Part 34

"Use it for a pasture."

"Isn't going to cut it--any of it?"

"No."

Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's No and Yes. I took hope.

"Is it thin enough to pasture?"

"The main piece is. Better come and see."

A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the wan light of March outside.

"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers--then the stream and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."

"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.

"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."

There was a healing in that never.... The Abbot was not the kind to ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the rubber-boots.

"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."

He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey, clouds yellowish-grey and watery.

We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers. For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters, presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first time I saw the Amphitheatre.

We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and through the naked branches, a log cabin.

An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a forest.

"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.

"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.

"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand----"

We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.

"It won't be so another Spring," he said.

Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.

"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I repeated.

"No."

There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment, but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high. The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for the edge of the Lake where we belonged.

... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes. I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day, and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown, formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its demands and making its values known, having long since called unto itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no holier place than a beech-wood....

The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream, too.

... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to me quite coldly: