Read Ebook: Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation by Comfort Will Levington

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Ebook has 779 lines and 80167 words, and 16 pages

in the usage of which the human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and sleeping-porches , instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.

But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also forget it. A few good things--perennials, by all means an elm-tree, stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have passed--these are enough. For a home that does not promote your naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.

Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion--through the very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of simplicity which permit a man to forget himself--just missing the fact that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only to show us wherein our treasure lies.

The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual garnering--that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it. It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed in them--not to rush forth at length from our miserable self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man--that is ahead.

That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land--that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week--there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed; they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing--and low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without help. The temporality of all things--even of the great imperturbable trees--is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."

There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started there--dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live, but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....

I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first summer that I yearn for again--close to the sand, close to the voices of the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.

The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below, and in time it will find a permanent slope that cannot be approached for beauty by any artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes. Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths--a trickle of water over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines--something of all this will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.

All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it--and as yet, there wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.

STONESTUDY

Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work. This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there were ancient scars across my back--as if I had helped in that building, and under the lash, too.

... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was afraid of short time or flaws of construction--I was watching because it satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens slowly hardens best.

The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier Fall than that--a full year before the thought of Europe became action. I watched the work--as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen, so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns easily after this.

It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well--six, eight, and eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at, his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be learning masonry all over again.

"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."

There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke it.

"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.

"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.

"No, that's a black feller."

"And this?"

Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of men....

A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of distance and Southern constellations.

I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed, it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put out--a few six-inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to them--a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory --but an elm over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable. These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure, slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.

We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In the meantime the three children--a girl of ten and two younger boys--had almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward the task of teaching our own.

IMAGINATION

I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's weaknesses--as the Master established His church upon the weakest link of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:

"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions. The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but prepare the soil, too."

"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of abundance."

The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.

"Nature?"

We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam; beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....

I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.

"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.

"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me. When I stopped, he said:

"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a devil, perhaps I can beat him."

The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she said.

"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.

"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she wanted to be."

"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.

"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."

The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.

"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have, who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an arsenal of laws and fears."

"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"

"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as instruction even."

"And spelling?"

"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading. These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different and higher organs."

"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.

"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh to me," I said.

"The little girl is ten, you say?"

"Yes."

"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.

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