A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too common in both religion and business, yet far from representing, to-day, the guiding spirit of either business or religion. For the growing conception of human brotherhood is mightily expanding our narrow religious selfishness; and the dawning revelation of industrial solidarity is not only making men careful for the present prosperity of the ends of the earth, but is making them concerned also for the future prosperity of the Farther-Off.
Priests and prophets we have had heretofore. “Woodman, woodman, spare that tree,” they have wailed. And the flying chips were the woodman’s swift response. The woodman has not heard the poet’s prayer. But he is hearing the American public’s command to let the sapling alone; and he is beginning to heed. It is a new appeal, this for the sapling; there is sound scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too. We shall save our forests, our watersheds, and rivers; we shall conserve for time to come our ores and rich deposits; we shall reclaim the last of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of our eastern farms; we shall herd our whales of the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific, number and multiply our truant schools of mackerel that range the waters of the sea; just as we shall restock with clams the waste, sandy shores of the sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were as fruitful as Eden, but which through years of digging and no planting have become as barren as the bloodless sands of the Sahara.
It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the course of time, what one sows—even clams if one sows clams; but it is a more solemn saying that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for all eternity, what one has not sown—even clams out of the exhausted flats of the New England coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run brackish to the sea.
Hitherto we have reaped where we have not sown, and gathered where we have not strawed. But that was during the days of our industrial pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the wilderness, where manna and quails and clams are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only barberries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had nowadays for the gathering. There are still enough barberries to go round without planting or trespassing, for the simple, serious reason that the barberries do not carry their sugar on their bushes with them, as the clams carry their salt. The Sugar Trust carries the barberries’ sugar. But soon or late every member of that trust shall leave his bag of sweet outside the gate of Eden or the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it now, lest once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his eternal feeding, but barberries!
We have not sown the clam hitherto: we have only digged; so that now, for all practical purposes, that is to say, for the old-time, twenty-five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, uncultivated clam has had its day; as the unenterprising, unbelieving clammers themselves are beginning to see.
The Providence River fishermen are seeking distant flats for the matchless Providence River clams, bringing them overland from afar by train. So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Duxbury clams come out of flats that reach all the way from the mouth of the St. Johns, on the down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake. And this, while eight hundred acres of superb clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town, which might be producing yearly, for the joy of man, eighty thousand bushels of real Duxbury clams!
What a clambake Duxbury does not have each year! A multitude of twice eighty thousand might sit down about the steaming stones and be filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more, that Duxbury does not hunger thus alone. For this is the story of fifty other towns in Massachusetts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to Dighton—a tale with a minus total of over two million bushels of clams, and an annual minus of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.
Nor is this the story of Massachusetts alone, nor of the tide-flats alone. It is the story of the whole of New England, inland as well as coast. The New England farm was cleared, worked, exhausted, and abandoned. The farmer was as exhausted as his farm, and preferring the hazard of new fortunes to the certain tragedy of the old, went West. But that tale is told. The tide from New England to the West is at slack ebb. There is still a stream flowing out into the extreme West; rising in the Middle Western States, however, not in the East. The present New England farmers are staying on their farms, except where the city buyer wants an abandoned farm, and insists upon its being abandoned at any price. So will the clammer stay on his shore acres, for his clams shall no more run out, causing him to turn cod-fisher, or cranberry-picker, or to make worse shift. The New England clam-digger of to-day shall be a clam-farmer a dozen years hence; and his exhausted acres along shore, planted, cultivated, and protected by law, shall yield him a good living. A living for him and clams for us; and not the long-neck clams of the Providence River and Duxbury flats only: they shall yield also the little-neck clams and the quahaug, the scallop, too, the oyster, and, from farther off shore, the green-clawed lobster in abundance, and of a length the law allows.
Our children’s children may run short of coal and kerosene; but they need never want for clams. We are going to try to save them some coal, for there are mighty bins of it still in the earth, while here, besides, are the peat-bogs—bunkers of fuel beyond the fires of our imaginations to burn up. We may, who knows? save them a little kerosene. No one has measured the capacity of the tank; it has been tapped only here and there; the plant that manufactured it, moreover, is still in operation, and is doubtless making more. But whether so or not, we still may trust in future oil, for the saving spirit of our new movement watches the pipes that carry it to our cans. There is no brand of economy known to us at present that is more assuring than our kerosene economy. The Standard Oil Company, begotten by Destiny, it would seem, as distributor of oil, is not one to burn even its paraffine candles at both ends. There was, perhaps, a wise and beneficent Providence in its organization, that we might have five gallons for fifty-five cents for our children’s sake—a price to preserve the precious fluid for the lamps of coming generations.
