Читать книгу Singing in the Rain - Anne Shannon Monroe - Страница 10

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“There can’t be a God!” So my friend wound up—she had been rehearsing to me in my city studio a fresh batch of woes. “There can’t be! His heart would break, looking on! He couldn’t endure it, through the ages!”

Her face was distorted, her hands shaking, her whole being overwrought—and futile—from her fixed contemplation of wrongs, from her pressing need to straighten them all out, to straighten the whole world out. And I had no reply; the right word didn’t come.

But when she had gone, and I sat alone in my cluttered studio where the world jangled noisily at my windows, where my friend’s querulous complaints and tragic doubts had further ruffled the atmosphere, the scene changed, and I looked upon another picture that I know well: far-flung acres in the Umatilla country, young wheat lifting golden green to a blue sky, larks rising rapturously on the winy air, pouring out their liquid notes in the proclamation, “It is spring! It is spring! It is spring!” ... On the highest rise of land a small church: it is Sunday morning, and the remnants of an Indian tribe that in the long ago cruelly massacred the brave missionaries who had trekked across a continent to teach them of God—the remnants of this tribe, living together in peace and industry and good will toward all living creatures, are gathered there to worship. One of their number is speaking—a powerfully built Indian, noted as an athlete, but he speaks gently, without gesture or aggression, and in his eyes is the look of one who dwells much in the still places, and in his words is inspiration. The dusky hearers listen, without turning a head, without stirring in their seats. Then out through the windows pour the vibrant voices of young Indians in the old hymn, “More of His grace to others show.” They sing it with fulness and beauty. The music billows across the fields where the wind breathes low through the young wheat, making an accompaniment—and a promise ... And it came to me strongly, out of the peace and quiet which the memory evoked: God saw the massacre, but He sees this, too. And the horrors of the massacre were but of the body, and so for only a day, but this is of the soul, and so for ever. And that is why there can be a God, and He can look on through the ages and not be broken-hearted, and that is why we should not wreck ourselves by concentrated contemplation of the cruel, stupid, and wrong things, but should keep ourselves balanced and sane by at least equal contemplation of the wise, intelligent, and right things.

We do not need to go to far-off plateaus under Western skies to hear God’s everlasting music, for it is going on all about us, wherever we are, ceaselessly. A lark sings in every lane, only we have got so in the habit of heralding the clangours and leaving the music unacclaimed that we are inclined to lose sight of the music altogether. The morning paper screams at us of the murder of a little child in our town right under our noses, and we join in with the general furore and demand, “What is the world coming to!” But the paper failed to mention with equal conspicuousness the fact that Tom Jones and his wife—also in our town—have recently adopted a third abandoned baby, making for each of these new little lives just arrived on the earth and with no place to go, a welcome as for a prince of the house of royalty. We read of a case of kidnapping that fairly curdles our blood, and we loudly declare that the world grows worse and worse, but nothing is said in the same sheet of the kindness of Mary Smith, who opened her small apartment to a homeless old lady, installing her as the true mother of her home. We read in huge scareheads that two boys have burglarized a house in our very neighbourhood, and we demand, “Where is the hope of the future, with the youth of the land given over to lawlessness?” But we overlooked an obscure notice tucked down on an inside page to the effect that five hundred boys of high-school age were meeting in conference to discuss the application of Christian ideals to everyday living. A woman sighed and groaned: “Dear, dear, the awful books appearing nowadays! No wonder our girls run wild!” Losing sight entirely of the fact that never before in the history of the world was so much excellent reading matter in reach of such a large proportion of humanity. All over the country have swept the moanings of people of culture because of the falling off of the spoken play, the absorption in “movies” of so large a part of the playgoing public; but even while the moanings filled the air, there began to arise play-acting groups everywhere, in schools, clubs, society, and labour circles: a movement that will do more for sound play-development, springing, as it should, out of the people themselves, than have all the years of mere professional performances with their many—and often hideous—road companies.... It is difficult, when close to a thing, to see the friendly swing of the event; difficult to take our eyes off the departing and welcome the coming; difficult to live without vision.

In my home town, recently, a jurist died, and all the town bowed its head in grief and said, “We shall not see his like again.” We found—as his body lay in state—that he had been from his youth up a friend to man, a protector of the widow and orphan, an elder brother to the poor, a strong arm for the law of human right—a just man, and a great man, and a good man: a man who, though far from rich, gladly paid a one-hundred-dollar telephone bill for the privilege of quoting from the Bible to a friend in trouble on the other side of the continent. A man who as judge—when a divorce case came before him—the case of two who had in earlier years been known to him, called out: “Mary, is that you? John, is that you? Come here into my office!” And who left the bench to go into his inner office alone with these two—the three to come out a few minutes later all wiping their eyes, the case dismissed and the records ordered cleared. And yet all through the fair days that he lived, doing steadily these kind, wise, sensible deeds, the inspired deeds of the good man who sees life whole, his neighbours were looking far afield and sighing, “If we only had great men in public life as once we had!”

