Part 5

Equality--its power sings. It dances. When the last is said and done, we all want the same thing, if we really knew,--goodness, beauty and truth, one at the top. There is joy in the fine new conception appearing now in all the arts--freedom first and last, even to lawlessness at first, but that will right itself more swiftly than smugness, which has had its age-long and hideous trial.... To me, the house in the beeches slowly unfolds it all--the mystery of the cosmic peasantry of the future--that fastidious poverty, that delicate plenty which is perfection. These two, mother and child, mean the new dancing to me, and the New Race beside. I have not dared to go again, because I build incorrigible dreams, and this one especially is dear.... Yet I often recall their loveliness together.

The mother's beauty had turned to loveliness. It had more than the mystic chiselling of sorrow--it had passion, it had humour.... I feel the need of telling you from time to time that I am not rhapsodising, the need of reminding you, how weathered and drab my mind was, when I went up the shore that day. She made me think of grapes and olives and laurel-boughs; she seemed the sister to the child. All about the two were subtle, pervasive, ever-changing tests of the power of the soul. The country people around did not think her extraordinary, much less beautiful. How much is revealed in that? Loveliness requires certain vision, an interpretative spirit, and thus it is protected from the vulgar gaze. These good country people carry upon their faces and hands and persons picture-writing of secret sins and dreamless stolidity, and yet they are scandalised by this woman. You cannot imagine how sweetly it came to me that she had utterly lost the sense that she was outcast.

A lamp burns at her door every evening. I don't suppose it is seen three times a month--yet the lamp burns.... There's a big wooden Cross in the room where they sleep--the child led me to it--a mat of grass before it, _kusa_ grass, who knows?... A great Cross, a much-worshipped Cross, with spike-holes, the broken edges worn smooth.... The child whispered to me that _she_ had been brought (when she was too small to know) and placed on the mat at the foot of the Cross for her mother to find; also that she came when the white clover bloomed.

* * * * *

... It is only this way, bit by bit, that I can make the picture. I have never before been so disturbed by the sense of inadequacy. The light about their heads is all diffused like morning upon a cloud.

* * * * *

8

OLD PICTURES IN RED

There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly being withdrawn--leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation, the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank, wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought, by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voyagers who came to America to find a free country, were strange and intolerant at first, when we felt the yoke of Europe settle upon ancient scar-tissue.

We discussed.

A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats, advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking ships,--we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth of the New.

Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother in whose house we learned how _not_ to do most things; in whose kitchen we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of Quest, because we loathed her long snoring of afternoons; from the death of whose sects and schism-shops we set forth to find the unity of life; from the obscenity of whose loves we came into the first great cleansing hatred of ourselves....

No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay, "You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts may not be finished.

More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed. That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect on the constructive side, and will continue to destroy itself against itself as all such forces do in their madness.

If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.

War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart, and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation. The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are thus made--thus tenderness and purity come to be.

Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our eyes--heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of God's Remembrance.

* * * * *

When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there is no God--then you begin to know what war means. When a country has given its tithe of human blood, _or one in five is gone_--then you begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the "horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions--the end is war, and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.

We didn't know what death meant before this war--but many have learned. The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.

When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and the other over the dim borderland--there's a straining of eyes into the Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit. Life of the soul begins again--out of pain--always out of pain.

We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death, even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to death to find their relation to God. The faith that comes with peace at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a black man at all--but a Sunburnt God....

* * * * *

Four at a supper table--a little child, its young mother, and the old father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman, and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The young mother asked coldly if they could feel _him_ in the room. Then just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep. The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what their daughter-in-law meant about _him_ being in the room.

A picture of the chastened world.

The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a breath of God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the darkness--that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal themselves to those who have suffered to the end.

The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything.

* * * * *

The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.

* * * * *

The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and the Levant, were puppets alike, churned together in a great planetary cleansing. Every partisan path was found to be increasingly crooked the farther one advanced--and a sheer descent at the last. Any national point of view used to dupe the people into greater destructive energy, proved in itself, no matter how sincerely offered, as short-sighted and ill-founded as the hatred of two soldiers who meet between trenches and discover, as they gore each other to death, that their only basis for hostility is a different colour of coat.

Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of greedy men who wanted their way--in the main, groups of leaders devoid of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations.... The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful groping consciousness of the peasant mind--its slow and torturous awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not enfold God.

The people must learn before they can be free. Hitherto they have been duped by the nations; and the nations are now being duped by each other; but there is a greater plan at work--using men and nations alike,--a plan to do away with boundaries and hatred and preying, to strike the spear from the hand of man and leave it free to help his neighbour, to establish democracy in the place of imperialism, and fraternity upon the solid footings of the earth in the place of separateness and strife.... The new volume of human spirit already has been opened. We felt it that night in Stonestudy before lights out,--the first beauty as of a song across still waters.

* * * * *

An American correspondent going home from the field in Europe "the long way around," met an old Persian Master on the road to Damascus. With the sage was his nearest disciple, also a Persian; in fact, the young man was so loved that he had been changed from discipleship into sonship. This young Persian became very devoted to the American. They stood together for a moment in silence, when the time for parting came. The old Master drew near and said:

"It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate. Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These two must meet and mate again for the glory of God and the splendour of earth. The East has lifted its soul to the hills and held fast to its memory of the Father's house. The West has descended into the folds of the valley, and won from agony and isolation its efficacy in material things. And now the mystic is looking down and the materialist is looking up. Soon their hands shall join--like your two hands in mine--and there shall be great joy in the Father's House."