But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not. The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of perfect human character, may be a process requiring all eternity,—longer than we can wait,—so that the present deposits may some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection, is—conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or the roundness of the “Square Deal”)—except, I say, for a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands.
The day of the abandoned farm is past; the time of the adopted, of the adapted, farm has come. We are not going to abandon anything any more, because we are not going to work anything to death any more. We shall not abandon even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn them into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet undreamed. We have found a way to utilize the arid land of the West—a hundred and fifty thousand acres of it at a single stroke, as President Taft turns the waters of the Gunnison River from their ancient channel into a man-made tunnel, and sends them spreading out
in order that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet, saying, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming the desert for a garden, with an effort of hands and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short of the original creative work which made the world—as if the divine fiat had been: “In our image, to have dominion; to subdue the earth; and to finish the work we leave undone.” And while we are finishing these acres and planting them with fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we continue stupidly and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead these eleven thousand acres of natural clam garden on the Massachusetts coast? If a vast irrigating work is the divine in man, by the same token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted and shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned plough-lands, and these lifeless flats of the shore the devils in him—here where no reclaiming is necessary, where the rain cometh down from heaven, and twice a day the tides flow in from the hills of the sea!
There are none of us here along the Atlantic coast who do not think with joy of that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made yonder in the distant West. It means more, and cheaper, and still fairer fruit for us of the East; more musk-melons, too, we hope; but we know that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam, also, is good. Man cannot live on irrigated fruit alone. He craves clams—clams as juicy as a Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor of wind-blown spray.
And he shall have them, for the clam farm—the restocked, restored flat of earlier times—has passed the stage of theory and experiment, being now in operation on the New England shore, a producing and very paying property.
The clam farm is not strictly a new venture, however, but up to the present it has been a failure, because, in the first place, the times were not ripe for it; the public mind lacked the necessary education. Even yet the state, and the local town authorities, give the clam-farmer no protection. He can obtain the state’s written grant to plant the land to clams, but he can get no legal protection against his neighbor’s digging the clams he plants. And the farm has failed, because, in the second place, the clam-farmer has lacked the necessary energy and imagination. A man who for years has made his bread and butter and rubber boots out of land belonging to everybody and to nobody, by simply digging in it, is the last man to build a fence about a piece of land and work it. Digging is only half as hard as “working”; besides, in promiscuous digging one is getting clams that one’s neighbor might have got, and there is something better than mere clams in that.
But who will plant and wait for a crop that anybody, when one’s back is turned, and, indeed, when one’s back isn’t turned, can harvest as his own? Yet this the fishing laws of Massachusetts still allow. Twenty years ago, in 1889, grants were made for clam farms in and around the town of Essex, but no legal rights were given with the grants. Any native of Essex, by these old barnacled laws, is free to help himself to clams from any town flat. Of course the farm failed.
Meantime the cry for clams has grown louder; the specialists in the new national college of conservators have been studying the subject; “extension courses,” inter-flat conventions, and laboratory demonstrations have been had up and down the coast; and as a result, the clam farm in Essex, since the reissue of the grants in 1906, has been put upon a hopeful, upon a safe and paying basis.
It is an interesting example of education,—a local public sentiment refined into an actual, dependable public conscience; in this case largely through the efforts of a state’s Fish and Game Commission, whose biologists, working with the accuracy, patience, and disinterestedness of the scientist, and with the practical good sense of the farmer, made their trial clam gardens pay, demonstrating convincingly that a clam-flat will respond to scientific care as readily and as profitably as a Danvers onion-bed or the cantaloupe fields at Rocky Ford.
This must be the direction of the new movement for the saving of our natural resources—this roundabout road of education. Few laws can be enacted, fewer still enforced, without the help of an awakened public conscience; and a public conscience, for legislative purposes, is nothing more than a thorough understanding of the facts. As a nation, we need a popular and a thorough education in ornithology, entomology, forestry, and farming, and in the science and morality of corporation rights in public lands. We want sectionally, by belts or states, a scientific training for our specialty, as the shell-fish farmer of the Massachusetts coast is being scientifically trained in clams. These state biologists have brought the clam men from the ends of the shore together; they have plotted and mapped the mollusk territory; they have made a science of clam-culture; they have made an industry of clam-digging; and to the clam-digger they are giving dignity and a sense of security that make him respect himself and his neighbor’s clams—this last item being a most important change in the clam-farm outlook.