We need distance on things—perspective.

A great man sat in a suburban car beside me going to work, a dinner pail in his lap. Only by accident did I learn that he was a great man, though I had suspected it from a peculiar look in his eyes when he was off guard, as of one enduring to the uttermost and yet with a look of courage, always, for the world. An architect with an invalid wife, he had been stricken with a form of paralysis that crippled his hands. But he didn’t want her to know he could no longer guide his pencils through his beautiful drawings, so he invented the fiction that he wanted to do night work, so he could spend more of his days with her; gave up his beautiful offices and took a watchman’s job, where he paced drearily through long, lonely hours, that she who had grieved so much might not be further grieved by the loss of his art. But casual onlookers only shrugged with, “a dull man leading a dull life.”

“Another drab little town,” said my fellow passenger, with a disparaging shrug, and as the train slowed down, buried himself in his magazine to close out the uninteresting view—but it so happened that I could have told him of great lives nurtured there, of a great editor who lived to sway events in the larger world, whose boyhood was spent under that little town’s spreading oaks, whose schooling was gained at its small academy, whose young manhood ripened into thoughtfulness and the power to give a real service to the world, right there where the train went through. And out of the “drabness” that was all that the traveller had seen, that other had carried away memories of sunny skies, rustling tree boughs, singing birds, murmuring waters, a delectable swimming hole, kindly and generous human relationships, romance—why, all the richness he later gave to the larger world was drawn off as by a spigot from that “drab” little town. And he was only one.

My mind moves on to another, who stayed. Calamities had come to her, the recital of which would sound like a chapter from a misanthrope’s diary—deaths, money losses, until, past middle age, she faced the need to earn her own living and no reason to live. She said, “I will work myself to death.” This seemed to her a not dishonourable way out of life. To this end she acquired every possible living thing that would need care—cows, chickens, a cat, a dog, a bird, a parrot. She rose early each morning to attend to them, and their needs filled her day. Storms came—she must bed down her cows with fresh hay; calves came, new little chickens, puppies, kittens; the parrot vociferously demanded a cracker, the bird twittered for fresh water. She grew steadily healthier and stronger; she found she could not work herself to death, and at last she no longer wanted to die. Her interest extended to people. She had many books, and many friends sent her steadily the new ones. She spread the gospel of good reading; she made her large, rambling, old-fashioned house the reading centre for the whole town. People dropped in freely—even travellers found the place, when an hour must be lost between trains—and they never afterward called it lost. A day with her was like a day escaped out of Paradise, so active were her sympathies, so instant was her understanding, so quick her response, so ready her wit—a truly sighted person. But what was there to the shallow gaze of the passer-by but a worn old house that shivered in the winter wind, in and out of which a middle-aged woman went—alone? No, it is not the little town that is drab; it is ourselves who look out of drab eyes. Nothing is drab but to the colour-blind; nothing mute but to the tone-deaf.

We see a tired young woman climbing city stairs to her room at the close of a hard day in office or factory, and we think there is nothing for her; all is dreariness. But on the one window’s sill a bird alights, and she throws it crumbs, and a lovely radiance glows within her. Another gathers up an alley cat, all smudged and neglected, and bathes it and feeds it and wins it to beauty and soft playfulness—and wins the deep-lying beauty of her own soul from drought. The most perfect expression of new life in spring green I ever saw was a window-box filled with sprouting grapefruit. A little girl had gathered up the seed thrown out from a restaurant and planted them there, and had joyously watched the pure, young colour come. Another child was radiant over tiny piles of sand carried in pieces of broken glass from a new building to her own doorstep, and there she played, pretending she had an entire sandpile, life warm and glowing in her under the magic of make-believe. Everywhere special days are celebrated, Easter, the Fourth of July, Christmas, birthdays, great events—but it is not merely the traditional holiday that we are celebrating. It is that something, deep within ourselves, that demands that the music of life shall have its day in the midst of so much that is merely noisy.

We become discouraged with one another, we proclaim the obliviousness of man to the deeper, spiritual side of living, and it is true that we do chatter endlessly of trivial things, retailing the latest gossip in a sort of “News, news, who’s got the news,” game for adults that suggests the shallowest of mental development. But this chatter is not a true gauge of our real selves, for all the while it is going on another life is going on deep down inside, a life of which we allow none to have cognizance. We live intensely—in there; we question life’s meaning—in there; we recognize our spiritual selves—in there; we sense the beauty of being and the promise of eternity—in there: but let us meet one of our kind, and instantly, like a sensitive plant, we close off this inner, this permanent us, and offer him only the outer husk. We express ourselves in the old hymn as being eager, in that life to come, to “know as we are known”—and then we do all in our power to keep from knowing—or being known—in the life we are now in. This gives rise to doubt in the mind of the skeptic, the unimaginative observer. He knows he is serious-minded, but he questions whether we ever really are. Well, he needn’t question—we are.

