Читать книгу Now I Remember: Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist - Thornton Waldo Burgess - Страница 10
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A Touch of Nostalgia
Seldom is there progress without some loss, loss with the finality of completeness. I am acutely aware of this when looking back to boyhood days. I wonder if age of the future will look back to youth of the present with any such sense of something missing, or if it may be that life today is at too great a pace for anything that may drop from it to be missed.
Progress involves change. Cape Cod of today is progressive. Who would have it otherwise? The Cape is changed and is still changing. In terms of modern living it has changed for the better, but not without some loss. It is from such losses that stems the nostalgia we of a passing generation feel from time to time. In a single day the splendid highways of the present unroll to the speeding visitor the map of the entire Cape. But it is a pictorial map, nothing more. He has had only a bird’s-eye view, seeing too much and too little. Certainly he has seen the Cape, but only as the gull, crossing it in search of more productive fishing waters, sees it. He has seen but does not know the Cape, its quiet hidden charms, the true way of life of its chosen people.
The sandy, rutted road and the horse and buggy are gone, but in their day there was time to see, to feel and to understand. In these days of too much too fast and too easy, I sometimes wonder if the compensations equal the all too often unnoted losses.
I love the Cape that is, but I think I love more the Cape that was. Among other things, I miss the bells of yesterday. Their communal tongues are stilled. This is not peculiar to the Cape, but somehow I am most conscious of the loss when I visit my old home town there. In the village of Sandwich were four churches: Methodist, Congregational, Unitarian and Catholic, each with a bell. The first three called to worship at the same hours on the Sabbath and in tones as distinctive as the denominations they represented. Each could be heard throughout the village and far into the surrounding country. Ringing at the same hours but not in unison, each called to its faithful own in subtly varied tones as befitted the day of rest and worship; not too fast lest an unseemly note of merriment creep in; not too slow lest it seem the voice of sorrow and mourning. Through long service the bell ringers had mastered the art of giving life and speech to the brazen tongues in the belfries high above them.
At other times those same bells swung furiously, clanging tongues flinging far and wide the alarm and call for help, as when an old lady had wandered into the woods and was lost, or when forest fires threatened the village and there was need of every able-bodied man and boy to fight the red terror. Again in joyous celebration those very bells pealed in wild jubilance and merriment. How differently they spoke in the hour of sorrow and mourning. I can still feel the sense of national disaster that swept over a small boy listening to the solemn tones as they tolled for the death of President Garfield.
At seven o’clock every morning of the week but Sunday the bell on the Boston and Sandwich glass factory called most of the men of the town to work, and again at one o’clock after the dinner hour. At that period a day’s work was ten hours and no one thought this more than fair for a day’s wage.
Each morning of the school year at eight-forty-five the bell on the high school building on the hill above the lake warned reluctant feet they had just fifteen minutes wherein to avoid the black mark of tardiness. Outside the village in the little schoolhouse beside the road, long since a “ragged beggar sunning,” the teacher’s hand bell called us from the playground. At railroad crossings the bell on the approaching locomotive clanged a warning to “look out for the engine.”
In winter sleigh bells filled the frosty air with jingled merriment. Even indoors daily life answered more or less to the dictum of bells. There were few electric bells. Doorbells carried honest tongues that in response to a pulled wire jangled an announcement of the waiting guest. It was not musical but never was it doubtful. In homes of modest affluence where a maid was employed she was summoned to wait on guests at the table by the silvery notes of a bell, often of the now coveted Sandwich glass. Some of these table bells were beautifully etched or engraved, and some were of the now priceless ruby glass.
Once each year the village boys had an outlaw claim on the church bells. The annual rebirth of the glorious Fourth of July was announced and saluted at midnight if possible, or as soon after as the more daring could outwit a church sexton and get their hands on the bell rope, or if need be climb to the belfry and there draw the rope up out of reach of restraining hands.
No more do the bells have authority or even take part in the communal life of the village. In 1884 the factory bell called the glassmakers to work for the last time. The glass works is but a memory to the townsfolk today, not even that to the younger generation. The three Protestant churches have united in one house of worship, to the financial benefit of the worshipers and especially of the one minister now needed, and two bells have been silenced with the loss of denominational individuality. The town schools have been consolidated in a fine, thoroughly modern schoolhouse. The high school bell is silent, the schoolhouse’s as well. Today the children are sent instead of called to school. Pull doorbells have given way to knockers or chimes or press-button electric bells. The buzzer has replaced the table bell.
