Chapter 3

"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.

"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me. When I stopped, he said:

"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing matter----' and opened the subject again....

"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a devil, perhaps I can beat him."

"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said, "----seeing the spirit of things."

"I hadn't thought of it as a definition--but it expresses what the real part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs, knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run away--to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those who set us free--they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give--a surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin--our dynamics is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way----"

The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she said.

"... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She read one of Henry Ward Beecher's _Star Papers_ and verified many of its fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The Shore is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how full the days are."

"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.

"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she wanted to be."

"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.

"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."

The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.

"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have, who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an arsenal of laws and fears."

"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"

"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as instruction even."

"And spelling?"

"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading. These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different and higher organs."

"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.

"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh to me," I said.

"The little girl is ten, you say?"

"Yes."

"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"

"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.

"Still you are taking her away from us."

I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.

"What do you mean--taking her away?"

"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work. Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I believe you have established the point that one can learn best from within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each day."

I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of her--lifting her apart from the many?

There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on, the job would be done more and more completely.

"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. _Quest_, that is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"

The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential imagination?"

"But children have it," I said.

5

WILD GEESE

I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is one of the tragedies of being city-bred.

Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined, because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings. Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.

It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of ducks--darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.

Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory, they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance of the soul.

Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some time _really_ to go to sea.

Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet. Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose yesterdays are lives.

* * * * *

Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I mentioned the flying wedge.

"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the waiting-room.

I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay, and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black powder.

Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.

Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of _wanderlust_ when he observed the geese that he kept on going without return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:

"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back mabe. Steve."

Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical month of April.

Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding fields. That was the second beginning.

The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot, others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.

"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor man to feed six hundred."

He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.

Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.

"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"

I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.

It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural mysteries--at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand--a spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains--Jack Miner's door-yard and Hudson's Bay.

"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.

"You don't have to. Come on."

He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.

"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine, but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain; anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he healed."

The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at me--something liquid and venomous in the sound--the long black beak as fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die--perhaps he felt out of the law because of that.

"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it out."

I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.

An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself clean--its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full of feathers.

And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long, powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary, an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in the mocking ruins of plenty....

Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came back from the chores.

6

WORKMANSHIP

As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came. Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.

"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."

That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.

I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.