Adventures In Contentment - David Grayson
I even cease to fear Mrs. Horace, who is quite the most formidable
person in this neighbourhood. She is so avaricious in the saving of
souls--and so covetous of mine, which I wish especially to retain. When
I see her coming across the hill I feel like running and hiding, and if
I were as bold as a boy, I should do it, but being a grown-up coward I
remain and dissemble.
She came over this morning. When I beheld her afar off, I drew a long
breath: "One thousand," I quoted to myself, "shall flee at the rebuke of
one."
In calmness I waited. She came with colours flying and hurled her
biblical lance. When I withstood the shock with unexpected jauntiness,
for I usually fall dead at once, she looked at me with severity and
said:
"Mr. Grayson, you are a materialist."
"You have shot me with a name," I replied. "I am unhurt."
It would be impossible to slay me on a day like this. On a day like
this I am immortal.
It comes to me as the wonder of wonders, these spring days, how surely
everything, spiritual as well as material, proceeds out of the earth. I
have times of sheer Paganism when I could bow and touch my face to the
warm bare soil. We are so often ashamed of the Earth--the soil of it,
the sweat of it, the good common coarseness of it. To us in our fine
raiment and soft manners, it seems indelicate. Instead of seeking that
association with the earth which is the renewal of life, we devise
ourselves distant palaces and seek strange pleasures. How often and
sadly we repeat the life story of the yellow dodder of the moist lanes
of my lower farm. It springs up fresh and clean from the earth itself,
and spreads its clinging viny stems over the hospitable wild balsam and
golden rod. In a week's time, having reached the warm sunshine of the
upper air, it forgets its humble beginnings. Its roots wither swiftly
and die out, but the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and
spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by
strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds.
I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder--rootless,
leafless, parasitic--reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and
smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes
and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be like
that: so much of our civilization is like that. Men and women there
are--the pity of it--who, eating plentifully, have never themselves
taken a mouthful from the earth. They have never known a moment's real
life of their own. Lying up to the sun in warmth and comfort--but
leafless--they do not think of the hosts under them, smothered,
strangled, starved. They take _nothing_ at first hand. They experience
described emotion, and think prepared thoughts. They live not in life,
but in printed reports of life. They gather the odour of odours, not the
odour itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A poor, sad, second-rate
existence!
Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail, every
one, until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil!
My wild plum trees grow in the coarse earth, among excrementitious
mould, a physical life which finally blossoms and exhales its perfect
odour: which ultimately bears the seed of its immortality.
Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation of
work: and the seed of human immortality is borne secretly within the
coarse and mortal husk. So many of us crave the odour without
cultivating the earthly growth from which it proceeds: so many, wasting
mortality, expect immortality!
----"Why," asks Charles Baxter, "do you always put the end of your
stories first?"
"You may be thankful," I replied, "that I do not make my remarks all
endings. Endings are so much more interesting than beginnings."
Without looking up from the buggy he was mending, Charles Baxter
intimated that my way had at least one advantage: one always knew, he
said, that I really had an end in view--and hope deferred, he said----
----How surely, soundly, deeply, the physical underlies the spiritual.
This morning I was up and out at half-past four, as perfect a morning as
I ever saw: mists yet huddled in the low spots, the sun coming up over
the hill, and all the earth fresh with moisture, sweet with good
odours, and musical with early bird-notes.
It is the time of the spring just after the last seeding and before the
early haying: a catch-breath in the farmer's year. I have been utilising
it in digging a drainage ditch at the lower end of my farm. A spot of
marsh grass and blue flags occupies nearly half an acre of good land and
I have been planning ever since I bought the place to open a drain from
its lower edge to the creek, supplementing it in the field above, if
necessary, with submerged tiling. I surveyed it carefully several weeks
ago and drew plans and contours of the work as though it were an
inter-oceanic canal. I find it a real delight to work out in the earth
itself the details of the drawing.
This morning, after hastening with the chores, I took my bag and my
spade on my shoulder and set off (in rubber boots) for the ditch. My way
lay along the margin of my cornfield in the deep grass. On my right as I
walked was the old rail fence full of thrifty young hickory and cherry
trees with here and there a clump of blackberry bushes. The trees
beyond the fence cut off the sunrise so that I walked in the cool broad
shadows. On my left stretched the cornfield of my planting, the young
corn well up, very attractive and hopeful, my really frightful scarecrow
standing guard on the knoll, a wisp of straw sticking up through a hole
in his hat and his crooked thumbs turned down--"No mercy."
"Surely no corn ever before grew like this," I said to myself.
"To-morrow I must begin cultivating again."
So I looked up and about me--not to miss anything of the morning--and I
drew in a good big breath and I thought the world had never been so open
to my senses.