With so much done, the next work—framing new laws to take the place of the old fishing laws—should be a simple matter. Such a procedure will be slow, yet it is still the only logical and effective one. Let the clam-digger know that he can raise clams; let New England know that the forests on her mountains must be saved, and within a twelvemonth the necessary bills would be passed. So with the birds, the fish, the coal of Alaska, and every other asset of our national wealth. The nation-wide work of this saving movement will first be educative, even by way of scandals in the Cabinet. We shall hasten very slowly to Congress and the legislatures with our laws. The clam-flat is typical of all our multitudinous wealth; the clam-digger is typical of all of us who cut, or mine, or reap, or take our livings, in any way, directly from the hands of Nature; and the lesson of the clam farm will apply the country over.
We have been a nation of wasters, spoiled and made prodigal by over-easy riches; we have demanded our inheritance all at once, spent it, and as a result we are already beginning to want—at least for clams. At this moment there are not enough clams to go round, so that the market-man sticks the end of a rubber hose into his tub of dark, salty, fresh-shucked clams, and soaks them; soaks them with fresh water out of rusty iron pipes, soaks them, and swells them, whitens them, bloats them, sells them—ghastly corpses, husks, that we would fain fill our soup-bowls with; for we are hungry, and must be fed, and there are not enough of the unsoaked clams for a bowl around.
But there shall be. With the coming of the clam farm there shall be clams enough, and oysters and scallops; for the whole mollusk industry, in every flat and bar and cove of the country, shall take to itself a new interest, and vastly larger proportions. Then shall a measure of scallops be sold for a quarter, and two measures of clams for a quarter, and nothing, any more, be soaked.
For there is nothing difficult about growing clams, nothing half so difficult and expensive as growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam farm offers most remarkable opportunities, although the bid, it must be confessed, is pretty plainly to one’s love of ease and one’s willing dependence. To begin with, the clam farm is self-working, ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. While this cannot happen generally, still the clam-farmer has a second distinct advantage in having his seed, if not actually sown for him, at least grown, and caught for him on these natural breeding-bars, in such quantities that he need only sweep it up and cradle it, as he might winnow grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island Sound there is such a bar, where it seems that Nature, in expectation of the coming clam farm, had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal currents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the entire state with its yearly stock of seed.
With all of this there is little of romance about a clam farm, and nothing at all spectacular about its financial returns. For clams are clams, whereas cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs and ginseng roots, are different,—according to the advertisements. The inducements of the clam farm are not sufficient to cause the prosperous Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East, as he has been selling out and going on to the farther West, for its larger, cheaper farms, and bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, whatever we have had to do, in fact, directly with Nature, has been for us, thus far, a speculation and a gamble. Earnings have been out of all proportion to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not earn, we strike it rich; and we have struck it rich so long in this vast rich land, that the strike has lost its element of luck, being now the expected thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and move on to the farthest West, where there is still a land of chance. But that land is passing, and with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is approaching when a man will pay for a western farm what he now pays for an eastern farm—the actual market value, based upon what the land, in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield. Values will rise to an even, normal level; earnings will settle to the same level; and the clam farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie will yield alike—a living; and if, when that day comes, there is no more “Promised Land” for the American, it will be because we have crossed over, and possessed the land, and divided it among us for an inheritance.
When life shall mean a living, and not a dress-parade, or an automobile, or a flying-machine, then the clam farm, with its two or three acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its average maximum yield, of four hundred and fifty dollars an acre, will be profits enough. For the clammer’s outfit is simple,—a small boat, two clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-boots, the total costing thirty dollars.
The old milk farm here under the hill below me, with its tumbling barn and its ninety acres of desolation, was sold not long ago for six thousand dollars. The milkman will make more money than the clam man, but he will have no more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking, calling for a larger type of man, and developing larger qualities of soul, perhaps, than could ever be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out of the soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of men, not of farms. We must have clams; somebody must dig clams; and matters of the spirit all aside, reckoned simply as a small business, clam-farming offers a sure living, a free, independent, healthful, outdoor living—and hence an ample living—to thousands of men who may lack the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed, the time for the larger undertakings. And viewed as the least part of the coming shell-fish industry, and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming national industry, due to our reclaiming, restocking, and conserving, and wise leasing, the clam farm becomes a type, a promise; it becomes the shore of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-lasting country than our pioneer fathers found here.
