Читать книгу Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 6

Table of Contents

In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good district, but there was no peace there. I felt forgotten. I had not the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little plot. There was no inner order in my heart—on the contrary, chaos in and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the healing of Nature.

So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The country is good, but it is not for me. … " I loved to read about the country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria. I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would sink into a bovine rumination.

Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the roads of the many—the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the devil is the voice of the crowd.

Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of the larger issues:

"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing children into the world. When evolving persons have reached individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them, they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red Indian westward off the face of the earth.

"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision which was their birthright."

It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of life.

There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it, and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to me, and all that the elm-tree meant—hill-cabins and country dusks, bees and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for all that the elm-tree knew—as if I were exiled from the very flesh that could bring the good low earth to my senses again.

Could it be that something was changed within—that we were ready at last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars—one that would take us to the Lake St. Claire shore, and another that crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern indentations for nearly ten miles.

"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.

It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy—the tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest. … The countryman came running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:

"He can tell you more than I can."

I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that. … In a way it was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth edited. He called men by 'phone—names strange to me then that have become household names since—while we sat by smiling and silent in his little newspaper shop. … And those who came wanted to know if we drank, when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.

Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of the car had been rigid among beer-cases.

We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of the West shore, the town between. … Somehow we always turn to the East in our best moments and it was so this day. … We were directed to the house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages. That boy you shall be glad to know.

We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He would have been strange, indeed, had she failed. … I look back now from where I sit—to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to the very edge of a willowed bluff—to the end of the land. Erie brimmed before us. It led to a new life, too.

I had always disliked Erie—as one who lived in the Lake Country and chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie heretofore had meant only something to be crossed—something shallow and petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars from this vantage. … If a man built his house here, he could explain where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think—we are pausing still. One must pause to project a dream.

… For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year. Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had given. There were days in which we were so happy—that another summer of such life would have seemed too much to ask.

I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully every night across the Lake—a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide, obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like the smell of blood.

… There are men and women in town who are dying for the country; literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants—turning back with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space, and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other. … One does not say what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be free.

The City, intolerable as it is in itself—in its very nature against the growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time—is nevertheless the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.

Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole is an ascent.

A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again from the country replenished and refreshed.

The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.

Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men look up more seldom.