Part 33

Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature--symbols of purest aspiration--and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from service and wear--the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too soon.

"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round--lots of hickory and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and chestnuts are there, too, and many little cedars. There is a log house in the centre, and right near it a Spring----"

He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.

"You are breaking our hearts," I said.

"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the log house never runs dry. I could go there now----"

"So could I," said the little girl.

They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own, having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."

"Why?" I would ask.

Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism, the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.

There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have habits. There seems to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money, and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?" "Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"

I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet, again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and written books that brought much money.

But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered world called Society--winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the final page or two--that most winning quality of the younger generation.

... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world. Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being established against American materialism along the Western coast. There is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.

All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is living spirit is being driven westward before gross Matter--westward as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.

The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and splendid idealisation.

But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter day, was a communication from San Francisco--the last to me of several documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.

But I found the turning in these documents with alarm; that the purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black business--known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism. I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this letter:

"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read--to play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces. They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of life--call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive surface you have set out to impress."

THE ABBOT DEPARTS

One day in March, the Abbot said:

"You know that woods I was telling you about?"

"Yes."

"Well, my father bought it the other day."

... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and beech--clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men--with thorn and dogwood growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane. The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would have named an estate after--or a province.

Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest impression. God bless the fodder--but what a price to pay. They had burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under that sacred cattle-path.

Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The story of the struggle for life on Mars came to me--how the only water that remains in that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.

It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.

"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.