I wonder why it is that the sense of smell is so commonly
under-regarded. To me it is the source of some of my greatest pleasures.
No one of the senses is more often allied with robustity of physical
health. A man who smells acutely may be set down as enjoying that which
is normal, plain, wholesome. He does not require seasoning: the ordinary
earth is good enough for him. He is likely to be sane--which means
sound, healthy--in his outlook upon life.
Of all hours of the day there is none like the early morning for
downright good odours--the morning before eating. Fresh from sleep and
unclogged with food a man's senses cut like knives. The whole world
comes in upon him. A still morning is best, for the mists and the
moisture seem to retain the odours which they have distilled through the
night. Upon a breezy morning one is likely to get a single predominant
odour as of clover when the wind blows across a hay field or of apple
blossoms when the wind comes through the orchard, but upon a perfectly
still morning, it is wonderful how the odours arrange themselves in
upright strata, so that one walking passes through them as from room to
room in a marvellous temple of fragrance, (I should have said, I think,
if I had not been on my way to dig a ditch, that it was like turning the
leaves of some delicate volume of lyrics!)
So it was this morning. As I walked along the margin of my field I was
conscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool,
heavy aroma which one associates with the night: as of moist woods and
earth mould. The penetrating scent of the night remains long after the
sights and sounds of it have disappeared. In sunny spots I had the
fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth,
giving curiously the sense of fecundity--a warm, generous odour of
daylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in
sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric),
came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost
tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the
thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and
the frogs.
How few of us really use our senses! I mean give ourselves fully at any
time to the occupation of the senses. We do not expect to understand a
treatise on Economics without applying our minds to it, nor can we
really smell or hear or see or feel without every faculty alert. Through
sheer indolence we miss half the joy of the world!
Often as I work I stop to see: really see: see everything, or to listen,
and it is the wonder of wonders, how much there is in this old world
which we never dreamed of, how many beautiful, curious, interesting
sights and sounds there are which ordinarily make no impression upon our
clogged, overfed and preoccupied minds. I have also had the feeling--it
may be unscientific but it is comforting--that any man might see like an
Indian or smell like a hound if he gave to the senses the brains which
the Indian and the hound apply to them. And I'm pretty sure about the
Indian! It is marvellous what a man can do when he puts his entire mind
upon one faculty and bears down hard.
So I walked this morning, not hearing nor seeing, but smelling. Without
desiring to stir up strife among the peaceful senses, there is this
further marvel of the sense of smell. No other possesses such an
after-call. Sight preserves pictures: the complete view of the aspect of
objects, but it is photographic and external. Hearing deals in echoes,
but the sense of smell, while saving no vision of a place or a person,
will re-create in a way almost miraculous the inner _emotion_ of a
particular time or place. I know of nothing that will so "create an
appetite under the ribs of death."
Only a short time ago I passed an open doorway in the town. I was busy
with errands, my mind fully engaged, but suddenly I caught an odour from
somewhere within the building I was passing. I stopped! It was as if in
that moment I lost twenty years of my life: I was a boy again, living
and feeling a particular instant at the time of my father's death. Every
emotion of that occasion, not recalled in years, returned to me sharply
and clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was a
peculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression of
space--can I describe it?--the utter bigness of the world and the
aloofness of myself, a little boy, within it--now that my father was
gone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was an
inexpressible cold terror--that anywhere I might go in the world, I
should still be alone!
And there I stood, a man grown, shaking in the sunshine with that old
boyish emotion brought back to me by an odour! Often and often have I
known this strange rekindling of dead fires. And I have thought how, if
our senses were really perfect, we might lose nothing, out of our lives:
neither sights, nor sounds, nor emotions: a sort of mortal immortality.
Was not Shakespeare great because he lost less of the savings of his
senses than other men? What a wonderful seer, hearer, smeller, taster,
feeler, he must have been--and how, all the time, his mind must have
played upon the gatherings of his senses! All scenes, all men, the very
turn of a head, the exact sound of a voice, the taste of food, the feel
of the world--all the emotions of his life must he have had there before
him as he wrote, his great mind playing upon them, reconstructing,
re-creating and putting them down hot upon his pages. There is nothing
strange about great men; they are like us, only deeper, higher, broader:
they think as we do, but with more intensity: they suffer as we do, more
keenly: they love as we do, more tenderly.
I may be over-glorifying the sense of smell, but it is only because I
walked this morning in a world of odours. The greatest of the senses, of
course, is not smell or hearing, but sight. What would not any man
exchange for that: for the faces one loves, for the scenes one holds
most dear, for all that is beautiful and changeable and beyond
description? The Scotch Preacher says that the saddest lines in all
literature are those of Milton, writing of his blindness.
"Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine."