For behold the clam crop how it grows!—precisely like any other crop, in the summer, or more exactly, from about the first of May to the first of December; and the growth is very rapid, a seed-clam an inch long at the May planting, developing in some localities (as in the Essex and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three inches long by December. This is an increase in volume of about nine hundred per cent. The little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, burrow with the first tide into the sand, where with each returning tide they open their mouths, like young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice a day, with never too much water, with never a fear of drouth, until they are grown fat for the clammer’s basket.
If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the uncertainties of his vineyard could sing,—
surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea can sing, and all of us with him,—
IX
THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING
THE cottages are closed; the summer people have gone back to the city; only the farmers and the commuters—barnacled folk—remain as the summer tide recedes, fixed to the rocks of winter because they have grown fast. To live is to have two houses: a country house for the summer, a city house for the winter; to close one, and open the other; to change, to flit!
How different it used to be when I was a boy—away yonder in the days of farms and old-fashioned homes and old-time winters! Things were prepared for, were made something of, and enjoyed in those days—the “quiltings,” the “raisings,” the Thanksgivings! What getting ready there used to be—especially for the winter! for what wasn’t there to get ready! and how much of everything to get ready there used to be!
It began along in late October, continuing with more speed as the days shortened and hurried us into November. It must all be done by Thanksgiving Day—everything brought in, everything housed and battened down tight. The gray lowering clouds, the cold snap, the first flurry of snow, how they hastened and heartened the work! Thanksgiving found us ready for winter, indoors and out.
The hay-mows were full to the beams where the swallows built; the north and west sides of the barnyard were flanked with a deep wind-break of corn-fodder that ran on down the old worm-fence each side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls; the big wooden pump under the turn-o’-lane tree by the barn was bundled up and buttoned to the tip of its dripping nose; the bees by the currant bushes were double-hived, the strawberries mulched, the wood all split and piled, the cellar windows packed, and the storm-doors put on. The very cows had put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their ears; the turkeys had changed their roost from the ridge-pole of the corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny side of the wagon-house; the squirrels had finished their bulky nests in the oaks; the muskrats of the lower pasture had completed their lodges; the whole farm—house, barn, fields, and wood-lot—had shuffled into its greatcoat, its muffler and muffetees, and settled comfortably down for the winter.
The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter. It looked its joy at the prospect of the coming cold. Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled, secluded in its wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts, sheltered by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined, clung to by creeper and honeysuckle, it stood where the roads divided, halfway between everywhere, unpainted, unpretentious, as much a part of the landscape as the muskrat-lodge; and, like the lodge, roomy, warm, and hospitable.
Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the kitchen, another led into the living-room, another into the storeroom, and two big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery with four generations of sliders, covered the cavernous way into the cellar. But they let the smell of apples up, as the garret door let the smell of sage and thyme come down; while from the door of the storeroom, mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling the whole house and all my early memories, came the smell of broom-corn, came the sound of grandfather’s loom.
Behind the stove in the kitchen, fresh-papered like the walls, stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato must be kept dry and warm), an ample, ten-barrel box, full of Jersey sweets that were sweet,—long, golden, syrupy potatoes, grown in the warm sandy soil of the “Jethro Piece.” Against the box stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same paper and piled with wood. There was another such chest in the living-room near the old fireplace, and still another in grandfather’s work-room behind the “tem-plate” stove.
But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not all. There was music also, the music of life, of young life and of old life—grandparents, grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven of us alone—a girl at each end of the seven and one in the middle, which is Heaven’s own mystic number and divine arrangement. Thanksgiving always found us all at grandfather’s and brimming full of thanks.
That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are different nowadays. There are as many grandfathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don’t make brooms in the winter any more, and live on farms. They live in flats. The old farm with its open acres has become a city street; the generous old farmhouse has become a speaking-tube, kitchenette and bath—all the “modern conveniences”; the cows have evaporated into convenient cans of condensed “milk”; the ten-barrel box of potatoes has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the wood-pile into a convenient five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a tarred string, the fireplace into a convenient moss-and-flame-painted gas-log, the seven children into one, or none, or into a convenient bull-terrier pup. Still, we may give thanks, for convenient as life has become to-day, it has not yet all gone to the dogs.