What has happened in my old home town is equally true in most other communities. They have lost their communal tongues. Something sweet, something precious and in no small degree important has disappeared or is disappearing from American life. If in the soft warm dusk on an evening in June you ever have listened to a village church bell in concert with the exquisite song of the hermit thrush or the wood thrush, and felt the spirit of rest and peace and tranquillity which they invoke, you will understand what I mean. Today there are few bells of any kind save possibly in the country—perhaps now and then a cowbell betraying a wanderer from the herd, or at the seashore the mournful, depressing moan of a bell buoy telling what has happened and may happen again in the fogbound restless sea.
The union of the churches and the consolidation of the schools were wise progressive measures, I know, but the bells are gone. For that matter, so are the schoolhouses of my boyhood. The modern building of the consolidated schools overlooks a cove of the onetime Mill Pond, now a lake, where with pole cut from nearby alders, a line tied to the tip of it, and an honest-to-goodness fishhook instead of the proverbial bent pin, I caught my first fish. It was a small striped perch, the sweetest fish I ever have tasted.
Near this place where the fish was caught was a spring of clear cold water. When I was in the primary school (grades were not known then) it was in a building perhaps two city blocks from the present school building. Daily in good weather two of us boys would be sent to get a pail of drinking water from that spring. It was there that I first became acquainted with Redwing the Blackbird and learned that the flower-bearing part of the sweet flag we called the kernel—why, I don’t know—was good to eat, quite as good as the tender heart of the plant to a boy who knew the right stage in which to pick the kernels. I wonder if the spring is still there. I wonder too what the children using the bubbling drinking fountain in that fine school building would think if they were suddenly forced to take turns bringing all their drinking water from such a distance and then making common use of a tin drinking cup.
Some years ago the third-graders of this same consolidated school gave me one of those thrills that in vulgar idiom we call a “kick” and that now and then relieves the humdrum monotony of daily routine. I had word that their teacher had taken them on a tour of the village to visit points considered of local interest. Among these was the room in which I was born. I wrote these small folk that they knew something I didn’t know and don’t know now. I know the house in which that unimportant event took place but I don’t know the room.
During the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, points of interest were marked with identifying signs. Before going to the celebration I heard that one house had been labeled “The House in Which Thornton Burgess Lived.” Apparently at that time no one knew in which house I was born, so they had selected one in which I had lived. I was curious to see which house had been so labeled, for Mother and I had at one time and another lived in no less than ten houses in the old town. It would have been better if the sign had read “A House” instead of “The House,” for the house so marked was lived in for only the last two years of my residence in the town. However, I deeply appreciated and was grateful for the recognition and honor that had been paid me. It refuted so wonderfully the old saying, “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.”
Yet it was all very embarrassing. It was intended as and really was recognition of a native son’s success in the larger field beyond the town’s somewhat narrow limits. As I was warmly greeted by old schoolmates and friends, some of whom I had not seen for so long that I failed to recognize them as they approached, I became fearful lest some to whom fortune had been less generous than to me might in their hearts feel that I was returning to the old home to parade such modest success as I had attained. Afterward in my own heart I apologized for entertaining such a thought for a moment.
It set me to wondering what this sought-for, fought-for indefinite thing called success really is. Some of those men and women had lived all their lives in the old town, practically unknown beyond its boundaries. But they had made an honest living where a good living was hard to make; had maintained their independence, made homes of their own, educated their children and prepared them to enter the outer world to do their part in the work of it; they had taken a direct interest in the affairs of the town, shared in the responsibilities of home government, gone to the aid of neighbors in distress. Who shall say that each of these, making the most of the limited opportunities within his or her grasp, was not in the truest and the broadest sense of the word a success? Had I in the vastly wider field in which I worked made as much of the greater opportunities that were mine? It was a sobering question. Success is too often confused with self-advertising and notoriety. It is not to be assayed by publicity or adulation. It is not the sole perquisite of high places. The degree of success in life should be measured by the field of opportunity. Success is to be found, all too often unrecognized, in every village and hamlet however small. It is this that makes America great.