--I have wandered a long way from ditch-digging, but not wholly without
intention. Sooner or later I try to get back into the main road. I throw
down my spade in the wet trampled grass at the edge of the ditch. I take
off my coat and hang it over a limb of the little hawthorn tree. I put
my bag near it. I roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt: I give my hat
a twirl; I'm ready for work.
--The senses are the tools by which we lay hold upon the world: they are
the implements of consciousness and growth. So long as they are used
upon the good earth--used to wholesome weariness--they remain healthy,
they yield enjoyment, they nourish growth; but let them once be removed
from their natural employment and they turn and feed upon themselves,
they seek the stimulation of luxury, they wallow in their own
corruption, and finally, worn out, perish from off the earth which they
have not appreciated. Vice is ever the senses gone astray.
--So I dug. There is something fine in hard physical labour, straight
ahead: no brain used, just muscles. I stood ankle-deep in the cool
water: every spadeful came out with a smack, and as I turned it over at
the edge of the ditch small turgid rivulets coursed back again. I did
not think of anything in particular. I dug. A peculiar joy attends the
very pull of the muscles. I drove the spade home with one foot, then I
bent and lifted and turned with a sort of physical satisfaction
difficult to describe. At first I had the cool of the morning, but by
seven o'clock the day was hot enough! I opened the breast of my shirt,
gave my sleeves another roll, and went at it again for half an hour,
until I dripped with perspiration.
"I will knock off," I said, so I used my spade as a ladder and climbed
out of the ditch. Being very thirsty, I walked down through the marshy
valley to the clump of alders which grows along the creek. I followed a
cow-path through the thicket and came to the creek side, where I knelt
on a log and took a good long drink. Then I soused my head in the cool
stream, dashed the water upon my arms and came up dripping and gasping!
Oh, but it was fine!
So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where I sat down comfortably and
stretched my legs. There is a poem in stretched legs--after hard
digging--but I can't write it, though I can feel it! I got my bag and
took out a half loaf of Harriet's bread. Breaking off big crude pieces,
I ate it there in the shade. How rarely we taste the real taste of
bread! We disguise it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk or
fruit. We even soak it with gravy (here in the country where we aren't
at all polite--but very comfortable), so that we never get the downright
delicious taste of the bread itself. I was hungry this morning and I ate
my half loaf to the last crumb--and wanted more. Then I lay down for a
moment in the shade and looked up into the sky through the thin outer
branches of the hawthorn. A turkey buzzard was lazily circling
cloud-high above me: a frog boomed intermittently from the little marsh,
and there were bees at work in the blossoms.
--I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly,
I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn
off. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes a
sort of machine--unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work,
though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the
consciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long
afterward every separate step in a task.
It is curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I
often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save
that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself--down
with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it--and repeat. And
yet sometimes--mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired--I will
suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me--a sense of its
beauty and its meanings--giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is
near complete content--
Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work.
It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere
thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For
happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves
sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but
lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks:
she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up
suddenly from hard work you will see her, but if you look too long she
fades sorrowfully away.
--Down toward the town there is a little factory for barrel hoops and
staves. It has one of the most musical whistles I ever heard in my life.
It toots at exactly twelve o'clock: blessed sound! The last half-hour at
ditch-digging is a hard, slow pull. I'm warm and tired, but I stick down
to it and wait with straining ear for the music. At the very first note,
of that whistle I drop my spade. I will even empty out a load of dirt
half way up rather than expend another ounce of energy; and I spring out
of the ditch and start for home with a single desire in my heart--or
possibly lower down. And Harriet, standing in the doorway, seems to me
a sort of angel--a culinary angel!
Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked
potatoes and home-made bread--there may be--
VII
AN ARGUMENT WITH A MILLIONNAIRE
"Let the mighty and great
Roll in splendour and state,
I envy them not, I declare it.
I eat my own lamb,
My own chicken and ham,
I shear my own sheep and wear it.
I have lawns, I have bowers,
I have fruits, I have flowers.
The lark is my morning charmer;
So you jolly dogs now,
Here's God bless the plow--
Long life and content to the farmer."
----_Rhyme on an old pitcher of English pottery_.
I have been hearing of John Starkweather ever since I came here. He is a
most important personage in this community. He is rich. Horace
especially loved to talk about him. Give Horace half a chance, whether
the subject be pigs or churches, and he will break in somewhere with the
remark: "As I was saying to Mr. Starkweather--" or, "Mr. Starkweather
says to me--" How we love to shine by reflected glory! Even Harriet has
not gone unscathed; she, too, has been affected by the bacillus of
admiration. She has wanted to know several times if I saw John
Starkweather drive by: "the finest span of horses in this country," she
says, and "_did_ you see his daughter?" Much other information
concerning the Starkweather household, culinary and otherwise, is
current among our hills. We know accurately the number of Mr.
