Child and Country Part 17

If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and G.o.d be with you if there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the love of G.o.d in the eyes of pa.s.sing men--if you have forgotten our Mother.

... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would not have you miss a breath of her beauty--but upon and within it, I would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's House. The Coming to you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pa.s.s to the unprepared houses. They are mute--suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.

... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your heart is listening--unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest--the little things of life silenced, the pa.s.sions of the self put away.

There is beauty in the wilderness--the beauty of the Old Mother is there in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great pa.s.sion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be destroyed by the l.u.s.tre of that which descends to you? Would you be a potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands--when you may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?

Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?

Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know the world--so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in the brown study of Pan.

This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a G.o.d still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rect.i.tude of heart which dares to be mother of souls.

Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise--too wise for that.

He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as the l.u.s.ts of the flesh.

You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is a breath from the old shames--your dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from generations that learned the lie to self.

You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not Nature--a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says: "All G.o.ds have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and the throb of him bewilders you with pa.s.sion.... You who are so high must fall far, when you let go.

... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you because you _dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood, the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pa.s.s him by, before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature, whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.

... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all lessons--to wait. You must pa.s.s by all others who are not true to the dream. You must integrate your ideal of him--as you dream of the s.h.i.+ning One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the dream, pa.s.s on--for though you travel together for years, at the end you will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no dreams--the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom another is waiting.

... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you.

There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.

... A whirlpool, a vortex--this is but the beginning of ecstasy.

This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative light. This is the highest mystery of Nature--all hitherto is background for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the sun--such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains--and beyond them is the ocean of time and s.p.a.ce.

22

MIRACLES

From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the world can show is a battlefield of human beings.

Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.

Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.

The word _Cosmos_ means order, as stated once before.

One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago--the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely--the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.

With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.

After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with another man's money,--standing alone, tormented with the thought of how little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank them for going away.

In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found myself turning in pleasure to it--the thought would come that it wasn't really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used to go from the building and grounds then--cutting myself clear from it, as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.

I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went.

I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living--and for pennies the hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation--one house after another through life--to accept money and call their work paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry--every stone is different--but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid--nor the house paid for....

One evening I went through the structure when all but the final finis.h.i.+ng was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name; yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the fireplaces--finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake sh.o.r.e bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still--and presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house--a week or two more from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.

The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a human habitation. But there was no wired gla.s.s; its roof was the sky. I remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there by the fountain one night--mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the _patio_....

And here was its northern replica--sunken area paved with gold-brown brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and front doors. I wanted it so--a house to see through like an honest face.

Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted it so.

"When we move in----" one of the children began.

I s.h.i.+vered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't move in, we would....

A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build another (if he ever _had_ to do it again) without raising his voice; without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite generations rather than build again.

There is the order of the small man--a baneful thing in its way, sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.

The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon--the eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation.

"The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and up to simplicity again, each circle in a n.o.bler dimension of progress.

There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer.

Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a pa.s.sage of disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]

Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road to sanct.i.ty is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove faithful in the small things, first.

I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain, balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing large quant.i.ties of work every day--for boys. Yet daily in their work, I was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and youth. This driving force is spiritual.

In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart six days to toil in the earth and one day to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d. A man wors.h.i.+ps G.o.d best in his work. His work suffers if he misses wors.h.i.+p one day in seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality, as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is G.o.d, or the emanation of G.o.d, as all the great religions reverently agree.

I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fas.h.i.+oned something greater than himself--that he has said or sung or written or painted something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and inimitable; that its expression _through us_ cannot be exactly reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other can play.

That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object is held in the hand. There is a higher vision--and the word _imagination_ expresses it almost as well as any other--by which the thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the whole.

There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.

Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.

You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....

You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy which gives life to all men and things.

Every object and every man tells the same story with its different texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy; that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and heart--the one great love story of the universe.

Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently--rising to superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired.

Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period--or in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.

Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] From _Midstream_.