“why thus longing, thus forever sighing?”
because, i suppose, there were once two sides to her bread-board, both of which she used for sketching. she brought the board from the fine arts room at college to her new home, carrying it one day to the kitchen to try her hand at modeling—in dough. there are several of her early sketches about the house, of that period prior to the dough, which show real talent. her bread, however, had about it the touch of genius. the loaves grew larger all the time, the bakings more frequent. the walls of any house are rather quickly covered with pictures, but there is no bottom to the bread-box. there are still two sides to her bread-board, and she uses both sides for dough.
“why thus longing, thus forever sighing?
for the far-off, unattained and dim?”
because, i suppose, time was when i thought of other things than the price of flour; not because[42] of much money in those times, but because she made angel-cake most of the time then, and what bread we did eat was had of the baker; and because the price of flour was then a matter of course. the price of flour now is a good deal more than a matter of course, and the price of corn-meal even more than the price of flour; so that we must count the slices now, and cut them thin.
we shall have angel-cake again, i promise the children, with the biggest kind of a hole in the middle, giving them a bran muffin to munch meanwhile, and wondering in my heart if this fight for bread will ever end in angel-cake.
one can live on potatoes and bran muffins, although there was never any romance about them, not even during the great war when wall street took them as collateral. we need cake. i don’t remember that i ever lacked potatoes as a child, but, as a child, i do remember dancing while the pickaninnies sang,
“mammy gwine make some short’nin’, short’nin’,
mammy gwine make some short’nin’ cake.
ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’, short’nin’,
ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’ cake,”
[43]
in an ecstasy of pure delight, which was not remotely induced by common hunger.
short’nin’ cake, angel-cake, floating island, coffee jelly—are they not victuals spirituels, drifted deep with frosting, honeyed over with an amber-beaded sweat, with melting sweetness, insubstantial, impalpable, ethereal, that vanish into the brain, that thrill along the nerves, feeding not the body, not the mind, nor yet the spirit, for these are but three of our four elements—we are also the stuff that dreams are made of, and we cannot wholly subsist on more material fare.
what makes pie pie is its four-and-twenty-blackbirds. singing-blackbird pie is the only pie, whether you make it of apples or rhubarb or custard or squash, with one crust or two. he dreamed a dream who made the original pie. and even now i cannot pass a baker in apron and paper cap without a sense of frostings and méringues—of the white of life separated from the yolk of life and stirred into a dream. i find the same touch of romance on many faces, both young and old, as i find it over the landscape at dusk and dawn, and on certain days even at high noon.
[44]it was so this morning when a flock of migrating bluebirds went over, calling down to me. they came out of the dawn, hovered idly over the barn and the tops of the cedars in the pasture, then faded into the blue about them and beyond them, where a fleet of great white clouds was drifting slowly far off to the south. but their plaintive voices floating down to me i still hear calling, with more yearning than a man, perhaps, should allow himself to know. for at the first sip of such sweet misery some poet chides,
“why thus longing, thus forever sighing
for the far-off, unattained and dim,
while the beautiful, all about us lying,
offers up its low perpetual hymn?”
as if longing were a weakness and not the heart’s hope; and our sighing— shall i sigh for what i have? or stop sighing? some of my possessions i may well sigh over, but there are very few to sigh for, seeing none of them are farther off than the barn or the line fence, except a few books that i have lent my friends, and now and then a few dollars.
and such is the magic in the morning light that i see the beautiful all about me lying—in[45] the bend of the road, on the sweep of the meadow, across the commonplace dooryard asleep in the sun; and such is the sweet silence of the autumn day that i hear the low perpetual hymn—in the lingering notes of the bluebirds, in the strumming of the crickets, in the curving stems of the goldenrods, the loud humming of the aster-dusted bees, even in the wavering red leaves of the maples singing in their fall.
it lacks an hour of mail-time, and the newspaper, and the world. the bluebirds are leaving before the mail-man comes, and everything with wings is flying with them, or is poised for flight as if there were no world, except a world for wings.
