Читать книгу Singing in the Rain - Anne Shannon Monroe - Страница 4

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It was my experience recently to settle down for some months in one of our fifty-seven varieties of Oregon climate where the rain comes down in a steady gray drizzle most of the winter. I did not like it. I said, hovering drearily by a fire, “This rain interferes with everything—with golf, sunsets, clothes drying on the line.”

Then my attention was arrested by the boy who brought the milk. Early in the morning he came, singing like some lark telling the world it was spring. He interested me. I ran down the steps to see him.

“Fine morning to be out,” I ventured, wondering about his mind.

“You betcher!” he came back out of his dripping raindrops. “Saw a fox in the cañon—a silver fox! If I kin ketch ’im, I’ll tame ’im!”

The boy hurried off, resuming his cheerful song, and I sat thinking. The sun didn’t shine—but there was a fox in the cañon, a silver fox! A visitor from the mighty mountains with all his mountain life and atmosphere upon him.... I got into rain clothes and set out to find the fox.... I never found him—but I found so much else: great, still forest trees bearing the dignity of centuries of life, and at their feet the most enchanting mosses and lichens that sprouted but yesterday, marvellous growths that only incessant rain could make possible. I found Oregon grape, that shiny, waxy-leafed shrub that borders every road and roofs every trail in this green-winter land, glistening in the rain and sending back points of light like newly polished mahogany. I found pussy willows bursting toward fulfilment. I found, in the terraced heights of this mountainous country, tints and shadings unimagined: soft, ghostly grays, draperies for a dream; blues like giant flame-shadows and as illusive between the varying banks of forest green—and I found an artist perched on a hill under a huge umbrella, trying to catch the lovely colours through their veils of silver mist.

“Marvellous—marvellous!” he breathed, scarcely seeing me.

And I had been blind to all this beauty, absorbed in regrets over a little guttapercha ball, clothes drying on the line, the sun—that day’s glare of utility. I ceased complaining of what was not in the country and set about finding what was. And, oh, I found so many things freshly lovely and inspiring, that after a time I didn’t miss the sun at all, or golf, while clothes dried quite as well in a basement.

I wonder if this isn’t one of the steadying understandings we especially need to get right now; that there may not be the things in our lives we are looking for, there may be upheavals that throw us out of the beaten track, but if we will only put aside repining, and briskly set about discovering the riches that are all about us, I wonder if we won’t all find plenty to set us singing in the rain?

I have never been much cheered by the “stencilled smile,” the false front, the pretending that there was no pain when pain was there, that there was no trouble when trouble stalked, that there was no death when Death laid his cold hand upon one dearer to us than life: but I have been tremendously cheered by the brave front; the imagination that could travel past the trouble and see that there were still joys in the world; the vision so clear that, recognizing death to a beautiful body, recognizes at the same time life to the spirit, and while humanly grieved over the passing of the one, can rejoice in the greater freedom of the other. It isn’t that we should fool ourselves with fairy tales and denials; it is that we should open our minds to a full recognition of life as experience—experience made up of joys and sorrows, rough places and smooth ones, disappointments and happy surprises, smashing cataclysms and glorious discoveries: see all this and be brave enough to face it, dealing with each change in its turn, directed always by the influences within rather than those without: then pack up the knapsack, cut a good stout stick, and once more travel on with face toward the goal and a song on the lips.

The little boy who sang so blithely under my window was not singing to try to make himself forget the rain. He had already forgotten the rain. He was singing out of the pure joy of his exploring young soul ... he had found a silver fox in the cañon! Well, to one awake to life, to its symbolism as well as its facts, there is always a silver fox in the cañon!

Two wives living in small, inadequate houses had been all ready to build new ones when the war came and delayed them. Then their husbands’ businesses had to be readjusted, and they were once more delayed.

Said one: “I am not sorry to postpone the going. Every nook and corner of this dear little house is crowded with sacred memories. There are the marks on the door casing where we took the children’s heights on their birthdays. There’s the stain on the study floor where poor old Fido dragged himself after the burglar shot him. There’s the mended window pane that Jackie broke with his first snowball, and Daddy was so proud of his aim he wouldn’t punish him.... Poor Jackie, his aim was just as straight in France, they tell us. Oh, I’ll be sorry to leave, though of course we must have a larger house with the children all growing up.”

