Читать книгу The Stream Runs Fast - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 3

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January first, 1943, was not just another day. It was not only the first day of a new year to me, but it was the first day of a new era. The old moulds had suddenly broken and I knew that on the highway of life I had come to a wide place on the road.

Hitherto I had done certain things on each day of the week, circumstances driving. Now I was free. Nothing mattered. I could stop and stare, dawdle, dream or drift, do anything I wished or—nothing. The books had closed. I could not comprehend it all at first. I felt as stripped and bare as the old horse with his harness gone!

I became acutely sensitive to my surroundings; the old familiar objects became doubly dear. The sun, sea and sky were mine now to enjoy. I listened to the robins busy with the arbutus berries, and filling the air with excited conversation like women waiting for the store to open for a bargain sale. They were getting ready for their long trek south, and were putting in one good meal before they started. . . . The sun was running over the green fields playing strange tricks with the trees on the headlands. The green fields here at the coast, fed by the winter rains, cheat the gloomiest day and make it impossible for anyone to feel sad. Everything that I saw that day as I looked out of my window had a merry look, even the washing on the line under the bare cherry trees made a gay showing of color and graceful billowings. The yellow jasmine that had now reached the window sill smiled at me, with its dainty golden stars, and I smiled back.

What had I to be so glad about?

My world was at war. The doctors tell me I'm washed up and finished. I can no longer drive a car, work in the garden or travel, must avoid crowds, eat sparingly, observing one general rule: "If you like it, avoid it". What had I to be so glad about?

But I am glad and my heart sings. Having loved this present world, known its joys and enjoyed its pleasures, I can now do a bit of free-wheeling, and besides, I have a great treasure bestowed upon me, one that was never mine before. Now I have Time, a full issue, as long as it lasts. I feel like Scrooge on that beautiful sparkling Christmas morning when he, too, found something very precious.

Time! Blue-misted, rainbow-hued Time, tanged by the salt Pacific breeze—twenty-four hours a day to use as I wished. I have lost space and speed but won Time, and now I can actually summer-fallow my mind, and it needs just that after these long active years. Like the impatient prairie farmer, I have cropped it too steadily, forcing it to yield. Now I can construct a new life on a new pattern. For the first time in my life I can disregard the clock and the calendar, and write as I please.

One dark memory assails me in this matter of writing. Hitherto I have done my best work when I have had a few good, lively interruptions. When I began "Clearing in the West" I did the first third in my usual hit-and-miss manner, working at odd times, and running a house at the same time. I remember I used to set the alarm clock to remind me to turn on the oven for the next meal, and always in the back of my mind I promised myself that some day I would have a real chance at writing, when I had nothing else in the world to do. I often indulged in that pleasant dream and told myself that I had never really had a fair chance.

Later in that year, 1934, all the conditions were perfect. I had no concern with meals. I took no outside engagements. I had a round table in an upper room in another woman's house. The lighting was good, the windows were too high for me to see out, I had piles of paper, a dozen sharpened pencils and not a thing in the world to do but write. For two terrible days I sat looking at the paper with my mind as dry as a covered bridge, not an idea stirring. It gave me a queer panicky feeling. I wondered if this really could happen to me. Did I really have to carry weight to be able to run at all? I kept thinking of a dozen things I wanted to do, every one of which seemed far more important than finishing my book. I wondered what I could say by way of explanation. Would I really have to admit that it wasn't in me to write any more? But my mind warmed up at last and I finished the book. Now I am going to continue the same story, my own story. This time I write with a sense of urgency, poignant but not unpleasant. In the back of my head I can hear the old tune we sang at Sunday School: "Work for the Night is Coming" . . .

It is strange about Time. One day I was no more conscious of it than I was of the air I breathed. There was plenty of time, days and days, running in and out, thousands of them. Then all at once some place there jangled a warning bell.

