Part 3
Store? The mouse had to store. She had to, not to feed her body,—there was plenty in the cellar for that,—but to satisfy her soul. A mouse’s soul, that something within a mouse which makes for more than meat, may not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of blind instincts. The human soul, that thing whose satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates and a silk petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of a mouse, may be a different thing indeed; but originally it, too, had simple, healthful instincts; and among them, atrophied now, but not wholly gone, may still be found the desire for a life that is more than something to eat and something to put on.
To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his potatoes, his corn, his beans and squashes before the long, lean winter comes to an end. But if squashes _to eat_ were all, then he could buy squashes, bigger, fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the grocery store. He may need to eat the squash, but what he needs more, and cannot buy, is the raising of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering of it. He needs to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic and look at it. He almost hates to _eat_ it.
A man may live in the city and buy a squash and eat it. That is all he can do with a boughten squash; for a squash that he cannot raise, he cannot store, nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man live where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a grocery? his bins, cribs, mows, and attics so many pasteboard boxes, bottles, and tin cans? Tinned squash in pie may taste like any squash pie; but it is no longer squash; and is a squash nothing if not pie? Oh, but he gets a lithograph squash upon the can to show him how the pulp looked as God made it. This is a sop to his higher sensibilities; it is a commercial reminder, too, that life even in the city should be more than pie,—it is also the commercial way of preserving the flavor of the canned squash, else he would not know whether he were eating squash or pumpkin or sweet potato. But then it makes little difference, all things taste the same in the city,—all taste of tin.
There is a need in the nature of man for many things,—for a wife, a home, children, friends, and a need for winter. The wild goose feels it, too, and no length of domesticating can tame the wild desire to fly when the frosts begin to fall; the woodchuck feels it; carry him to the tropics and still he will sleep as though the snows of New England lay deep in the mouth of his burrow. The partridge’s foot broadens at the approach of winter into a snowshoe; the ermine’s fur turns snow-white. Winter is in their bones; it is good for them; it is health, not disease—with snowshoes provided and snow-colored fur.
Nature supplies her own remedies. Winter brings its own cure,—snowshoes and snowy coats, short days and long nights, the narrowed round, the widened view, the open fire, leisure, quiet, and the companionship of your books, your children, your wife, your own strange soul—here on the farm.
Where else does it come, bringing all of this? Where else are conditions such that all weather is good weather? The weather a man needs? Here he is planted like his trees; his roots are in the soil; the changing seasons are his life. He feeds upon them; works with them; rests in them; yields to them, and finds in their cycle more than the sum of his physical needs.
A man lives quite without roots in a city, like some of the orchids, hung up in the air; or oftener, like the mistletoe, rooted, but drawing his life parasitically from some simpler, stronger, fresher life planted far below him in the soil. There he cannot touch the earth and feed upon life’s first sources. He knows little of any kind but bad weather. Summer is hot, winter is nasty, spring and autumn scarcely are at all, for they do not make him uncomfortable. The round year is four changes of clothes—and a tank-sprinkled, snow-choked, smoke-clouded, cobble-paved, wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day, half-night something, that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter.
A city is a sore on the face of Nature; not a dangerous, ugly sore, necessarily, if one can get out of it often enough and far enough, but a sore, nevertheless, that Nature will have nothing kindly to do with. The snows that roof my sheds with Carrara, that robe my trees with ermine, that spread close and warm over my mowing, that call out the sleds and the sleigh-bells, fall into the city streets as mud, as danger on the city roofs,—as a nuisance over the city’s length and breadth, a nuisance to be hauled off and dumped into the harbor as fast as shovels and carts can move it.
But you cannot dump your winter and send it off to sea. There is no cure for winter in a tip-cart; no cure in the city. There is consolation in the city, for there is plenty of company in the misery. But company really means more of the misery. If life is to be endured, if all that one can do with winter is to shovel it and suffer it, then to the city for the winter, for there one’s share of the shoveling is small, and the suffering there seems very evenly distributed.
Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffering, no quarrel whatever with the season. Here you have nothing to do with its coming or going further than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys; you do up the chores early in the short twilight, pile the logs high by the blazing chimney and—you remember that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man who has said it all in his book; there is to be a concert, a reception, a club dinner, in the city, sixteen blissful miles away,—and it is snowing! You can go if you have to. But the soft tapping on the window-panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the house rise higher, shriller. You look down at your slippers, poke up the fire, settle a little deeper into the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with the reading.
