Chapter IV: Part 4

I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are small, but too big _for them_, and make a little clatter as they go over the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or somewhere that I do not know of.

The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but if one moves quickly they all run away.

I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready. Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn much more about them.

* * * * *

... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep, but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:

"... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one
thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me
something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or
tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can
get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
asked for."

I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for fulfilments at once.

"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every day, and perhaps something will come."

These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on Roses:

If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
pull me right out of the body and out into another world
where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
tea roses.

I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very
much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that
sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
every day.

A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.

"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
is!"

"Which one do you like best?" I asked.

"The red one, of course," the girl answered.

"Why, the other two are much----" I began.

"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
likes them red ones best?"

I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
Nature, know her better from their reading than country
people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk
on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
people like red roses because they are like them. The red
roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow
teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow
bigger. They are not ashamed.

A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put
into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it
is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down
under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose
spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have
been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is
fine enough for them, and it has come--and others. Months
afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses
come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all
wonderful?

I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey Day:

Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan
shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little
wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the
crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of
wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the
harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday
scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had
begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the
window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I
could not finish that essay; I had to write something about
the grey happy day.

On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always
so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was
on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made
us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water,
cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see
that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only
one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if
they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you,
they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander
through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many
different faces, different and strange lands and people.
Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and
everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge
dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away.
The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new
ones come.

A TALK

What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.

At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard, flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange, wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love them. But that is all, for they are working hard.

If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together, and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any _old_ thing.

What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.

12

TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT

It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable, the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:

"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take another look at your little stone study."

I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff, casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.

"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I can frame it up for you."

When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty, and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.

This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in his own cellar:

"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let me."

He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.

"And it's all paid for?" I asked.

He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."

"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for it?"

"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."

That was not to be forgotten.

So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house, because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.

As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors, merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.

There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in the village still, but different.

Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted the paddle.

There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it. The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.

The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No word.

The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty, picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night the Canadian said:

"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old, even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them, sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring, the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live differently."

Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town, when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another incident:

... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so well--had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare flesh--that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and the interurban lines), and for what they do not get of the natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.

They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was shameless.

Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious of itself--and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent these shores.

The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth--and vision requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive, scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they are prone to sink.

It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations. We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards, and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work, that subject.

In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.

The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in the case of the countryside which complained.

They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all the living lights--the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to Questing--man's real and most significant business. They do not know that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of spirit to rise above the resistance.

As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian rather than individual. The year around, these people wear clothing,--woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.

They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with the sense of possession.

They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew.

They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_ They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and motion-photography.

The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is merely an unlettered thing.

No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.

All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the soul just as every other fine thing comes.

We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening--love and life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter.... But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that he is serving his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of fear or curses them for straying.

I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening--but the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.

I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve, but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead. The paths behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and lowly communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal with one small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small ways. We wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we forget that. We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and gracious night--but God pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at life, and not lie to ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a little.

All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in bringing in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:

"How noble are the simple-minded--how sweet the people of the Countryside--how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.

The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good is ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if forced to go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for men, though he must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is ready, one brilliant little fact rises in his consciousness--one that comes to stay, and around which all future thinking must build itself. It is this:

When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.

All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First the dreamer dreams--and then the people make it action....

What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.

To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.

The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate among the infinite small doors of the many--which is cowardice and the grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman. He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....

The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world. Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision--all good comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely, which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary victory.

The real workman then--vibrating between compassion and contempt--his body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.

13

NATURAL CRUELTY

In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and the grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they are, in fact, in that more rapid and mysterious passage between conception and birth. Young nations pass through the same phases, and some of them are abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing. The child feels it in his hands, and the nation feels it in its first victory.... In the Chapel during a period of several days we talked about the wonder of animals (the little boys of the house present) and the results were so interesting that I put together some of the things discussed in the following form, calling the paper Adventures in Cruelty:

As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain
matters of charity as we used to regard them are vulgar now.
I remember when a great sign, THE HOME OF THE
FRIENDLESS, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city
school children, as we passed daily through a certain street.
Though it is gone now, something of the curse of it is still
upon the premises. I always think of what a certain observer
said:

"You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world,
where men could give such a name to a house of love-babies."