Said the other: “This wretched little house is battered and banged from end to end with the wear and tear of the children! I’m ashamed to entertain my club in it now, and I just don’t see how I can go on living in it another year!”

Just the difference in the two women, you see—not a bit of difference in the situations!

Two college girls nearly of an age belong to a family badly crippled by the war. Lilian rides buoyantly on the crest of life’s wave; Letty is sunk in its depths. The mother, a braver-spirited woman, will wash and dye and make over an old dress for Lilian, and Lilian will receive it with a hearty: “Such a gallant little dress, Mother! Here it comes through the mill just as perky as ever! I love it!” And she will eagerly get into it, and prance about, pretending she is a fashion model, carrying her head, oh, so high, as though satin and ermine decked out her fair young body, while the mother looks on with smiles forcing back her tears.

Then she will go through the same tedious process for Letty, and Letty will groan out: “Do I have to wear that old thing again? Every girl in school will know it’s made over!”

And the mother’s heart, that had fluttered up to a bit of joy in the success of her creation, sinks like lead in her breast.

“I never thought I would come to anything like this,” moans one of these indigo distillers.

Well, why didn’t you? What was the matter with your imagination? You knew all the time “this” was in the world. Why shouldn’t you come to it the same as any one else? Why should you be marked for special leniency? You are just one in the surging wave of humanity making up your day; there is nothing unusual about you. There can be—it all depends on how you meet changed conditions—but there isn’t—so far.

“Well, I’m glad someone in the world has something to be cheerful about,” moans another, on hearing a laugh ring out gaily—herself doing about as much for the gaiety of nations as the head-hunters.

And letters! How they love to send it through the mails, this indigo of their distilling; send it like a shot from a hypodermic needle under the skin of someone they love, for one must read one’s letters—there’s no escape, as from personal contact, where you can take your hat and go. It’s not uncommon to hear among young women struggling for a foothold in business or some art in any of the great cities dialogues such as this:

“What’s the matter? You’re blue as ink!”

“Oh, I had a letter from home, that’s all.”

“All? Well, it’s enough—I know ’em!”

It isn’t women alone that distil these draughts of indigo. A fussy old bachelor I know is the dread of all the camping parties, because he just must superintend the cooking, and then if the dishes don’t all come out together, he won’t eat. I’ve seen him sit under a tree, sulking, chewing his moustache, his face red as a turkey-cock’s wattles, because the coffee boiled up two minutes before the fish were ready to lift from the fire. But as often as I have had to laugh at this dear old bachelor, brooding off under a tree while the woods and water were calling gloriously, I have had to think to myself: So must the Creator look on His children in their larger bafflings: one loses money—and he won’t play; one loses health—and he won’t play; one loses love—and he won’t play: one after another they refuse to play the Great Game gamily, and sit apart black and downcast, spoiling their own lives and casting gloom over everyone about them. You can laugh at the old bachelor who won’t play because his coffee and his fish didn’t come out together, but to One Higher, you, brooding off in your corner about something equally trivial in the larger contrasts of time with eternity, may seem quite as childish.

You never can tell, too, when you’re fussy with what comes to you, but what you’re being fussy with your kindest fate. The breaking up of programmes often brings the greatest blessings. A mistake, a cataclysm, and even better things bob up for you, as with the prospector who was compelled to tie his baulky mule to a juniper tree and back-track afoot for help. When he returned he found his mule had kicked open a pocket of gold, a far richer find than rewarded any of those whose mules had gone obediently ahead as their masters willed. Well, there you are: that’s life. It isn’t a mathematical science, and two and two do not always make four. And you’re not omnipotent, and your way may not always be the best way.