Writing is not like any other kind of work. There is a fervor in it that overcomes fatigue or even pain. It is a fire in the blood, a shot in the arm. It holds us when life begins to ravel, just as all the earth gathers itself into the brief brightness of Indian Summer before the stillness of winter falls. I wonder if it is the desire to be remembered? Miss Millay spoke for all of us when she wrote:

"Stranger pause and look From the dust of ages, Lift this little book Turn its battered pages; Read me, do not let me die; Search the fading letters, finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I! Women at your toil, Women at your leisure, Till the kettle boil Snatch of me your pleasure. Where the broom straw marks the leaf Women quiet with your weeping Lest you wake a workman sleeping Mix me with your grief!"

This may not be a noble reason for writing. It may be just one cut above the people who carve their names on park benches but it is real and dominant in all of us. But this is not my only reason for writing this book.

I have seen my country emerge from obscurity into one of the truly great nations of the world. I have seen strange things come to pass in the short span of one lifetime, and I hasten to set it down while the light holds. People must know the past to understand the present and to face the future. The British people endured their trials because they have their roots in history.

In Canada we are developing a pattern of life and I know something about one block of that pattern. I know it for I helped to make it, and I can say that now without any pretense of modesty, or danger of arrogance, for I know that we who make the patterns are not important, but the pattern is.

That night, when it seemed that I might be going out with the tide, I knew I had no reason for feeling cheated, for I had had a good innings and a long run. I had warmed both hands before the fires of life.

I had been paid my wages in the incorruptible coin of loyal friendship and love, and the sense of life's continuity comforted me more than the drugs the young doctor had administered for my relief. Even in the shaded light of the room, the drama of life was proceeding, clear and decisive, and I knew that all was well with the world,—the nurse was knitting a little shirt . . .

I thought, by some strange freak of memory, of the Tenmarq wheat the Mennonites had brought to Kansas from Russia in 1873, the year I was born, and how it is now going back to Russia to seed its scorched fields. There it is again, the great circle of life, nothing lost, nothing without meaning; sixteen gallons of wheat hand-picked by poor peasants, whose names no one remembers, now going back in a great convoy of ships to feed a nation.

As my brain cleared, I had a great longing to live. There was good mileage in me yet, and there were so many things that I wanted to do and had always been so sure that I would do. I did not want to leave one good word unwritten, one good story untold. I would have worked harder if I had have known that life could be so soon over. I always knew that our spiritual forces were not keeping pace with our mechanical development. It is so easy to destroy and so hard to build up. The challenge of the new world never lay so heavily upon me and never did time seem so inexorable. There is a new world to be built and it must come in the hearts of the people. We have to see it before we can build it. Armies can stop wars, but only the Truth can make men free. Miracles are happening everywhere; new processes, new methods, new materials. Men were never so clever and never so needy. The age of plenty is here, if only the heart of man can be prepared, and he can be made to see that what hurts one nation hurts all. What a time to be alive! And what a poor time to die. So I lived.

"Without Regret" is the name I would like to have chosen for this book. There is something light and gallant about the phrase which appeals to me, reminiscent of that great passage in one of Walt Whitman's poems, where he speaks of his admiration for animals because they are not sorry or repentant for anything they have ever done, nor do they ever weary one with their apologies or excuses. I have been reading over my diaries which I have kept since 1912, and my scrapbooks, and it has been rather an overwhelming task, but I am glad that I have kept everything, and so in these I have an honest record of my activities with both the praise and blame which came to me, but the reading of them has been a task which leaves me shaken at times.

I have been accused, attacked and maligned. Once I was burned in effigy (which I had entirely forgotten until I read the Party's apologies in one of my scrapbooks). I have been caricatured, usually as a mosquito or other disagreeable insect, under the caption of "Calamity Nell". I have engaged in hot controversies, been threatened with violence and with libel suits, but on the other side of the ledger I have been stoutly defended by many good friends, known and unknown. I have had songs and poems written to me and I've had my name in lights. I have had and still have many loyal and faithful friends, who have known me long and still love me. I have always been rather proud of my enemies too, for I have never desired the approval or even the tolerance of the people whose interests run contrary to the public good, the people who believe if they are happy and prosperous, all's well with the world. I have never indulged in hating people and am glad to remember that I could attack opinions without feeling any bitterness toward the people who held them. But still I cannot look back without regret. I can see too many places where I could have been more obedient to the heavenly vision, for a vision I surely had for the creation of a better world.

But I hope I am leaving at least some small legacy of truth.