And she reads on—
Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed.
* * * * *
And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons’ straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October’s wood.
But you will be snow-bound in the morning and cannot get to town? Perhaps; but it happened so only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904. So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were glad for a day at home that wasn’t Sunday, for a whole long day to pop corn with the boys.
A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a home, and never so much of a home as in the winter when the stock and the crops are housed, when furrow and boundary fence are covered, when earth and sky conspire to drive a man indoors and to keep him in,—where he needs to stay for a while and be quiet.
No problem of city life is more serious than the problem of making in the city a home. A habitation where you can have no garden, no barn, no attic, no cellar, no chickens, no bees, no boys (we were allowed _one_ boy by the janitor of our city flat), no fields, no sunset skies, no snow-bound days, can hardly be a home. To live in the fifth flat, at No. 6 West Seventh Street, is not to have a home. Pictures on the walls, a fire in the grate, and a prayer in blending zephyrs over the door for God to bless the place can scarcely make of No. 6 more than a sum in arithmetic. There is no home environment about this fifth flat at No. 6, just as there is none about cell No. 6, in the fifth tier of the west corridor of the Tombs.
The idea, the concept, home, is a house set back from the road behind a hedge of trees, a house with a yard, with flowers, chickens, and a garden,—a country home. The songs of home are all of country homes:—
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood When fond recollection presents them to view:
* * * * *
The gutter, the lamp-post, the curb that ran by it, And e’en the brass spigot that did for a well.—
Impossible! You cannot sing of No. 6, West Seventh, fifth flight up. And what of a home that cannot be remembered as a song! It is not a home, but only a floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you are dumped by a hoisting machine. It is warm inside; Eve is with you, and the baby, and your books. But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees; you do not see the sun go down beyond the wooded hills, nor ever feel the quiet of the stars. You have no largeness round about you; you are the centre of nothing; you have no garden, no harvest, no chores,—no home! There is not room enough about a city flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for a living.
For a man’s life consisteth not in an abundance of things, but in the particular kind and number of his chores. A chore is a fragment of real life that is lived with the doing. All real living must be lived; it cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another serious problem in city life,—it is the tragedy of city life that it is so nearly all lived for us. We hire Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it; we buy it of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not so here on the farm; for here one has the full round of life’s chores, and here, on a professor’s salary, one may do all the chores himself.
We may hire our praying and our thinking done for us and still live; but not our chores. They are to the life of the spirit what breathing and eating and sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse,—the friendship of the noble creature; not to “pick up” the eggs yourself, nor hoe your own garden, nor play with your own boys! Why, what is the use of having boys if you are never going to be “it” again, if you are not to be a boy once more along with them!
There are some things, the making of our clothes, perhaps, that we must hire done for us. But clothes are not primitive and essential; they are accidental, an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but belonging to a different category from children, gardens, domestic animals, and a domestic home. And yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what a saving, too, of life’s selvage, could we return to the spinning-wheel and loom as we go back to the farm and the daily chores!
She, harvest done, to char work did aspire, Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire.
And who has not known the same aspiration? has not had a longing for mere chores, and their ample compensation? It is such a reasonable, restful, satisfying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and worry of the day! Then the twilight, and the evening chores, and the soft closing of the door! At dawn we shall go forth again until the evening; but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine discipline of the morning chores. The day should start and stop in our own selves; labor should begin and come to an end in the responsibility of the wholesome, homely round of our own chores.
Summer is gone, the harvest is done, and winter is passing on its swiftest days. So swift, indeed, are the days that morning and evening meet, bound up like a sheaf by the circle of the chores. For there is never an end to the chores; never a time when they are all done; never a day when the round of them is not to be done again. And herein lies more of their virtue as a winter cure.
Life is not busier here than elsewhere; time is not swifter, but more enjoyable, because so much of life is left unfinished and time is thrown so much more into the future. There is no past on the farm; it is all to come; no sure defeat, but always promise; no settled winter, but always the signs of coming spring.