the day is warm, with little breezes on the wing, hardly larger than swallows. they stir the grasses of the knoll, and race with them up the slope, to fly on over the wavy crest, following the bluebirds off toward the deep-sea spaces among the drifting clouds. and the curving knoll itself is in motion, a yellow-brown billow heaving against the moving clouds where they ride along the sky. and over the knoll sweep the hawking swallows, white bellies and brown[46] and glinting steel-blue backs aflash in the sun. winging swallows, winging seeds, winging winds, winging clouds and spheres, and my own soul winging away into the beckoning blue where the bluebirds have gone!
but i shall return—to the mail-box on this rural free delivery route, to the newspaper, to the tariff, to the turk. the democratic state committee is assembled this day in springfield. i am not there. i also ran. i stumped the state for nomination to the national senate, and landed here on mullein hill, hingham. here i set out. through many years i have developed the safe habit of returning here. it was a magical chance life offered me; a dream of beating the protective tariff devils. but mullein hill is clothed with dreams; and magical chances make this their stopping-place.
it is certainly true to-day. to begin with, i have this day bought the field by the side of my house. for all the twenty years of my living here i have dreamed of this rolling field with its pines and pointed cedars, and rounded knoll against the sky. not every day in the autumn is like this for dreams; not many of them in all[47] the year. i shall be building fences about the field now for many days; and paying taxes on the field every day from this time on. there are not many autumn days like this for dreams. yet to know one such day, one touched with this golden melancholy, this sweet unrest and yearning, should it not outlast the noon, is to know,
“and one thing more that may not be,
old earth were fair enough for me.”
you say that i am still thinking of the united states senate. possibly. “one thing more that may not be” i must be thinking on, for we all are. after the nomination comes the election; and what chance has the sworn enemy of a high protective tariff of election in massachusetts?
old earth is fair enough for me ordinarily, and she is passing fair to-day. but even the dog, for all his appetite and growing years, is not always satisfied with bread and play. he clings closer than ever to me, as if sometimes frightened at inner voices calling him, which, like deep waters, seem to widen between us, and which no love, though pure and immeasurable, may be able to cross. he is nothing uncommon[48] as a dog, except in the size of his spirit and the quality of his love. he will tackle anything, from a railroad train to a buzzing bumble-bee, that he imagines has intentions inimical to me; and there is nothing on the move, either coming or going, quite innocent of such intentions. without fear, or awe, or law, he wears his collar, and his license number, 66, but not as a sign of bondage, for that sign he wears all over his alert and fearless front. he growls in his sleep before the fire at ghosts of things that have designs against the house; he risks his life all day long.
but he reserves a portion of his soul. he will deliberately chew off his leash at night, and, making sure that nothing stirs about the helpless house, will steal away to the woods, where he hears the baying of some spectral pack down the forest’s high-arched halls. i do not know what the little cross-bred terrier is hunting along the frosted paths—fox or rabbit or wild mice; i cannot run the cold trails that are so warm to his nose; but far ahead of his nose lope two panting hearts, his and mine, following the gleam.
all dogs are dreamers, travelers by twilight,[49] who wander toward a slow deferring dawn. they cannot see in the white fire of noon. a lovelier light, diffused and dim with dusk, is in the eyes of dogs and all dumb creatures, through which they watch a world of shadows moving with them like lantern-lighted shapes at night upon a wall.
“not of the sunlight,
not of the moonlight,
not of the starlight,”
is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs.
there is a deposit, an infinitesimal deposit, it may be, of the radium of romance in the slag of all souls. call it by other names—optimism, idealism, religion—you still leave it undefined; an inherent, essential element, harder to separate from the spiritual dross of us than radium from its carnotite; a kind of atomic property of the spirit which breaks up its substance; which ionizes, energizes, and illumines it.
there may be souls that never knew its power, but i can hardly think there ever was a soul shut in a cave so darksome, that romance never entered with its touch of radiance, if only as
“a little glooming light, much like a shade.”