It is true, however, that there might be fewer dogs and more children, possibly; fewer flats and more farms; less canned milk (or whatever the paste is) and more real cream. Surely we might buy less and raise more, hire less and make more, travel less and see more, hear less and think more. Life might be quieter for some of us; profounder, perhaps, for others of us,—more inconvenient indeed, for all of us, and yet a thing to be thankful for.
It might, but most of us doubt it. It is not for the things we possess, but only for the things we have not, for the things we are relieved of, the things we escape,—for our conveniences,—that we are thankful nowadays. Life is summed up with us in negations. We tally our conveniences only, quick-detachable-tired, six-cylindered, seventy-horse-powered conveniences. To construct eighteen-million dollars’ worth of destruction in the shape of a gunboat! to lay out a beautiful road and then build a machine to “eat it”! to be allotted a span of time and study how to annihilate it! O Lord, we thank Thee that we have all the modern conveniences, from cucumbers at Christmas to a Celestial Crêche! Heaven is such a nice, fit, convenient place for our unborn children! God is their home. The angels take such gentle care of them! Besides, they are not so in the way there; and, if need be, we have the charity children and other people’s children; or we have the darling little sweet-faced bull-terrier pup.
For myself, I have never had a little cherub-faced bull-pup, but at this present writing I am helping to bring up our fourth baby, and I think I see the convenience of the pup. And I am only the father of the baby at that!
To begin with, you can buy a pup. You can send the stable-man after it. But not a baby. Not even the doctor can fetch it. The mother must go herself after her baby—to Heaven it may be; but she will carry it all the way through Hell before she brings it to the earth, this earth of sunlit fields and stormy skies, so evidently designed to make men of babies. A long perilous journey this, across a whole social season.
Certainly the little dog is a great convenience, and as certainly he is a great negation,—the substitution, as with most conveniences, of a thing for a self.
Our birth may be a sleep and a forgetting, but life immediately after is largely an inconvenience. That is the meaning of an infant’s first strangling wail. He is protesting against the inconvenience of breathing. Breathing is an inconvenience; eating is an inconvenience; sleeping is an inconvenience; praying is an inconvenience; but they are part and parcel of life, and nothing has been done yet to relieve the situation, except in the item of prayer. From prayer, and from a multitude of other inconveniences, not mentioned above, that round out life (death excepted), we have found ways of escape—by borrowing, renting, hiring, avoiding, denying, until life, which is the sum of all inconveniences, has been reduced to its infantile nothingness—the protest against the personal effort of breathing which is existence.
Not so for the Commuter. He is compelled to live. I have been reckoning up my inconveniences: the things that I possess; the things I have that are mine; not rented, borrowed, hired, avoided, but claimed, performed, made, owned; that I am burdened with, responsible for; that require my time and my hands. And I find that, for a fairly full life there are inconveniences enough incidental to commuting.
To begin with, there is the place of the Commuter’s home. Home? Yes, no doubt, he has a home, but where is it? Can Heaven, besides the Commuter, find out the way there?
You are standing with your question at the entrance of the great terminal station as the wintry day and the city are closing, and it is small wonder that you ask if God knows whither, over the maze of tracks reaching out into the night, each of this commuting multitude is going. But follow one, any one of the bundled throng—this one, this tired, fine-faced Scotchman of fifty years whom we chanced to see during the day selling silks behind the counter of a department store.
It is a chill November evening, with the meagre twilight already spent. Our Commuter has boarded a train for a nineteen-mile ride; then an electric car for five miles more, when he gets off, under a lone electric light, swinging amid the skeleton limbs of forest trees. We follow him, now on foot, down a road dark with night and overhanging pines, on past a light in a barn, and on—when a dog barks, a horse whinnies, a lantern flares suddenly into the road and comes pattering down at us, calling, “Father! father!”
We stop at the gate as father and daughter enter the glowing kitchen. A moment later we hear a cheerful voice greeting the horse, and then, had we gone closer to the barn, we might have heard the creamy tinkle of milk, spattering warm into the bottom of the tin pail.