To-day is the first of January, snowy, brilliant, but dripping with the sound of spring wherever the sun lies warm, and calling with the heart of spring yonder where the crows are flocking. There is spring in the talk of the chickadees outside my window, and in the cheerful bluster of a red squirrel in the hickory. No bluebird has returned yet: spring is not here, not quite, I hope, but it is coming, and so near that I shall drop my pen and go out to the barn to put together some new beehives, for I must have them ready for the spring. Winter! The winter is almost gone. Why, it is barely a month since I brought my bees into the cellar, and here I am taking them out again—in prospect.
The hives have just come from the factory “in the flat”: sawed, planed, dovetailed, and matched,—a delightful set of big blocks,—ready to be nailed together. You feel a bit mean, keeping them from the children. But the oldest of the boys is only six, and he had a walking bear for Christmas. Besides, when you were a _little_ boy you never had many blocks, and never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And how suddenly the January day goes! You hammer on into the deepening dusk, and the chickens go to roost without their supper. You would have hammered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives won’t last very long; and you sigh as they stand finished. You could wish them all in pieces to do over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to bottom board!
Winter! with January started, and February two days short! It is all a fiction. You had dreams of long evenings, of books and crackling fires, and of days shut in. It still snows; there is something still left of the nights, but not half enough, for the seed catalogues are already beginning to arrive.
The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry bed and the frozen soil where the potatoes are to be. Yet the garden grows—on paper? No, not on paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a garden is as real in January as in June.
And so the winter goes. For if it is not the garden and the bees, it is some of a thousand other chores that keep you busy and living past the present,—and past the present is the spring.
I am watching for the phœbes to return to the shed,—they are my first birds. I long to hear the shrill piping of the March frogs, to pick a blue hepatica from beneath the pines; for these are some of the things, besides cheaper rent, more room, more boys, fresh air, quiet, and a cow, that one lives for here on the farm. But I am not waiting, winter-sick, for I have stored the summer in attic and cellar; I am already having my spring—in prospect; and as for the actual winter, the snow-bound days are all too few for the real winter joys of this simple, ample life, here in the quiet, among the neighbor fields.
IV
The Nature-Student
I
I HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration—for a junior.
“You didn’t know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?” said the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves laid bare by the knife. “Now, see here,” he went on, eyeing me keenly, “doesn’t a revelation like that take all the moonshine about the ‘beauties of nature’ clean out of you?”
I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very deliberately: “No, it doesn’t. That’s a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles—mere dead dog—compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?”
The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him.
“Well,” he said, turning abruptly, “you had better quit. You’ll be only a biological fifth wheel.”
I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.
Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions,—zoölogists, botanists, geologists,—look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.
I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it _Arctomys monax_ with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (_strobus_) from a pitch pine (_rigida_) by just a cone and a bundle of needles,—one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren,—only trees.
As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines,—’ou calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.
Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are thawing out? It is quite as healthful, if not as scientific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.
I want this small boy some time to know the difference between these needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always, that the hard days are sure to soften, and that then there oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny, penetrating, purifying balm,—a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul.
All foolishness? sentiment? moonshine?—this love for woods and fields, this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me, but made no reply.
He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and the knowledge, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him, not a quick thing,—a shape, a million shapes, informed with spirit,—a voice of gladness, a mild and healing sympathy, a companionable soul.
“But there you go!” he exclaims, “talking poetry again. Why don’t you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors, anyway!”
I do not mean a sixteen weeks’ course in zoölogy, or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the deep and beautiful things of living nature,—the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental, vacation-time course,—the more’s the pity. The results do not often come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather; more after the manner of revelations,—data that the professors have little faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee bit heap o’ weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.
But there is the trouble with my professor. He never ploughs at all. How can he understand and believe? And isn’t this the trouble with many of our preacher poets, also? Some of them spend their summers in the garden; but the true poet—and the naturalist—must stay later, and they must plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would turn up what Burns did that November day in the field at Mossgiel.
How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns’s life! What if he had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He might have written a life of Milton in six volumes,—a monumental work, but how unimportant compared with the lines “To a Mouse”!
We are going to live real life and write real poetry again,—when all who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life’s first sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one’s own ploughing, and to write!
Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I live on the farm, hoe, and think, and write,—whenever the hoeing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse?
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
With a whole farm o’ foggage green, and all the year before me, I am not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured,—lines that we at least may _live_ into song.
Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do,—made over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland Robinson are poets. But they are poets. We all are,—even the biologist, with half a chance,—and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration. The nature-lover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations.
He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call back to him across the echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery.
That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doesn’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.