this is the light in the eyes of dogs, the light[50] that birds and bees follow, and the jellyfish steering round and round his course. something like its quivering flame burns down in the green, dismal depths of the sea; down in the black subliminal depths; and on down in the heart of the world. for what other light is it, that guides the herring every spring, in from the ocean up weymouth back river? or the salmon in from the pacific, up, high up the columbia to the snake, and higher up the snake into the deep, dark gorges of the imnaha?
it is now long past october, and where is the bluebird’s mate of june? she has forgotten him, and is forgotten by him, but he has not forgotten his dream-of-her; for i saw him in the orchard, while southward bound, going in and out of the apple-tree holes, the lover still, the dream-of-her in his heart, holding over from the summer and coming to meet him ahead of her, down the winter, out of the coming spring.
the dog and you and i and even the humble toad are dreamers at heart, all of us, only we are deeper adream than they.
“if nothing once, you nothing lose,
for when you die you are the same,”
[51]says freneau to a flower. yet the flowers are of the dust that i am made of, and they too are the stuff of dreams. and the toad under the kitchen-steps, what he knows of my heart! as if the unrequited pain of lovers, the sweetest, saddest things of poets, had always been his portion, and their vague melancholy the only measure of his tremulous twilight song. when the soft spring dusk has stolen into the young eyes of the day, as the first shadow of some sweet fear into the startled eyes of a girl, then out of the hush, quavering through the tender gloom,
“a voice, a mystery!”
from his earth-hole under the kitchen-steps i have known the toad, by dint of stretching and hitching up on chance stones, to get nine inches up, nine inches from the surface of the globe, up on the lowest of the steps! yet it is given him to pipe a serenade in the gloaming that no other lover, bird or poet, ever quite equaled, even when he sang,
“i arise from dreams of thee
in the first sweet sleep of night.”
life is always a romance. there is fire in its heart, even in the three cold chambers of the[52] toad’s heart; and the light of the fire flickers fainter than the guttered candle before it will go out. this may not be “the true light”; yet it lighteth every man that cometh into the world, every man with a pen, and his brother with a hoe, though they comprehend it not. one of our poets has written of “the man with the hoe” and left the man out and put only the hoe in the poem. this poet has written more than he has hoed, i am sure; as the painter of “the man with the hoe” had painted more than he had hoed, i am sure. here is a poet who sees no light at all in “the man with the hoe,” because that poet has written more than he has hoed, which is to gather where he has not strawed. when a hoe looks as black as this to a pen, you will search the premises of the pen in vain for hoes. i hoe; i know men who hoe; and none of us knows mr. markham’s scarecrow for ourself. here a realist sees what another realist thought he saw; as if you could ever see life!
life is not what the realist sees, but what the realist is and knows, plus what the man with the hoe is and knows; and he knows that, if chained to a pick instead of a hoe, down in the[53] black pit of some siberian mine, he could not work life out in the utter dark.
realism, if not a distortion and a disease, is at best only a half-truth; and the realist, if more than a medical examiner for his district, is but the undertaker besides.
whoever sings a true song, or pens the humblest plodding prose, whether of achilles, son of peleus, or of john gilley, a milkman down in maine, or of the toad, or of the bee, has essentially one story to tell, and must be a homer, truly to tell it.
here on my desk lies the story of john gilley, and over in the next farmhouse lingers the unwritten story of another milkman, my neighbor, joel moore; and in the other neighbor-houses live like people—humble, humdrum country people, with their stories, which, if lighted with nothing but their own hovering gleam, would glow forever.
the next man i meet would make a book; for either he is, or he knows, a good-enough story, could i but come by the tale.
o. henry, pacing the streets in an agony of fear at having run out of story-matter, is only[54] a case of nerves. the one inexhaustible supply of matter in the universe that is of use to man is story-matter; for, as the first human pair have been a perpetual song and story, so the last pair shall be the theme for some recording angel, or else they will leave a diary.
the real ill with literature is writer’s cramp, an inability to seize the story, all of it, its truth as well as its facts—an ill, not of too much observation, but of too little imagination. art does not watch life and record it. art loves life and creates it.
