems to me a more honorable record to hand down to posterity than that of a seventeenth lady whose only distinction was that she had a title inherited, not earned, and that she sat to a great artist for her portrait.

Europe is childish, overbearing, grasping, like an old man. We ought to contribute liberally to its support on that account, as we do to aged parents; but we ought not to ape the senility of old age. We do now limit the quota of immigrants from these countries, but it seems to me even more important to limit the number of American tourists who go abroad to the aged and mature. The youth of this country should be kept at home until their characters and ideals have been firmly established. I was forty years old before I went over there, confirmed and certified in my convictions as an American citizen, but it was a long time before I recovered my own spirit and wiped the shadows of a weaker world from my mind. Even now I cannot be sure. It seems to me that I detect a foreign substance at times in my thoughts, not so firm or sound as real living makes thinking. And I have known a great many people who never do repent of Europe after they have indulged in it. They get an air of aloofness and superiority. They are sick and disgusted with our honest sins. They have acquired a decadent taste for vice as if vice were one of the arts of Europe, as indeed it is. Now it does seem to me that if we must be wicked we ought to be normally and healthily wicked and call our sins by their right names. It is a sign of degeneracy to be so virtuously sensitive and proud of your vices as so many men and women of older nations have grown to be.

XXXVII

THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN

A young man with a mind of high degree and an extensive literary style recently shot off this in a magazine article: ‘Gossips are people who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest possible, namely, God.’ He might have exchanged places with his nouns, written it: ‘People are gossips who have only one relative in common,’ and hit more nails on the head. But at that, he missed by half the number we have in common.

The nearest relative of every mortal man that always survives him is the earth. He is atom and acid kin to it. He springs from it and returns to it, laid back into it, earth to earth and dust to dust, which is closer kin at last than he ever was to his up-and-speaking relatives. He bears but one relation to God, a spiritual resemblance, either real or fancied. Lacking that, he sustains literally no relation to God beyond that of mere material scrapped and to be used again for another form of perishable life, vegetable or flesh. The spirit of him in this case is a disease to be cured by some divine method with which no man is acquainted, whatever the theologians may claim to know about it.

The wisest of us do not actually know much. We can only believe according to the quality of our minds. The favorite notion used to be that such spirits went through a severe smelting process, similar to that of four thousand degrees centigrade by which pure gold is now extracted from quicksilver, but not, I understand, in paying quantities. I am merely suggesting this, not as a doctrine, much less a dogma, but by way of speculating upon the possible method of purification. Personally, I find it disturbing and unprofitable to dwell upon the reclaiming processes of damnation. I have seen too many damned people in this world, and been too frequently damned myself, not to know that we damn ourselves, and that by an act of will and faith we can always escape from this sense of guilt, which settles the whole doctrine of punishment so far as I am concerned.

But the point I wish to make now is that we are all conscious of being kin to the earth, though comparatively few have more than a creed sense of being related to God. It is a thing we are taught, but really learn to feel. The man who begins life next to land never forgets. He may come up in the world and be carried by his illusions of success far from its life and loveliness, but there come wearying days in his countinghouse when his thoughts fly back like homing birds to that quiet place. His own people may be dead and gone, or he may have lost the sense of kinship to them; but he remembers still where the shadows fell upon the grass, as a child far from home remembers his mother’s face. It is the child in him longing for the comfort of that ancient mother of all men.

If he has lost out and gone down in the world with a bad conscience, the same thing happens. There comes a woeful day when his tears rise like a tide and he knows if he could go back, fling himself beneath the shade of a certain tree for a long, long time, the silence and goodness of the earth would cure and restore him. It would not, but this is the way he feels. The sensation proves and defines the sanctity of our relation to the earth.

As to those other people, born in cities as chickens are hatched in an incubator, they have the same instinct changed to silliness. They are like stepchildren who do not know how to love the earth; still, they have their transient cravings for its blessings. But few of them can bear to live with it, because its weather and its silence is terrible to them. They are really inebriates, living by the intoxication of the eye and the ear upon the vast confusion of cities and crowds. They may be strangers there, without home or friends, but they require this frightful motion and noise as an addict must have his drug. They cannot bear the solitude of silent places or the diminishing companionship of their elder brethren, the trees. They are waifs blown like leaves in the wind the world makes in passing. They never had the capacity to live, and so substitute motion and noise for life as a sort of artificial respiration.

