Читать книгу Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 9

Table of Contents

There is no playground like a sandy shore—and this was sheltered from the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people turn to it often from the classes.

The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented cottages. It was while in the water that I determined to explore. The first thing that impressed me when I reached the eminence was the silence. It was something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also still. There was no road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the bluff, and the shore fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few people passed there. That most comfortable little town was lying against the rear horizon to the West. I used to come in the evenings and smoke as the sun went down. Sometimes the beauty of it was all I could bear—the voices of children in the distance and the Pelee light flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.

I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago. There was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the time. The fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a soil as anywhere in the Lake Country.

Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and brick-house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural point, but that the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the property, fruit-trees, brick-house and all.

I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for three days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the shore-line almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed, so that what remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play of the weathers. If some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site would follow the orchard—that was clear.

… Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all. … Thoreau in his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same critical delight, and found his abode where others did not care to follow. We look twice at the spot we choose to build our house. That second look is not so free and innocent. … Yet a man may build his house. Thoreau had no little brood coming up, and I have doubted many times, even in moments of austere admiration, if he wouldn't have lived longer, had there been a woman about to nourish him. She would have insisted upon a better roof, at least. … I told the neighbour-man I would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering me about it. He smiled and came once too often.

The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the edge, for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake, at one with it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the yarrow and the daisy. I remember the long grass of the hollows, the peculiar soft bloom of it, and what a place it was to lie and dream, until one became a part of the solution of sunshine and tinted immensity.

So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.

When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point wearing away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was mine, bought by the foot-front. … A man may build his house.

Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks they came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind made match-wood of all arrangements. … The high water would wash and weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth above would fall—only to be carried out again by the waves. The base had to be saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down the shore I noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles with the shore had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows behind had retained it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so authoritatively, but I followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now like an ancient Peruvian. It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot of labour to a city man, and it remained as it was for several days.

One morning I came forth in lashing weather—and rubbed my eyes. The jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay was dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water, snaking the big boulders into line with a chain—a sixty-foot jetty by sun-down, built on top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man ever spent a few dollars more profitably. Even these stones were covered in time, and there was over a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of the clay and thinning out on the slope of shore to the end of the stones. Later, when building, I took four hundred yards of sand from the east side of the stone jetty, and it was all brought back by the next storm. …

I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions possess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy. Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden—all for the price of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.

But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also forget it. A few good things—perennials, by all means an elm-tree, stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have passed—these are enough. For a home that does not promote your naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.

Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion—through the very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of simplicity which permit a man to forget himself—just missing the fact that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only to show us wherein our treasure lies.

The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual garnering—that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it. It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed in them—not to rush forth at length from our miserable self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man—that is ahead.

That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week—there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed; they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing—and low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without help. The temporality of all things—even of the great imperturbable trees—is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."

There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started there—dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live, but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in winter, if their laterals are severed. … I want the birds to come to this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must be watched for it is a beautiful murderer. …

I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first summer that I yearn for again—close to the sand, close to the voices of the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.

The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below, and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes. Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths—a trickle of water over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines—something of all this will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is last, as the Shore was first. … I brought a willow trunk there this Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.

The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and clearer—a blend of patio and broad hearth—running water and red firelight—built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a roof of wired glass over a patio paved with brick; the area sunken slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms, urns, ferns and winter plants.

All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it—and as yet, there wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.