I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to
time on the streets, during the long summers, _different_
green-blue wagons. The drivers were different, too--I recall
one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one of the
fascinating horrors of our bringing-up--the fork, the noose,
the stray dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the
door slammed, and no word at all from the driver--nothing we
could build on, or learn his character by. He was a part of
the law, and we were taught then that the law was
everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters
against it.... But the green-blue wagons are gone, and the
Law has come to conform a bit with the character of youth.

The time is not long since when we met our adventures in
cruelty alone--no concert of enlightened citizens on these
subjects--and only the very few had found the flaw in the
gospel that God had made the animals, and all the little
animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there
is a bit of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it
cannot be said to belong to the New Age.

Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better.
Formerly western drovers used to drive their herds into the
brush for the winters. The few that the winter and the wolves
didn't get were supposed to be hardy enough to demand a
price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost the
beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years
of labour; that the result was decrepit colts and stringy
dwarfs for the beef market. Also there was agitation on the
subject, and the custom passed. City men who owned horses in
large numbers found their _efficiency_ brought to a higher
notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth
and rest. There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are
those who believe that it will see us through to the
millennium.

A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country
there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red
and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers.
Her name was Mary--Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children
played with us, and they were like other children in every
way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves
disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin
children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they
said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was
always on the roadside--no remote back-pastures for her. She
loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to
deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting
the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game
and walk sedately out of the ring--just as she would when a
baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too
long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus
think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we
passed her--to and from school. It was said that she could
negotiate any gate or lock.

"Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin
house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they
were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the
whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind
of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her,
and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she is old.
She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin
children said.

"Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke
to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy
that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom,
they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old Mary.... You
see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a
child--but you never can know what it showed me of the world.
None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have
not since. I cannot."

Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I wanted butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady that had eyes the children would see fairies in----

"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of yours----"

"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"

"Yes, sound as a trivet."

"A good yielder?"

"All of that."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the milktime, there isn't much left for beef----"

"But I don't want to eat her."

"But as an investment--you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down--they don't weigh much at the butcher's."

The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:

"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's abominations in a city street yesterday--cart with crate, new calf inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter--a very interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government. For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little bewildered bit of veal--and now we were to eat what was left of her.... Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live chickens were piled there awaiting shipment--crushed into eight-inch crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an atrocious horror like that--a man being held in a torture-cell in such a position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve, to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this thing before--yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then tell it again and again--until enough others see, to make it dangerous to ship that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his life-work to change those crates--to make those crates such a stench and abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he concluded.

There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then very often a man sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to bulk in freight and express.

Yet there is _efficiency_ even to that added expenditure--a very thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and suffered the lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage, blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so far had little elucidation.

Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged in slaughtering--nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles change--but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens found theirs in the city yards.

The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace, merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped to spare the helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work to bring it about.

Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver, but it has been found that more is required. You may threaten him with the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his manhandling for the moment--but in some alley, he is alone with his horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is he who puts the poor creature to bed.

The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime, for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of knowing things; it is the coarseness of fibre which resists all the fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about them will be harrowingly treated.

So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.

On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed--with a few days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above the price of the hide--to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for the shipment.

The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought all that was stopped long ago----"

Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that is to run a blockade, if the premium is right--so will a certain element of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of manhood proper.

The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from without instead of from within.

Custom is a formidable enemy--that herd instinct of a people which causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are children to do when their parents shout _mad-dog_ and run for clubs and pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot? Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.

The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences--upon astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology--are the results of flashes of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.

Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change--that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores of a New World.

14

CHILDREN CHANGE

The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated, having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every sea.

The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little class after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they really belonged to the class. It was primarily designed for the younger minds--and I was unwilling to change that.

You would think it rather difficult--I know I did--to bring the work in one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the young men:

"Of course it is _their_ hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As for me--the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two classes."

They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.

"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.

They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:

"Chapel is the best hour of the day----"

He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of _staying down_ a little each day--or the world would never hear his voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did. The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any competitive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will come to all the world.