“no one knows the stars,” says stevenson, “who has not slept, as the french happily put it, à la belle étoile. he may know all their names, and distances, and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind, their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.”
art and literature have turned scientist of late, as if our magnitudes, names, and distances, as if the concern of psychologists, physiologists, ethnologists, criminologists, and pathologists, were the concern of mankind! these things all belong to the specialists.
what does mankind reck of the revolution of[55] the node and apsides? that neptune’s line of apsides completes its revolution in 540,000 years? instead of an astronomer, mankind is still the simple shepherd, keeping watch by night, and all he knows of the stars is that they brood above the sleeping hills, and now and then, in some holy hush, they sing together.
science is concerned with the names, distances, and magnitudes of the stars; and with problems touching the “intestinal parasites of the flea.” art, literature, and religion are concerned only with mankind; with the elemental, the universal, the eternal; with the dream, the defeat, the romance of life.
i have much to do with writers—with great writers, could they only think of something to write about. “there is nothing left,” they cry, “to write about.” “but here am i. take me,” i answer. out come pads and pencils flying. there is hard looking at me for a moment. then a cynical smile. i won’t do. becky might have done, but thackeray got her; just as some one has got everybody! my tribe can never furnish her like again. yet my tribe is not infertile; it is thackeray’s, rather, that has run out.
[56]a sweet young thing in one of my extension courses, voicing the literary despair of the class in a poem called “the fairy door,” made this end of the whole matter:
“the world seems black and ugly
when i shut the fairy door;
i want to go to fairyland
and live forever more.”
i was reading this effusion on my way in to college. when i reached the climax in the stanza,
“the world seems black and ugly”
i thrust the manuscript back into my bag in disgust and turned for relief to the morning paper. here—for the young writer was the daughter of a prominent bostonian—i saw the announcement of her engagement to a chicago man, and i knew, of course, what ailed the poetry; and i knew the medicine that i should administer.
how far apart literature and life sometimes get! and how much more real and romantic is ordinary life than ordinary literature!
the girl was to meet me that afternoon in the university extension lecture. the amphitheater[57] was full of city folk, and there in the middle of the hall sat the young poet. she was very pretty, one of the daughters of men still fair. taking her poem, i read it aloud to that last stanza, when, turning sharply, and pointing the manuscript hard at her, i demanded,
“is this so? do you want to leave boston for fairyland, instead of chicago? do you?”
she was staggered by the suddenness and savageness of it all and rose to her feet, adorably pink in her confusion, stammering, “no, no, i beg—of course i—no, i don’t”—by this time so recovered that her eyes flashed wrath as she dropped to her seat amid the gaping and the twittering of the class.
“if you don’t mean it,” i demanded, “why in the sacred name of literature did you write it? why don’t you ever write what you mean? and you mean that boston has suddenly become a back number for literature; that the literary center has shifted to chicago—that’s what you mean. chicago! the one romantic, fairy-like spot on earth! isn’t that what you mean? then don’t you see how fresh, how thrilling a theme you have in your chicago?[58] no one else, perhaps, ever saw chicago in quite this rosy, romantic light before.”
hers is the enduring truth about chicago; as against that set forth by mr. armour in “the packers, the private car lines, and the people.” here she was, herself the very stuff of the eternal in literature, and forced to fairyland for something to write about! sheer nonsense. one need not take the wings of the morning to the uttermost sea, or make one’s bed in hell for “copy.” chicago will do—or boston—or even hingham.
to be, if to be only a stock or a stone, beast or bird or man, is to be a story, while to be any one of my neighbors is to be an epic.
the day we moved out here, before our goods arrived, a strangely youthful pair, far on in the eighties, struggled up the hill from the old farm below to greet us. he was clad in overalls and topcoat, and she in flowers, overflowing from both her arms, and in wild confusion on the gayest easter bonnet that ever bloomed.
“how do you do, neighbors!” she began, extending her armfuls of glorious mountain laurel; “mr. white and i bring you the welcome[59] of the hingham hills”—mr. white’s rough old hand grasping mine amid the blossoms.
“why,” i cried, “i didn’t know the hingham hills could hold such a welcome. i have tramped the woods about here, but i never found a bunch of laurel.”
“ah, you didn’t get into valley swamp! mr. white and i will show you, won’t we, georgie? we know where odes hang on hawthorns, don’t we? we are busy farmers, and you know what farming is; but we have never ploughed up our poetry-patch, have we, georgie?”
they never had; nor much of their other ninety-six acres either—the whole farm a joyous riot of free verse: fences without line or meter: cattle running where they liked; the farm kit—a mowing machine, a sulky plough, and a stolid old grindstone—straying romantically about the shy sweet fields.
it was an ode of a carriage that the spoony old couple went to town in, with wheels dactylic on one side and iambic on the other, and so broken a line for a back spring that mrs. white would slide into mr. white’s lap without c?sura or even a punctuation mark to hinder.
[60]i was at the village market one muddy march day, when cupid and the old mare, neither wearing blinders, brought this chariot to the curb. mr. white, descending to the street, reached up for mrs. white, who, giving him both her hands, put out a dainty foot to the carriage-step and there poised, dismayed at the march mud. instantly mr. white, disengaging one hand, lifted a folded blanket from the seat, shot it grandly out across the mud, and with a bow as gallant as sir walter’s own, handed the dear old shoes unblemished to the shop.
eighteen or eighty, it is just the same. boston or chicago or hingham, it is just the same. white or red or yellow or black, it is just the same. the radium of romance is mixed with the slag of all our souls. here is my colored neighbor down toward the village.
“hello!” i called to him over the telephone, “aren’t you going to do that job for me?”
this neighbor is a most useful colored citizen, with a complete line of avocations, cleaning cesspools nocturnally and on saturday afternoons being one of these sporadic and subsidiary callings.
[61]“hello!” he answered; “i most assuredly am! and exceedingly sorry i am, too, for this delay.” (he had been coming for one year and six months now.) “but my business grows enormously. it is really more than i can administer. the fact is, professor, i must increase my equipment. i can’t dip any longer. i am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.”
“i am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” divine! i like the sound. for it is the true measure of life as set over against that which life may merely appear to be. to trudge along through life beside your humble cart of the long-handled dipper, and to know that your dipper is approaching the proportions of a pump is to know that you are greater than you know.
i saw yesterday in the sunday newspaper the lovely face of a girl, who, “rumor has it,” ran the legend, “will be the next queen of england.” she, too, like my colored neighbor, like us all, is approaching the proportions of a pump. we are all the stuff that pumps and dreams are made of, and great art, and great literature.
i spoke of joel moore here in the next house[62] to me. for twenty-six years he was chained to a milk-route, covering lovell’s corner, east weymouth, and our back wood-road; but he always drove it in a trotting sulky.
from behind the bushes i have seen him calming the leg-weary team as it labored up the humps in the road, his feet braced, his arms extended to the slack lines, his eyes fixed on the judge’s stand ahead, while he maneuvered against ed geers and ben hur and all the weymouths for the pole.
he came home in that lumbering, rattling milk-cart as if it wore winged wheels, and were being drawn by the steeds of aurora around the half-mile track at the great brockton fair.
it was sixteen years ago that joel drove home with flora iv, a black mare without a leg to stand on, but with a record of 2.12? there was large fixing of the little barn for her, and much rubbing-down of withers.
one day joel was seen wandering over the knoll here near the house, kicking stones around. something was the matter. i sauntered out toward my barn casually and called to him. picking up a piece of rock in the pasture, he[63] staggered with it to the fence, and fixing it into the wall, said with labored breath, “flora iv has a foal!” and, lifting another stone off the wall, for ballast, he strode up the hill and over, and down to his barn, not knowing the “magnificat,” it may be, but singing it in his heart all the way down.
and this happened on the very hill which this day i bought with the field by the side of the house. joel owned the field then. but he longed for a fast horse. i never set my heart on a fast horse; but i cannot resist a field. i did not covet this field of joel’s. i merely dreamed of it as part of my dooryard, and waited—longer than jacob waited for rachel. what a dream she must have been!
but let me come back to joel and flora and the foal.
my youngest boy was born that same summer—sixteen years ago—the double event in joel’s mind wearing the mixed complexion of twins. he had had no children till the colt came, and naturally he spoiled her. she was a willful little thing by inheritance, though—arch, skittish, and very pretty; and long before[64] she wore shoes had got the petulant habit of kicking the siding off the barn at any delay of dinner.
she should have been broken by her second birthday, but joel would take no risks; and in the third summer, though he “had her used to leather,” he needed a steady old horse to hitch her with, and she came up to her fourth birthday untrained. then, the first time he took her out, she behaved so badly, and cut herself so, forward, that it was necessary to turn her loose for months. then she was sent away to be broken, but came back a little more willful than ever, and prettier than ever, if possible.
that winter joel had to give up his milk-route on account of sickness, and with the opening of spring got the blacksmith to take the colt in hand. he took her, and threw her, dislocating her shoulder. then he pulled off her new shoes, and she was put into the boxstall to get well.
after that, i don’t know just why, but we talked of other things than the colt. she kicked a board off the back of the barn one day, sending a splinter whizzing past my head, but neither of us noticed it. she was seven years old now,[65] a creature shaped for speed, but joel was not strong enough to manage her, and a horse like this could so easily be harmed. in fact, he never harnessed her again.
i urged him from time to time, with what directness i dared, to let me take him into the hospital. but he had never left the farm and his wife alone overnight in all these years. then one day he sent for me. he would go, he said, if i could arrange for him.
a march snow lay on the fields the day before he was to go, and all that day, at odd times, i would see him creeping like a shadow about his place: to the hen-coops, up to the line fence, out to the apple tree in the meadow, taking a last look at things. it was quite impossible for me to work that day.
the next morning the four boys, on their way to school, went down ahead of me to say good-bye. they filed in, shook hands bravely, fighting back their tears, and playing fine the game of bluff with him, though the little fellow, born the summer the colt was born, nearly spoiled it all. he is a dear impulsive child and had frankly been joel’s favorite.
[66]“i’ve taken the eveners off the disk harrow,” he was saying as he came out to the sleigh. “i gave the kittens a bed of fresh rowan. i drove a nail under the shutter of the can-house, where you can hang the key. you had better lock up a little till i get back”—his words half muffled under the big robes of the sleigh.
“i hate to leave home,” he said, as we went along; “but she couldn’t stand it. she’s not well. it isn’t so bad for me with you along.”
two or three times he was about to say something else, but felt too tired. i had him duly entered; introduced him to his surgeon; helped him to his cot, where a cheery nurse made him easy; then gave him my hand.
“good-day,” he said; “i’m going to pay you back some time. only i can’t.” he clung a moment longer to me. “i’ve never had many of the luxuries. i’ve worked hard for all i’ve got—except for the little colt. she was thrown in. i never fed her a quart of grain—the cleanest little eater—as fat as butter—and on nothing but roughage all the time!”
then, looking me straight in the eye, he said calmly, “you and i know and the doctors know.[67] but i couldn’t tell her. you tell her. you can. and tell her i guess she had better sell the little colt.”
he paused a moment. something yet he wished to say—the thing he had tried before to say. i hope the recording angel took it down, and the way he said it, down. not quite daring to look into my eyes, he asked, wistfully, “you don’t need a fast horse yourself, of course, having your auto?”
“yes, i do, joel,” i answered firmly; “i do need a fast horse. we all do, or something like that.” and i bent over and kissed him, for his wife, and for my little boy at home.
there is balm in gilead; but are there racetracks in heaven?—and fast horses there? perhaps not. but i often wish that i had told joel i believed there were. of course there are. there is romance in heaven, and the magical chance of escape there.