Heaven knew whither, over the reaching rails, this tired seller of silks was going. Heaven was there awaiting him. The yard-stick was laid down at half-past five o’clock; at half-past six by the clock the Commuter was far away, farther than the other side of the world, in his own small barn where they neither sell silk nor buy it, but where they have a loft full of fragrant meadow hay, and keep a cow, and eat their oatmeal porridge with cream.
It is an inconvenient world, this distant, darkened, unmapped country of the Commuter. Only God and the Commuter know how to get there, and they alone know why they stay. But there are reasons, good and sufficient reasons—there are inconveniences, I should say, many and compelling inconveniences, such as wife and children, miles in, miles out, the isolation, the chores, the bundles—loads of bundles—that keep the Commuter commuting. Once a commuter, always a commuter, because there is no place along the road, either way, where he can put his bundles down.
Bundles, and miles in, and miles out, and isolation, and children, and chores? I will count them all.
The bundles I have carried! And the bundles I have yet to carry! to “tote”! to “tote”! But is it all of life to be free from bundles? How, indeed, may one so surely know that one has a hold upon life as when one has it done into a bundle? Life is never so tangible, never so compact and satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied with a string. One’s clothes, to take a single example, as one bears them home in a box, are an anticipation and a pure joy—the very clothes that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course, or wears with disconcerting self-consciousness, or wears, it may be, with physical pain.
Here are the Commuter’s weary miles. Life to everybody is a good deal of a journey; to nobody so little of a journey, however, as to the Commuter, for his traveling is always bringing him home.
And as to his isolation and his chores it is just the same, because they really have no separate existence save in the urban mind, as hydrogen and oxygen have no separate existence save in the corked flasks of the laboratory. These gases are found side by side nowhere in nature. Only water is to be found free in the clouds and springs and seas—only the union of hydrogen and oxygen, because it is part of the being of these two elements to combine. So is it the nature of chores and isolation to combine—into water, like hydrogen and oxygen, into a well of water, springing up everlastingly to the health, the contentment, and to the self-sufficiency of the Commuter.
At the end of the Commuter’s evening journey, where he lays his bundles down, is home, which means a house, not a latch-key and “rooms”; a house, I say, not a “floor,” but a house that has foundations and a roof, that has an outside as well as inside, that has shape, character, personality, for the reason that the Commuter and not a Community, lives there. Flats, tenements, “chambers,” “apartments”—what are they but public buildings, just as inns and hospitals and baths are, where you pay for your room and ice-water, or for your cot in the ward, as the case may be? And what are they but unmistakable signs of a reversion to earlier tribal conditions, when not only the cave was shared in common, but the wives and children and the day’s kill? The differences between an ancient cliff-house and a modern flat are mere details of construction; life in the two would have to be essentially the same, with odds, particularly as to rooms and prospect, in favor of the cliff-dweller.
The least of the troubles of flatting is the flat; the greatest is the shaping of life to fit the flat, conforming, and sharing one’s personality, losing it indeed! I’ll commute first! The only thing I possess that distinguishes me from a factory shoe-last or an angel of heaven is my personality. Shoe-lasts are known by sizes and styles, angels by ranks; but a man is known by what he isn’t, and by what he hasn’t, in common with anybody else.
One must commute, if one would live in a house, and have a home of one’s own, and a personality of one’s own, provided, of course, that one works in New York City or in Boston or Chicago; and provided, further, that one is as poor as one ought to be. And most city workers are as poor as they ought to be—as poor, in other words, as I am.
Poor! Where is the man rich enough to buy Central Park or Boston Common? For that he must needs do who would make a city home with anything like my dooryard and sky and quiet. A whole house, after all, is only the beginning of a home; the rest of it is dooryard and situation. A house is for the body; a home for body and soul; and the soul needs as much room outside as inside the house,—needs a garden and some domestic animal and the starry vault of the sky.
It is better to be cramped for room within the house than without. Yet the yard need not be large, certainly not a farm, nor a gentleman’s estate, nor fourteen acres of woodchucks, such as my own. Neither can it be, for the Commuter, something abandoned in the remote foothills, nor something wanton, like a brazen piece of sea-sand “at the beach.”
The yard may vary in size, but it must be of soil, clothed upon with grass, with a bush or a tree in it, a garden, and some animal, even if the tree has to grow in the garden and the animal has to be kept in the tree, as with one of my neighbors, who is forced to keep his bees in his single weeping willow, his yard not being large enough for his house and his hive. A bee needs considerable room.