I do not know anything more tragic to contemplate than these lost children of the earth. They may be learned men or successful men; they may be dutiful or merely beautiful women; but if you dare to realize how lacking in quality and the original stamina of life they are, thrust them back upon the earth from which they sprung for longer than a vacation period, and watch them go to pieces. They are parasites, consumers. They have lost the valor to produce their own sustenance from the earth. They survive by trade, commerce, inherited wealth, some kind of artificial labor. There is not a drop of honest Adam sweat in them. They are the kind of people who carry an umbrella over their heads through life, whether it is the roof of an office, a factory or a stock exchange. They want money, prestige, power, more rights and privileges than any man can ever earn except at the expense of other men; but they remain unacquainted to the last with real life achieved in the open according to the law which bound the first man to the land for his own good, where there are no fictitious values, but a fair exchange of bread, poverty, and peace promised to those who do keep and dress the garden which the earth is.

One may write very convincingly, however, upon this theme without making much more of a success than Adam did in the beginning when he was ordained to keep and dress that first garden. The Scriptures are not easy to fulfil. I have been tempted to doubt if the very apostles who recorded the Gospels actually lived up to them. I have had a few divine inspirations myself without feeling the least blasphemous; but looking back now, I can see no more than the faintest gleam of them in my deeds. What I mean is that it must be natural, after all, to come short of the glory of God. This world would be a frightfully glaring place if we did not.

The queer thing is that we also miss happiness in the effort. The satisfaction of saints in their piety has always seemed to me despicable. It is a form of deceit never justified by the facts. And the gratified airs they give themselves is not to be confounded with simple honest human happiness. We are entitled to that whether we miss the glory of God or not. Most of the time I am certain this is the supreme gift of His love which still awaits us when we comply sensibly with the conditions; but I have my dark moments when I am tempted to suspect that this instinct for happiness may be a sort of clucking encouragement devised by Providence to keep us up and going, as romantic love is one of Nature’s enchantments to keep up the birth rate.

XXXVIII

GARDEN HAPPINESS

Certainly the exercise of our virtues does not insure happiness. My experience is according to the Scriptures at this point--your virtues invite hardship and persecution. I have observed the very good carefully. They are noble souls, totally defeated in this present world by their conscience and their sacrifices. It takes a spunky spirit to escape the Job Scriptures. This is my objection to the intimate companionship of saints. The last one of them has a martyr tune in him somewhere, and if you encourage him with either sympathy or admiration, he will let go and sing it to you in sobbing praise of himself. I am a trifle that way. More than once I have known myself to keen my spiritual nose to a kind friend and chant the tale of some injustice suffered in the exercise of my nobler qualities. It is puerile. No matter how virtuous you are, virtue goes out of you then.

I take involuntarily a sort of ignoble consolation in the fact that the very bad are farther from happiness than the very good, because they have destroyed the foundation upon which happiness must rest. It is written that if we repent of our sins the Lord remembereth them no more forever, which is something that cannot be said of any mortal man. Even if he repents of his transgressions, the memory of them hangs like a shadow in the light of his spirit forever. I have seen these swords suspended over the head of a saint until finally he was slain by them.

As for me, I have never been able to keep a record of my virtues, though I have tried hard enough; but I have never been able to forget one sin. Just let me get in a weaving way with so much as one beam of holiness to light my dark places, and some niggardly little transgression I committed years ago, or yesterday, lifts its head and licks out a forked tongue in hissing comment. I defy anyone, however worthy, to risk himself in the glow of holiness without having a similar experience.

This, I believe, is what is meant by the omniscience of the Almighty. It is in us, a fearful faculty for seeing ourselves which we cannot escape. And it reveals each man to himself as a spiritual bungler every time he frisks within range of his own inner vision. The effect is salutary, but very depressing. I am never peaceful, much less happy afterwards.