Starkweather's bedrooms, we can tell how much coal he uses in winter and
how many tons of ice in summer, and upon such important premises we
argue his riches.
Several times I have passed John Starkweather's home. It lies between my
farm and the town, though not on the direct road, and it is really
beautiful with the groomed and guided beauty possible to wealth. A
stately old house with a huge end chimney of red brick stands with
dignity well back from the road; round about lie pleasant lawns that
once were cornfields: and there are drives and walks and exotic shrubs.
At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to understand why I
should also enjoy Starkweather's groomed surroundings. But it came to me
that after all, much as we may love wildness, we are not wild, nor our
works. What more artificial than a house, or a barn, or a fence? And the
greater and more formal the house, the more formal indeed must be the
nearer natural environments. Perhaps the hand of man might well have
been less evident in developing the surroundings of the Starkweather
home--for art, dealing with nature, is so often too accomplished!
But I enjoy the Starkweather place and as I look in from the road, I
sometimes think to myself with satisfaction: "Here is this rich man who
has paid his thousands to make the beauty which I pass and take for
nothing--and having taken, leave as much behind." And I wonder sometimes
whether he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than I, who walk the
roads outside. Anyway, I am grateful to him for using his riches so much
to my advantage.
On fine mornings John Starkweather sometimes comes out in his slippers,
bare-headed, his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and walks slowly
around his garden. Charles Baxter says that on these occasions he is
asking his gardener the names of the vegetables. However that may be, he
has seemed to our community the very incarnation of contentment and
prosperity--his position the acme of desirability.
What was my astonishment, then, the other morning to see John
Starkweather coming down the pasture lane through my farm. I knew him
afar off, though I had never met him. May I express the inexpressible
when I say he had a rich look; he walked rich, there was richness in the
confident crook of his elbow, and in the positive twitch of the stick he
carried: a man accustomed to having doors opened before he knocked. I
stood there a moment and looked up the hill at him, and I felt that
profound curiosity which every one of us feels every day of his life to
know something of the inner impulses which stir his nearest neighbour. I
should have liked to know John Starkweather; but I thought to myself as
I have thought so many times how surely one comes finally to imitate his
surroundings. A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the sawdust on
his coat is not the most distinctive insignia of the carpenter; the poet
writes his truest lines upon his own countenance. People passing in my
road take me to be a part of this natural scene. I suppose I seem to
them as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like the
grass and leaves as to be invisible. We all come to be marked upon by
nature and dismissed--how carelessly!--as genera or species. And is it
not the primal struggle of man to escape classification, to form new
differentiations?
Sometimes--I confess it--when I see one passing in my road, I feel like
hailing him and saying:
"Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, am a person; I am different and
curious. I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts of people; if
you are not interested in me, at least I am intensely interested in you.
Come over now and let's talk!"
So we are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs
which separate us even from our nearest friends!
Once or twice this feeling has been so real to me that I've been near
to the point of hailing utter strangers--only to be instantly overcome
with a sense of the humorous absurdity of such an enterprise. So I laugh
it off and I say to myself:
"Steady now: the man is going to town to sell a pig; he is coming back
with ten pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can of coffee and some
new blades for his mowing machine. He hasn't time for talk"--and so I
come down with a bump to my digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or whatever
it is.
----Here I've left John Starkweather in my pasture while I remark to
the extent of a page or two that I didn't expect him to see me when he
went by.
I assumed that he was out for a walk, perhaps to enliven a worn appetite
(do you know, confidentially, I've had some pleasure in times past in
reflecting upon the jaded appetites of millionnaires!), and that he
would pass out by my lane to the country road; but instead of that, what
should he do but climb the yard fence and walk over toward the barn
where I was at work.
Perhaps I was not consumed with excitement: here was fresh adventure!
"A farmer," I said to myself with exultation, "has only to wait long
enough and all the world comes his way."
I had just begun to grease my farm wagon and was experiencing some
difficulty in lifting and steadying the heavy rear axle while I took off
the wheel. I kept busily at work, pretending (such is the perversity of
the human mind) that I did not see Mr. Starkweather. He stood for a
moment watching me; then he said:
"Good morning, sir."
I looked up and said:
"Oh, good morning!"
"Nice little farm you have here."
"It's enough for me," I replied. I did not especially like the "little."
One is human.
Then I had an absurd inspiration: he stood there so trim and jaunty and
prosperous. So rich! I had a good look at him. He was dressed in a
woollen jacket coat, knee-trousers and leggins; on his head he wore a
jaunty, cocky little Scotch cap; a man, I should judge, about fifty
years old, well-fed and hearty in appearance, with grayish hair and a
good-humoured eye. I acted on my inspiration: