Chapter 17

"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand----"

We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.

"It won't be so another Spring," he said.

Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.

"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I repeated.

"No."

There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment, but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high. The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for the edge of the Lake where we belonged.

... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes. I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day, and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown, formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its demands and making its values known, having long since called unto itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no holier place than a beech-wood....

The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream, too.

... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to me quite coldly:

"They have decided to make me go back to school----"

"Sit down," I answered.

As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic; full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount. He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced, but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.

The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others. The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once--and away.... He is but fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful things have happened to him.

They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never runs.

But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable him to get himself out.

My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and ordered plane.

The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and must try once more.

It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy, believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured me:

"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm in your Study."

There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to the Abbot:

"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come. You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy--live it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an honour--a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready. Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might. Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."

29

THE DAKOTAN

It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use. Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit. He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two, or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.

But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly over the writer's words.

The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there. I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of the master of Walden in his work.

The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:

"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our wildest imagination.

"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things. As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over _telepathy_ is merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.

"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration. Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling chatter. It is only those few who have come _to know_, through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that become gifted with all-knowing counsels.

"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive enough to receive the impression. From the collective, intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which is to be _felt_ as a fine singing tingle by all in the vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and known before it is uttered; all minds are one.

"... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing, conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic, spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they can to the vibrations of peace and harmony--to the _Sounds_, which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case has not to do with intellect and reason, but with sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness, and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.

"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening, inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?

"... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the magic pronunciation of _Aum_, _Amitabha_, _Allah_, of certain chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are surrounded by....

"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken rhythm, would call the _Vina_, that Oriental harp-string of the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But _Vina's_ magic cry at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of thunder, the wind in the pines--these are sounds that bring one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of the Universe. These are the voice of _kung_, 'the great tone' in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening raptly to _kung_, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such meditations."

30

THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)

I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially, though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later manuscript to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.

He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants the popular market; the quality of his _bent_ precludes that for the present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight line between the thought and the utterance.

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have _arrived somewhere_--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....