Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

The most valuable things that we purchased with this old farm have turned out to be the unforeseen things, -things that were not mentioned in the title. Title deeds do not record or catalogue spiritual qualities. The friendship of Mr. Sutton was one of the things that came to us unbargained for. It has been worth much to us to have known him. I think he has had a good deal to do with such rectification of my philosophy of life as I have been able to achieve. He has bolstered up my faith in my fellow-men. I think I have never known a gentler, kinder, more honest, more unselfish man than Joseph Sutton, and I have come to believe that such virtues weigh more heavily in the balance than the evidences of material success. It is only thoughtlessness that prevents us all from seeing it.

22

From those first days, thus recalled, my mind has been traveling on down the years. It was a decade ago that we finally came to make our home here and to become citizens of Lisburn. We were not altogether happy at first. In principle we were not disappointed with the new life, but in practice, a great deal of readjusting had to be done. We could not immediately reorganize our affairs to suit the new environment, and yet as I look back, I seem to see all that in a kind of rosy glow, and to regret that time has flown so swiftly.

It is a curious and fortunate fact that unpleasant impressions fade from the memory more quickly than pleasant ones. Life seen in retrospect, like life seen in prospect, often takes on a glamor denied the present.

The imagination, which thus reconstructs the past in a brighter form than that in which it was originally experienced, is one of man's happiest gifts.

I ran across a passage in Thoreau's Journal the other day, that sets forth beautifully the curious but fortunate fact that unpleasant impressions fade from the human memory more quickly than pleasant ones. We forget the little irritations, remember the little joys. Thoreau says: "How is it that what is actually present and transpiring is commonly perceived by the common sense and understanding only, is bare and bald, without halo or the blue enamel of intervening air? But let it be past or to come, and it is at once idealized. The man dead is spiritualized, the fact remembered is idealized. It is ripe and with the bloom on it. It is not simply the understanding now, but the imagination that takes cognizance of it. The imagination requires a long range."

I suppose the same truth underlies Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "Emotion recollected in tranquillity." As I look back over these past ten years these past ten years the memory is a happy one. I know that we made no mistake in cutting loose from certain ties and certain conventions. I am glad that I am a countryman, entirely apart from the question of success or failure. And I have been thinking to-day that perhaps we make a mistake in letting the present seem "bare and bald." Is it not, in essence, the same golden thing that it was pictured in prophetic imagination, and that will eventually appear in recollection? There

is something to be said in favor of carpe diem. Would it not be worth the effort to idealize the present also, to eat our honey as we gather it, to apply to the present some of that imagination that glorifies the past and the future?

I believe I am learning to do it. That is one of the fine things about living in the country. One has the space and the quiet (actual leisure is not essential) in which to ponder these things and to make application of one's philosophy. I am finding this present life good.

Thoreau goes on to say, "It is the faculty of the poet to see present things as if in this sense past and future, as if distant or universally significant." We all need to cultivate more of the poetic quality of our natures, and it seems to me easier and more natural to become a poet in the country than elsewhere.

I am, you see, gradually crystallizing my ideas as to what this life in the country means to me, the allure that made me seek it and that makes me wish to celebrate it. Not every one can do or wishes to do what I have done, to live as I live, and I am not seeking to make converts. I am merely endeavoring to pass on such enlightenment as this life has brought me. I have had, in a humble way, my revelations.

22

As I think back over those years, it seems to me that I have learned some things of value. I have learned some things, I think, that help me to live more comfortably with my fellow travelers through what Bunyan called the wilderness of this world. I have learned that most of the obstacles to friendliness and

coöperation and sympathy among men are artificial obstacles. Let me tell you, in all candor, how I have discovered this, for to me it is a great and significant discovery.

I call myself a countryman, and I mean to be a countryman. I have meant to be a countryman from the first. Not a farmer, perhaps, in the strictest sense of the term—meaning one who wins his entire livelihood from the soil by the sweat of his brow-but a countryman nevertheless. This has been, and still is, my fixed determination. But it has not been quite as easy of accomplishment as I fancied it would be. It is easy enough to think of oneself as a countryman, but to be unquestioningly accepted as a countryman by one's rural neighbors, is another

matter.

I have reached the conclusion-and I will admit that it grieves me—that something of the outsider will always cling to me. My origin, my education and training, my background, my previous condition of servitude inevitably set me apart and differentiate me in some degree from those who have been born and reared on farms and who all their lives have faced the rural problems and borne the rural burdens. I cannot tell you how reluctant I have been to make this confession even to myself. I can only say that I have honestly tried to overcome these obstacles, and I think I am justified in believing that I have worn down many barriers. It has taken time and patience but I am filled with hope for the future and with joy in such success as I have achieved. Does this seem to you to be a strange and insignificant am

bition? Let me say that I believe the whole fundamental question of human brotherhood and social democracy to be at the bottom of it.

It is in making this effort to adapt myself to the common ideals and standards of my neighbors that I have learned the truths I want to tell you about. And when I say myself, I mean Miriam too; for if a married man has not the coöperation of his wife in an undertaking of this sort, he is defeated before he begins.

20

I have come to the conclusion that the whole conception of caste is an anachronism and out of place in a democracy such as we wish ours to be. Caste is one of the singularly persistent survivals of a less enlightened age. Our civilization should have outgrown it, but even in this day and in this country the consciousness of caste is virtually universal. Instinctively (instinct is largely inherited habit) we classify people according to their wealth, earning capacity, social position, raiment, education, political rank or other manifestation of worldly success. It is artificial and absurd, and we all know in our hearts that it has little or nothing to do with character and the real worth of a man. It seldom takes into consideration the spiritual qualities which are the only ones of permanent value.