And the soul of the Commuter needs room,—craves it,—but not mere acres, nor plentitude of things. I have fourteen acres, and they are too many. Eight of them are in woods and gypsy moths. Besides, at this writing, I have one cow, one yearling heifer, one lovely calf, with nature conspiring to get me a herd of cows; I have also ten colonies of bees, which are more than any Commuter needs, even if they never swarmed; nor does he need so many coming cows.
But with only one cow, and only one colony of bees, and only one acre of yard, still how impossibly inconvenient the life of the Commuter is! A cow is truly an inconvenience if you care for her yourself—an inherent, constitutional, unexceptional inconvenience are cows and wives if you care for them yourself. A hive of bees is an inconvenience; a house of your own is an inconvenience, and, according to the figures of many of my business friends, an unwarranted luxury. It is cheaper to rent, they find. “Why not keep your money in your business, where you can turn it?” they argue. “Real estate is a poor investment generally,—so hard to sell, when you want to, without a sacrifice.”
It is all too true. The house, the cow, the children, are all inconvenient. I can buy two quarts of blue Holstein milk of a milkman, typhoid and scarlet-fever germs included, with much less inconvenience than I can make my yellow-skinned Jersey give down her fourteen quarts a day. I can live in a rented house with less inconvenience than in this house of my own. I am always free to go away from a rented house, and I am always glad to go. The joy of renting is to move, or sublet; to be rid also of taxes and repairs.
“Let the risers rot! It isn’t my house, and if I break my neck I’ll sue for damages!”
There is your renter, and the joy he gets in renting.
There are advantages, certainly, in renting; your children, for instance, can each be born in a different house, if you rent; and if they chance to come all boys, like my own, they can grow up at the City Athletic Association—a convenient, and more or less permanent place, nowadays, which may answer very well their instinctive needs for a fixed abode, for a home. There are other advantages, no doubt. But however you reckon them, the rented house is in the end a tragedy, as the willful renter and his homeless family is a calamity, a disgrace, a national menace. Drinking and renting are vicious habits. A house and a bit of land of your own are as necessary to normal living as fresh air, food, a clear conscience, and work to do.
If so, then the question is, Where shall one make his home? “Where shall the scholar live?” asks Longfellow; “In solitude or in society? In the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark gray city, where he can feel and hear the throbbing heart of man? I make answer for him, and say, In the dark, gray city.”
I should say so, too, and I should say it without so much oracular solemnity. The city for the scholar. He needs books, and they do not grow in cornfields. The pale book-worm is a city worm, and feeds on glue and dust and faded ink. The big green tomato-worm lives in the country. But this is not a question of where scholars should live; it is where men should live and their children. Where shall a man’s home be? Where shall he eat his supper? Where lay him down to sleep when his day’s work is done? Where find his odd job and spend his Sunday? Where shall his children keep themselves usefully busy and find room to play? Let the Commuter, not the scholar, make answer.
The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own.
Where, then, should a man live? I will make answer only for myself, and say, Here in Hingham, right where I am, for here on Mullein Hill the sky is round and large, the evening and the Sunday silences are deep, the dooryards are wide, the houses are single, and the neighborhood ambitions are good kitchen-gardens, good gossip, fancy chickens, and clean paint.
There are other legitimate ambitions, and the Commuter is not without them; but these few go far toward making home home, toward giving point and purpose to life, and a pinch of pride.
The ideal home depends very much, of course, on the home you had as a child. I can think of nothing so ideally homelike as a farm,—an ideal farm, ample, bountiful, peaceful, with the smell of apples coming up from the cellar, and the fragrance of herbs and broom-corn haunting storeroom and attic.
The day is past when every man’s home can be his farm, dream as every man may of sometime having such a home; but the day has just arrived when every man’s home can be his garden and chicken-pen and dooryard, with room and quiet and a tree.
The day has come, for the means are at hand, when life, despite its present centralization, can be more as it used to be—spread out, roomier, simpler, healthier, more nearly normal, because again lived near to the soil. It is time that every American home was built in the open country, for there is plenty of land—land in my immediate neighborhood for a hundred homes where children can romp, and your neighbor’s hens, too, and the inter-neighborhood peace brood undisturbed. And such a neighborhood need not be either the howling wilderness, where the fox still yaps, or the semi-submerged suburban village, where every house has its Window-in-Thrums. The Commuter cannot live in the wild country, else he must cease to commute; and as for small-village life—I suppose it might be worse. It is not true that man made the city, that God made the country, and that the devil made the village in between; but it is pretty nearly true, perhaps.