The dullest trip is that trip on which nothing unexpected happens, the dullest day is that day in which no unlooked-for occurrence obtrudes, and the dullest life is that life that gets into a groove of an exactly planned programme and stays there. Not that we shouldn’t make programmes—goodness, no! But we should be flexible, ready to readjust them as fast as changing conditions require. We ate alligator pears and pâté-de foie-gras yesterday, but we are eating cabbage and turnips to-day; very well, let us be sufficiently versatile in our tastes to appreciate the life-giving qualities of cabbage and turnips, and sufficiently philosophical to be glad we know what both extremes are like.

I know only one person who has apparently been able to shut off the usual avenues of the unpleasant: wealth removed want; death removed inharmonious relatives; transportation facilities remove tiresome environment; amusements remove boredom; and yet this young woman is the most miserable of mortals. You can’t shut off all the avenues of unpleasantness without shutting off the avenues of pleasantness as well. You can close your ears to earth’s disagreeable sounds—but you will never again hear the songs of birds. The most impoverished life is that life so protected that nothing real gets through to it. It’s rather a slam, too, as if old Nature had taken one glance at it, then turned away as from some unpromising cocoon, and said, “Oh, never mind, we won’t bother to hatch that one”—as if it didn’t matter.

Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough—

Throw away the old. If it was good, we are impressed from its mould—we no longer need it. Throw away yesterday’s mould; accept to-day’s. For it’s life that we all want, life in abundance. We want to swim in life as an aviator swims in the far reaches of the air. We want to feel many contacts, many phases. Nothing that life could do to you could be so stunting as the limitations of a narrowly fixed routine. Can you imagine wanting to fly through a walled-in tunnel? And yet there are natures so settled in materiality, that so love a fixed security, that they may even think of this as desirable ... air lanes segregated.

Then be glad when things go differently. Take it as a compliment; you are worth bothering with. Forget that frustrated plan and make a new one. Get curious about the life going on about you. Fall into the habit of asking, “What shall I see next?”—as would a cheerful traveller looking from his car window, and expecting neither skyscrapers in the desert nor mirages in the Hudson tubes. Cultivate a little more the disposition of the hardy explorer and less that of the ape. For it’s aping that so often stills the song on the lips; aping others in their way of living, their clothes; aping life as it is lived otherwhere, or as we once lived it or planned to live it. We had a dream of a certain kind of future, and we borrowed rosiness from it to tint up the immediate skies. Then—splash! We were deep into a future far different, and instead of letting the dream go, we hold it fast for comparisons—and comparisons are for ever odious. Gloom and depression follow, and there is no singing in the rain, no singing in the sun, no singing anywhere at all.

At a beach I know well, agate-hunting is one of the zestful occupations. People of all ages are busy at it, crouched down near the pounding waves. You don’t see the successful agate-hunters wasting any time on a dull gray stone. They lift it, no light shines through, and they instantly drop it and pick up another. And yet there the stones are, all mixed up together, the dull gray ones and the lovely clear ones, and it’s only that one becomes deft at dropping a worthless one and trying another that the pocket is filled with moss agates, ribbon agates, water agates—all the lovely souvenirs of earth’s inspired hours. Well, that’s life. If you’ve picked up an ugly gray outlook and insist on hugging it to your breast, you will get from it just the worthlessness that is in it. Better dash it down and make room for a treasure of brightness that may lie right at your feet.

But—you say—the black mood comes, and what can you do about it? What do you do when a mouse gets in the room? Sit and dwell on the idea? You know you don’t. You go after it hammer and tongs, up on chairs, down under the couch, out through the kitchen and over the porch; and then to make sure of future safety to yourself, you set a trap. But when the black mood comes, what then? You are sitting alone at your needlework, perhaps, when the pest attacks you, and you begin to stir it—over and over and around and around, getting fresh poison from every fresh stirring. Before you know it your eyes become set, your face deep-lined, and you’re off on a regular woe-jag, poisoning yourself and sending poison out on the ether of air to blight the lives of others. Now, no one is accountable for what comes into his mind, only for what he harbours there. Just suppose, then, at the first approach of the pest you took alarm—as if a mouse had slipped under your skirt. Suppose you sprang up, threw down your work, and changed your occupation to something that required every bit of your brain power: something creative, demanding thought and manipulation, like fitting a modern dinner-gown pattern on your old graduation dress, or freshly dipping and blocking your window hangings. Or you might go to the library and read a rattling good detective yarn, or take a long walk, or dig in the garden, or visit a sick friend, or go to a movie, or take a cold bath and get into new clothes. Anything under the sun to break the spell! Perhaps you are depressed from too much loneliness—then join a club or organize a new one. Perhaps your outlook is gloomy—then cut a window in a wall, add a porch on the cheeriest side of your house, increase your human contacts. Maybe there is not enough all-aloneness; it’s a case of nerves from too many human contacts. Then fit up the attic or an old outhouse—a shed, chicken coop, any four walls that will hold you—and call it your “den” and defy the world to enter! A couple of hours alone daily where one did exactly as one pleased—read, or wrote, or relaxed, or meditated—would change many a depressed, complaining housewife into the most buoyant and charming of women.

Native disposition is something, of course, but habit of mind is a great deal more. One woman overcame moodiness by conducting a funny column on a daily newspaper. The necessity of searching every happening for the funny angle, that she might get grist for her mill, opened up her mind to a philosophic slant on life that stayed with her.

“Laugh about it,” a mother would say to her baby when he tumbled on his nose, or spilt his milk, or broke his little red wagon. “Las about it,” he was presently saying back to her when the roast was tough, or the groceries were late, or the new gown failed to fit; and so the habit of good cheer was established between them.

Another mother so successfully trained her little boy to resourcefulness that it became a boomerang—she was utterly unable to punish him. Put him on a chair in the centre of the room and tell him to stay there—for some naughtiness—and before her back was turned he had made a ship of the chair, a sea of the room, and would be having a perfectly beautiful time playing shipwreck. Stand him in a corner, and the corner instantly became a cave and he’d be deep in a fight with bears. Put him to bed, and he’d make a tent of the bedding and have the loveliest time playing Indian. Maddening, perhaps, at times, but what a promising habit of mind with which to start the big journey! Is it worth time and patience to secure? What more so! For how spankingly bracing, in contrast with the dragging-down, depressive attitude, is the attitude of the thoroughbred, of never being downed by circumstance, of going always with the head up, the eyes clear, and the vision fixed on the conquering way; of having one’s quality grounded in one’s self rather than in one’s possessions!

And it’s all about us everywhere, the brave attitude. From France come reports of the wonderful spirit manifested by members of old families who are now living in the basements of what were once palatial mansions. “This old house knew many a famous guest,” cried one of these, “but this new home of ours, this dug-out—it has sheltered many a brave soldier. We live in greater pride ... a new glory is on us.”

A blind man I know is one of the most cheerful travellers in the great invisible army of dauntless souls. He is editor of an important newspaper, and he does his work with such human insight, and such an appreciation of the beauty of life, such sympathy for the humblest of people and all their little tragedies, for the greatest of people and all their tremendous responsibilities, that troubled ones often seek him out and are astonished to find him groping in the dark for their hand. He’ll describe to you in glowing terms the hallelujah chorus of birds in the early morning above a stream that flows calmly: “Not one of those tempestuous little mountain torrents,” he’ll explain, very particular about its character, “but a calm, steadily flowing stream with the serenity of eternity.” And he’ll tell you how the drops of water glisten like diamonds on the points of the leaves when the sun comes out after a shower. Oh, he’ll make your breast ache with the beauty he pictures—the beauty he sees with his blind eyes and that you never quite see with your sighted ones. He didn’t need eyes to see with.... God knows, it seems, when we must have the physical instrument, all the padding of “things,” the crutches and props of circumstance.

And there’s courageous little Tama, who must go draggingly always, because a nurse dropped her when she was a baby—Tama, who never ran and played with other children, never bounced around in the jolly surf, never rolled a hoop or went on roller skates—can never have the joys of life most young women fill their dreams with—but to whom people go with their complainings and to them she’ll say briskly, “Well, you can’t have everything with a bowl of soup,” and then go ahead and help find out just what they can have, and how fine it all is, after all.

