Child and Country Part 21

"No."

Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's _No_ and _Yes_. I took hope.

"Is it thin enough to pasture?"

"The main piece is. Better come and see."

A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the wan light of March outside.

"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers--then the stream and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."

"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.

"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."

There was a healing in that _never_.... The Abbot was not the kind to ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the rubber-boots.

"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."

He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey, clouds yellowish-grey and watery.

We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.

For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters, presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first time I saw the Amphitheatre.

We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding through the centre. The gra.s.s had been cropped to the last of the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was s.h.i.+vering on the slope beside me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and through the naked branches, a log cabin.

An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had made it a grove of the earth-G.o.ds. We remembered the Spring by the cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and floor was gone, but the walls needed only c.h.i.n.king. They were founded upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a forest.

"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.

"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.

"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand----"

We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.

"It won't be so another Spring," he said.

Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.

"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I repeated.

"No."

There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said to me in Newchw.a.n.g. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white man's civilisation. Newchw.a.n.g was long on the vine at that very moment, but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high.

The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for the edge of the Lake where we belonged.

... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes.

I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day, and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown, formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have forgotten itself; a n.o.ble nature that has lost the need of insisting its demands and making its values known, having long since called unto itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no holier place than a beech-wood....

The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream, too.

... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to me quite coldly:

"They have decided to make me go back to school----"

"Sit down," I answered.

As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic; full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount.

He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the moment all its ravis.h.i.+ng greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced, but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.

The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.

The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once--and away.... He is but fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful things have happened to him.

They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never runs.

But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable him to get himself out.

My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this gla.s.sy and ordered plane.

The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and must try once more.

It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy, believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he a.s.sured me:

"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm in your Study."

There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up in different ways from the townspeople. The ma.n.u.scripts that go forth from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to the Abbot:

"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into compet.i.tive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.

You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy--live it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an honour--a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready.

Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.

Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."

29

THE DAKOTAN

It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over gra.s.sy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.

Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.

He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two, or pa.s.sed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.

But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly over the writer's words.

The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.

I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he looked up.... I had not been thinking of Th.o.r.eau; at least, not for days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like Th.o.r.eau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of the master of Walden in his work.