It all comes to this: We get wisdom of one sort and another with fatal facility, because the world is full of it, a brilliant or dull sort of ignorance deduced from observation, study, experience, and the prideful exercise of our rational faculties; but we are perpetually short on understanding until after it is too late.

When I came back to these hills to dress my garden in the year 1913, I know now that I missed happiness by the narrowest margin. I was on the right track. I was at home again upon the earth. I felt that peace and steadiness of mind we all feel in familiar surroundings among companions who never change or move away. The same grass and the same green boughs overhead, the same flowers I had known in earliest infancy blooming like tiny remembered faces in every meadow and on the banks of every stream. The same little footpaths of peace across every hill, winding according to the minds of those happy travelers who made them.

But the most enterprising business man was never more quickly involved than I was in plans and preparations for happiness. The old cabin to be restored and furnished, all about to be cleared and trimmed. I saw the frost crystals blooming in the gray dawn of every morning that first winter. The longest day was too short to accomplish what must be done before the next day. I was in the woods choosing timber for more rooms to be added to the cabin. I was something of a nautilus in those days, without the sublime indifference of that little sailing mollusk to the passage of time. I was in a hurry to finish my house.

But, like the nautilus, I have gone on adding to it year by year according to the widening chambers of my mind. There will be a wall, a pillar unfinished somewhere when my own end comes. I shall probably defer death by an effort of mortal will if I am having another window cut in order to get one more entrancing view of this valley at the very last. I do not know whether this is foolishness or not, but I have left much copy of my mind and spirit written in stones that will last longer than the monument Horace raised to himself, ‘more enduring than brass.’

I made a garden and planted it. I was in the fields from dawn until dusk that first spring, watching the plows sink deep in the loam of the land. To me, there is no fragrance comparable in sweetness to the scent of freshly turned earth. Later I walked like an impudent little god of a woman down the rows of young corn. I remember praying for the corn that year during a long drought, not that I needed bread so fiercely earned, but because to see it living and growing was like feeling the green blades of my own vanity spreading and rustling in the sun.

Somewhere in this house there is a snapshot made of me that summer standing up on a load of wheat sheaves. I am wearing a stiff white frock. I am bareheaded and the wind is blowing. I do seem to have a high happy look. There streams across my face something of the light of youth, keen and strong. Love alone can so transfigure us. I am in love, you understand. My heart is embracing this sky, this meadow, these overshadowing hills. I am feeling the wreaths of little blue flowers that bloom beside the streams upon my brow. I am strong and well again, cured of so many sorrows. My heel has touched the earth again. Auteas was right about that--if you believe in your heel and the life of the earth you can recover strength as he did for the next struggle.

I was that child I used to be, let loose like a joyful energy. So this is something I have discovered about happiness: It is not a product of energy, but of chance, a free mind and deliverance from that parsimonious sense of time which no child ever feels. This marked the difference now between the woman I was and the child I had been. I took every chance then with a free mind and no sense at all of time. I was too young to make plans. I met the future as a lark meets the sky upon the wings of a singing heart. I was nearer kin to God then and had a wiser sense of life than I shall ever know again.

The simpler creatures manage life more gracefully than we do. I have often envied the birds, not because they can sing, but because they can fly. They own everything from the tallest tree top to the farthest meadow’s rim; but they have no sense of possession, no baggage to carry. They endure more hardships than we do and have a better time. The difference between them and, say, the communists, is that they are not acquisitive. They do not want to own everything in common. They are honest about that, and no man is. He must be either predatory or competitive. He has an instinct for ownership which he is determined to satisfy.

This earth would be settled by squatters if a comparatively few people did not hold titles to most of it. The latter are safer neighbors than the migratory class to which the communists really belong. They are a kind of human locust swarming over the earth now, never to be confounded with the earlier pioneers. I suppose in time we shall get rid of them. If we do not, they will destroy us. Then they will turn upon themselves. They are by purpose destructive, according to some rascally notion of gain. Their piety is a sort of missionary malice couched in the noblest deceit of language.