And there’s a dear old factory worker in my neighbourhood who is for ever shining up into life with a wonderful discovery—in a vacated house she found a lot of old rags that will wash up just fine for rugs! And now that the war is over, one can once more get sugar sacks at the corner grocery and have again the luxury of new underwear—a thing denied during the sugar-sack famine, apparently. And a little boy who lights up all over and comes running with the great news, “Auntie, Auntie, the moon’s come back!” overjoyed that the little boys in China are through with it, and it is his turn to have it again. And an old man whose eyes shine as if they for ever saw visions—a lonely old man who mends shoes all day. But when it was suggested that he should get out-of-doors on Sundays for his health’s sake, came back in an outburst of beautiful confidence: “Ah, I do, I do—every Sunday. You see, I have a grave to keep.” Not in gloom, not in heaviness of spirit, but in joy over a service he still could render the partner of his happier years.

And once, on a long wilderness hike, I found one of these dauntless spirits in a tiny shack buried deep in a little lost valley of the Sierras. I stirred her up as one might a wren in its nest, inadvertently. She was glad that I came, because—she wondered—had I seen the world from the top of the Sierras? And what was it like up there? It developed that she had lived always in the valley and her husband had but recently died, so, as she put it, she must make a new programme. But she must see the world first from the top of the Sierras. We talked for the better part of an afternoon, there on her crude doorstep in the shadow of the great mountains, and I left and tramped on, not hearing her name and she not hearing mine, neither of us being curious, so interested was each of us in what the other’s mind had recorded, mine from the mountain-top looking down, hers from the valley looking up. Long after I discovered that she was one of our best-loved poets, tucked off there in her wilderness nest—known to the world only by her brave, sweet song.

Often she appears—that special woman—in a long line coming to meet one in stranger towns. You wonder about her; you can’t forget her ... there is something, you can’t say just what. I remember one who came like something buoyantly upspringing from the earth, a rose in a north wind. I couldn’t help making inquiries. Her husband was in the penitentiary, and she was earning a living with her needle for her little boy—and she had been a gently nurtured girl and married for love. Apparently it had never occurred to her to draw apart from the life of her kind, to shut herself in and spend her days brooding, using her little son as a sort of animated weeping-post. This baby was having the only babyhood he would ever have; soon it would be the only childhood, the only life. So she crowded back the atmosphere from her own troubles and took a firm stand in the brightness of life for her child’s happy days.

And once—and this sometimes seems to me the most marvellous vehicle of all for the message—I found in the cindery crater of an extinct volcano a bravely rooted bleeding-heart, all delicately hung with blood-filled blossoms. Where did it get its nourishment in those volcanic cinders? Where—we might ask—do they all get their nourishment—all those who root and bloom so beautifully in such untoward soil?

For everywhere we see them, in every community, in every smallest circle—these high souls of earth—with the light of battle in their eyes and the God of battles at their back, carrying on unfalteringly, as the Crusaders carried on, as the boys in France carried on—but magnificently alone, without the cheer of stirring band music or a commanding officer’s orders. And they march on, and march on, and march on, up through the years ... but they do hear music—music never heard by those of the drooped head and the dragging feet, the music of God’s harmonies ... and they do hear the tramp of marching comrades, those other brave ones who will not be beaten to earth ... for they have joined an invisible army whose hands reach out to each new recruit .... And so she is not so alone as she seems to you, that brave-spirited woman in your own circle at whom you wonder.

Oh, the bravery of people, it seems to me, is the most splendid spectacle in the world to-day! A lump rises in the throat, and we lift our eyes, and our arms, and our voices, and we cry aloud, “These shall not be brave in vain!” The world shall catch their suggestion—not that other of pessimism and depression and doubt, but this finer thing—and move on surely through the muck of the lower lands to the heights of clearer vision!

Then sing! Sing in the rain, sing in the sunshine, sing from the mountain-tops and the valleys! Let all your being sing out that it is good to be alive, good to be a part of a world struggling to find itself, good to be the very least in the ranks of the rebuilders and recreators, of the valiant of earth, the army commanded by God!