But the Commuter, it must be remembered, is a social creature, especially the Commuter’s wife, and no near kin to stumps and stars. They may do to companion the prophetic soul, not, however, the average Commuter, for he is common and human, and needs his own kind. Any scheme of life that ignores this human hankering is sure to come to grief; any benevolent plan for homesteading the city poor that would transfer them from the garish day of the slums to the sweet solitudes of unspoiled nature had better provide them with copies of “The Pleasures of Melancholy” and leave them to bask on their fire-escapes.
Though to my city friends I seem somewhat remote and incontiguous, still I am not dissevered and dispersed from my kind, for I am only twenty miles from Boston Common, and as I write I hear the lowing of a neighbor’s cows, and the voices of his children as they play along the brook below, and off among the fifteen square miles of treetops that fill my front yard, I see faint against the horizon two village spires, two Congregational spires, once one, that divided and fell and rose again on opposite sides of the village street. I often look away at the spires. And I as often think of the many sweet trees that wave between me and those tapering steeples, where they look up to worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl across the street.
Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields and as lovely, too—from twenty miles away, or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is necessary; but less and less is city living necessary.
It is less and less possible also. New York City—the length and breadth of Manhattan—and Boston, from the Fenway in three directions to the water-front, are as unfit for a child to grow up in as the basement floor of a china store for a calf. There might be hay enough on such a floor for a calf, as there is doubtless air enough on a New York City street for a child. It is not the lack of things—not even of air—in a city that renders life next to impossible there; it is rather the multitude of things. City life is a three-ringed circus, with a continuous performance, with interminable side-shows and peanuts and pink lemonade; it is jarred and jostled and trampled and crowded and hurried; it is overstimulated, spindling, and premature—it is too convenient.
You can crowd desks and pews and workbenches without much danger, but not outlooks and personalities, not beds and doorsteps. Men will work to advantage under a single roof; they cannot sleep to advantage so. A man can work under almost any conditions; he can live under very few.
Here in New England—as everywhere—the conditions of labor during the last quarter-century have vastly changed, while the conditions of healthful living have remained essentially as they ever were, as they must continue to remain for the next millennium.
Some years ago I moved into an ancient house in one of the oldest of New England towns. Over the kitchen I found a room that had to be entered by ladder from without. That room was full of lasts and benches—all the kit necessary for shoe-making on a small scale. There were other houses scattered about with other such rooms—closed as if by death. Far from it. Yonder in the distance smoked the chimney of a great factory. All the cobblers of these houses had gathered there to make shoes by machine. But where did they live? and how? Here in the old houses where their fathers lived, and as their fathers lived, riding, however, to and from their work on the electric cars.
I am now living in an adjoining town, where, on my drive to the station, I pass a small hamlet of five houses grouped about a little shop, through whose windows I can see benches, lasts, and old stitching-machines. Shoes were once made here on a larger scale, by more recent methods. Some one is building a boat inside now. The shoemakers have gathered at the great factory with the shoemakers of the neighbor town. But they continue to live in the hamlet, as they used to, under the open sky, in their small gardens. And they need to. The conditions of their work have quite changed; the simple, large needs of their lives remain forever the same.
Let a man work where he will, or must; let him live where only the whole man can live—in a house of his own, in a yard of his own, with something green and growing to cultivate, something alive and responsive to take care of; and let it be out under the sky of his birthright, in a quiet where he can hear the wind among the leaves, and the wild geese as they honk high overhead in the night to remind him that the seasons have changed, that winter is following down their flying wedge.
As animals (and we are entirely animal)—we are as far under the dominion of nature as any ragweed or woodchuck. But we are entirely human too, and have a human need of nature, that is, a spiritual need, which is no less real than the physical. We die by the million yearly for lack of sunshine and pure air; and who knows how much of our moral ill-health might be traced to our lack of contact with the healing, rectifying soul of the woods and skies?
A man needs to see the stars every night that the sky is clear. Turning down his own small lamp, he should step out into the night to see the pole star where he burns or “the Pleiads rising through the mellow shade.”
One cannot live among the Pleiads; one cannot even see them half of the time; and one must spend part of one’s time in the mill. Yet never to look for the Pleiads, or to know which way to look, is to spend, not part, but all of one’s time in the mill.