I will not say that the sense of caste is absent in the country. Quite otherwise. But country people do not accept caste unquestioningly, as city people are inclined to do. Their social hierarchy is less rigid. They are more inclined to view claims to caste with suspicion. I think they are more nearly ready

to throw the whole fabric of caste overboard. Joseph Sutton, I believe, was a man liberated from caste.

I flatter myself that I have achieved a partial emancipation. I think I have succeeded in destroying some of the illusions. I know that some of my town acquaintances, observing me under different conditions and at different times of the year, have been perplexed as to how to place me. This amuses and secretly pleases me. I should like nothing better than to prove that their whole system of classification is nonsense.

This sense of caste breeds a ridiculous sort of competition. People are forever trying to climb up an entirely imaginary and illusory ladder, trying to slip somehow into a niche above that of their neighbors. If one means proves ineffective, they try another. If circumstances of birth, breeding, environment or financial resources seem to have condemned them to a certain stratum of society, they try to make people think they belong to a higher one. If the facts won't bear them out, they try to bluff.

There is not so much of this endless and futile competition in the country. We know one another too well. We're pretty shrewd, too, when it comes to that; bluffing doesn't go far. The result is a greater social candor and sincerity. Joseph Sutton made no pretenses whatever.

And out of all this comes simplicity, or as near an approach to simplicity as we complex and muddling human beings can hope at present to achieve. One needs to become as a little child, you know, to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. On my farm I have found a more complete simplicity than anywhere else—sim

plicity of living, simplicity of practical affairs, simplicity of human contact, simplicity of philosophic outlook. Contentment and simplicity, I am persuaded, are two of the most desirable ends of life.

The achievement of this outlook has been one of the chief rewards of my life here and of my effort to fit myself into the rural environment. I have found human friendliness and frankness. I have found a more serene and satisfying philosophy of life; and in this I am conscious of a spiritual renewal that is most heartening. It shows that a man can be made over into something a little more satisfactory to himself.

Very often I have come upon a discarded snake-skin in the stone walls or in my woodpile. The reptile has emerged a new and shining creature, leaving behind him an integument that has served its purpose and is no longer of any use to him. Man, always tending to become casehardened in his ideas, can thus slough off his old self if he will. The possibility of human metamorphosis is one of the most encouraging things I know of.

When I began this paper I had it in mind to point out some of the things that have endeared this farm of ours to us since the day when we received the title deed from Mr. Sutton. And perhaps I have done

it. For nothing ties us more securely to the place than these human connections as they appear in the light of our clearing perception of them.

We love our friendly white house and its familiar contents; we love our natural surroundings and count them beautiful; we love our occupations in house and barn, garden and orchard; we love our animal comrades here. But nothing that we have produced on these acres, no fruits or grains or vegetables, can equal in value the spiritual crops that have sprung up and come to fruition, scarcely noticed, like the wild cherries in the hedgerows.

It is not mere sentiment, I think, the attachment we feel for this place, though I don't know of many things better than sentiment. We have a strong sense of home, both of us, and I would not part with that for any wealth or power. All around us we see people giving up their homes; the children have married and gone away, and the house seems too large, and the servant problem has become insoluble. We cannot understand how they can esteem so lightly a thing as precious and enduring as home. For our part, we have been sending down our roots deeper and deeper each year into the stony but not uncongenial soil, and we are proud and happy in our bondage.

THE FINDING OF FITZGERALD

A True Story of the Royal North-West Mounted Police

[ocr errors]

T. MORRIS LONGSTRETH

[ocr errors]

E'LL never know now,' said the Mounted Policeman, more to his photograph album than to me, "what made him do it. Fitz wasn't the one to talk, anyway."

I smiled inwardly. They were all alike in that, these Mounted Police, and now Staff-Sergeant Dempster was talking at last. To be sure I had survived several hours of misgivings. He had read my letter of introduction and said nothing-had invited me to supper and said next to nothing, and we had done the dishes still in silence, until a photograph on the wall had blessedly led to the album whose pages were memory.

I reasoned that if a man had crossed from Halifax to Vancouver, taken the boat to Skagway, the train to White Horse, another boat down the Yukon to Stewart River, and then penetrated for three days into the dark backward and abysm of that territory to see Dempster at his little isolated detachment, it would at least prove a certain sincerity. But the famous non-com. who was now lighting his pipe, had met other sincere questioners and remained unmoved, and I wondered what might move him.

The regular features of his almost Indian-dark face spoke steadiness,

his deep brown eyes and low voice harmonized with the vast silent setting beyond the cabin door, for he had lived so long with stillness as to contemn expression. And then, without preamble, he spoke of the days of Francis J. Fitzgerald, while I watched the long, motionless sub-arctic summer twilight gather over one of the great solitudes of the world-the theater of this story.

"We'll never know now what prompted the brown-haired boy, rather tall and slight, to stand before the recruiting officer in Halifax-the autumn of '88 I think it was-and say he would like to join up. He had been working in a shoe store and found that walls were a torment to him. He told Sergeant McGibbon his age was twenty-one years and six months, and when McGibbon expressed a doubt that despite a blasted Irish assurance, he looked barely seventeen, Fitz remarked that one shouldn't always judge a man by his looks. There was something attractive about him, even as a kid, and when the sawbones passed on him as a fair candidate, McGibbon swallowed his doubts and signed him on. So Fitzgerald went home and announced to his family he was leaving for Regina.

« AnkstesnisTęsti »