We fix our minds too intently on the obvious, failing to go farther. We are absorbed in our petty round, failing to see of what it is a part. It is as though we stood off and observed the whirling of the planets, but became concerned only with the meteors tossed through the celestial spaces. It’s as though we watched a turning wheel polishing a piece of glass, and became concerned only with the particles of emery thrown off in waste. But the Creator does not stop the universe because of a bit of iron and stone dashed into a farmer’s potato patch: the mechanic does not stop his wheel because of wasted emery. And so it is with Life. The Great Plan rolls grandly on like an anthem sung by master musicians. The seasons bring us tears and tumults, it is true, but they unfailingly bring their gifts of nurturing, of growing, of harvest, of rest. The hours roll over us in what we speak of as a day, with slippings and stumblings on our part, but each day brings unfailingly its awakening, its high noon, its fulfillment, and its repose. New little lives come into being, and we are hectic with joy or tense with uneasiness, adopting this method, discarding that; but quite as if we were not, life steadily unfolds the tiny baby, like a flower, petal by petal. Death encompasses one to whom we are accustomed, and our hearts bleed, and we hold fast to all things that were his, and seeking to hold him to us, we sink all that is left to us of him in six feet of earth, hedge it in with a headstone and a footstone, and on the headstone inscribe “Here lies—— ...” But unmindful of our childish proclamation, the sun shines warmly on the bit of earth, the dews fall gently, the breezes play over it, till through vine and leaf and twig and flower, and singing birds and winging insects, all that we would limit to the narrow tomb is drawn back once more into part and parcel with the great universal flow of life itself. Everywhere we look we see God’s plan operating, as regardless of us as moves a resistless undertow beneath the fret of surface waters. Everywhere, if we will but listen, “Step aside,” says old Nature. “I’ll take hold here.” And we step aside, and Nature sweeps on with her plan, sweeping us on with her, if we catch her keynote—or else to one side, in the rubbish heap of the impermanent.

There is comfort in this—tremendous comfort. Something is fixed, something is stable; only we are uncertain. And only we, of all creation, give place and space to the impermanent. Everywhere Perfection is trying to break through, and everywhere we push Perfection back. Look at the shining in the eyes of a young man as he gazes on his beloved, in the eyes of a true mother as she gazes upon her baby. Each is gazing on a dream of Perfection. Look at the beauty in flowers, kittens, lambs at play—all representing Perfection, each a full development of its kind. Think of a folksong, natural music—natural as the song of a lark—right as the music of the spheres, a thing perfected. All perfected things express harmony, rhythm, music. There are no harsh sounds in nature: recall the music of falling waters, of swaying tree boughs, of growing corn, of buzzing insects—all busy, busy, busy—no man is so busy as are the least of the perfected things below man. No stagnation is there, no deadness; all is activity, all is fulfilment, and all is music. Only God’s undeveloped creatures, unfinished, unperfected—only we, in our strivings, breaking our moulds—give out harsh sounds.

We must believe, then, that when we, too, are finally perfected, we, too, will make only harmony in the world. Think how it is with us now when we are able to create some one perfect thing—a happy atmosphere so that people love to be near us, a song, a picture, a cake, trust in the heart of a dog, love in the heart of a fellow being, confidence in a tiny child—when we are able to seize the right thread in a tangle and draw out the hard knot—think how it is with us then! What a sense of pure joy floods us! What harmony comes into us! What beauty! What rhythm! And then go on with it and imagine what all life will be when that blissful time comes when all that we do will be right; when the laws of life that make the whole vast scheme sublime are understood and operate within each of us as unfailingly as they now do in perfected nature. Then will the noise of living be stilled, the clamour and clangour cease, and music only be heard—music of exultation, as from a lark’s throat; of achievement, as in growing grain ...

Then why become discouraged? Man is finding his place on the earth, and it’s a noisy process—but give him time. It’s just possible that the crudeness will not be so shoutingly apparent when we get distance on it. It is just possible that it will sink back in the picture as we get farther away. It is just possible that the music of even this day, that we are rather given to deploring, will carry farther than the noise. What do we think of when we remember the American Revolution, with its hard facts of graft and self-seeking, but the faith and steadfastness of Washington? What do we recall of the Civil War, with its bitterness and greed, but the vision and integrity of Lincoln? What will stay with men in ages to come of the great World War, with its hideous agonies, but the birth on earth of peace among nations?

Remembering these things, suppose we should try the experiment of changing the emphasis. Isn’t it wholly possible that emphasis on the permanent things, the things that endure for ever, on the right, and the strong, and the true of our world, our nation, our state, our town, our families, and our homes, would set up a wholesome trend that way? Isn’t it wholly possible that we vastly increase the chaos we deplore, when we allow it to become as a lodestone, dragging us ever down to its own destructive level? Nature tends to restore—water purifies itself every few miles—time heals—and a lark sings on your very doorstep. Listen for it!