Part 17

"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take another look at your little stone study."

I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-paved patio below and the fountain in the centre.... As he was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff, casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.

"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I can frame it up for you."

When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty, and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.

This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in his own cellar:

"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let me."

He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.

"And it's all paid for?" I asked.

He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."

"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for it?"

"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."

That was not to be forgotten.

So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house, because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.

As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors, merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.

There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in the village still, but different.

Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted the paddle.

There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it. The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.

The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No word.

The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went back. It was all uninteresting night to me now--beauty, picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night the Canadian said:

"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old, even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them, sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring, the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live differently."

Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town, when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another incident:

... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so well--had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare flesh--that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and the interurban lines), and for what they do not get of the natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.

They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was shameless.

Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious of itself--and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent these shores.

The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth--and vision requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive, scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they are prone to sink.

It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations. We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards, and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work, that subject.

In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.

The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to educate the countryside by browning his back in public. That did not appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in the case of the countryside which complained.