* * * * *

9

STEVE

Steve and I were camping together for a few weeks on the Southern California strand. One morning he looked up from the pages of a book in his hands and remarked:

"This fellow is one of us."

The book was _Youth_, by Joseph Conrad.

"I haven't read a book for a long time," Steve added. "There are three stories in this. I've read only one--_Heart of Darkness_--in fact, I haven't finished that.... You have to fall into this Conrad and be his--to get him. You let your mind open into a cup, and presently after six or seven pages, you find it brimming. If you fall into him deep enough, you get almost what he sees--not quite though. No reader ever does. But you get something intense, fascinating, a restlessness, a terror. You find that all your somnolence and inertia has caught fire."

There had been a ten minutes' rain at dawn. The smell of the tropics moved over the sterile sand. It was cool, but there was no wind. The day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A broad quilt of gulls and plover sat together on the shore waiting for the drying light or for the mist to rise, or the tide to ebb....

Steve resumed:

"He tells about a boy who loved maps--who used to look for hours at the continents--thrillingly attracted to the darkest places, the patches still unprotected. There was one heart of darkness with a river winding through. He doesn't tell you the continent or the river, but there were elephants there. He should have called the story _Ivory_.... Years afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and follows it for endless days, but the world has arrived. Some nation is there colonising for Ivory--you don't know which. The story is told like that--unplaced in time and space. Really it doesn't matter what particular imperialistic tendency is at work. The fact is, he climbed the river into the ghastliest chaos....

"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful brooding leafiness--the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent death. Death was familiar to them. They were chained to labour, cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air--men foolish with fever and heat--a haze of flies--white men burning out inside--oxidisation of human souls--a steady and hideous beat of death--devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness--clerks making entries of Ivory--a nation's young men running through the jungles for Ivory--carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for Ivory--all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory--murder for that--lives lost, tribes shattered--the leafy heart of a fresh continent seared with the civil flame of greed--commodities dumped in river beds--mails that men would die for torn open by vandal hands--waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war--that's the point--the war of middlemen--middlemen turning to rend each other.... Heart of darkness--after that the light comes."

Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was sweeter every minute.

"This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me--for anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about being a workman like that--about any workman. That's why one wants to cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work. They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world with. They are _it_. It is the old against the old. It's all about Ivory. They crucify for fossil."

Steve was lighting up.

"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman. The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all--not in Ivory--but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all the governments--that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives, not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible forces. It doesn't matter. _Some person or some group is holding the plan of the New Age._

"We're learning life as never before--plucking the deeper fruits and mysteries of pain. But one must go apart from the crowd to see. One must cease to be a partisan. The real seer sees the whole, not the part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians see it all--a few in China--a few in India. Romain Rolland sees it all. This fellow, Conrad, sees it all.... It's a pity if America doesn't soon get the full picture. It's worth seeing----"

Ocean and sunlight and mountains. The world was a brimming cup. If a man could take all the beauty there was for him, he could never die.... We went over to the post-office of the little town. The business men of the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed.... Grocers, butchers, the hardware man, the real estate men, the man who ran the newspaper, fishermen, barbers, lawyers--mainly fat and pleasant--children on the way to school.

They were short-breathed and short-armed. They dressed in wool and wore heavy dark hats. I had never noticed before how short-armed the race of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants are not so; painters and musicians have a tendency to be long-armed. I mentioned this to Steve.

"The middlemen," said he. "They are tightened throughout--ligaments contracted--contraction taking place in the deeper weaves of mind, a drying up of the deeper sources of life. Contraction, self-centering--that's what madness is. A man must sing, or weave, or build or make bricks. The ways of competitive life are paltry ways. They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves. They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become intimate even with the commodities of the earth--the very things they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamously, filch from each other.... It's all here--all that Conrad pictured in the heart of darkness. These are the sick, the maimed, the blind of the earth. They live in the realm of fear, pain, anger, desire. These are the war-makers.... Their arms are twisting and shortening in to their navels----"

Sunlight streamed in through the open doors of the post-office. Motors going by drowned the soft rustling from the sea. The hell of the outer world trickled in through bits of conversation. Everybody had read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving--the President was ill--railroads in strike, coal famine, prohibitive cost of staples--France cracking with the dry-rot of exhaustion--England ... a voice--Germany choking in her own blood.

The tradespeople of the little town by the sea gathered in their bills and orders and advertisements and hurried back to their shops. Nothing astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe--no ears for lamentations--no mind but to buy cheap at the right time and sell dear all the time. We walked back to the shore.

* * * * *

"I once saw a little town on a hill-side," Steve said. "A grand boot-maker was there, and a man who made clocks with such tools as he had--big noble clocks that ran unvaryingly eight full days. Another man made furniture--perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver and a potter there. The days were long and singing, full of labour and peace. No one multiplied by mechanical means. Every artisan had his apprentices. The age of the apprentices will come back--with a new dimension added----"

"Switzerland or dream?" said I.

Steve smiled. "They are starting communities all along this coast," he said. "Many are on the quest of the town I saw."