It has been some time since I sat down to work at my table under the tall spruce trees. I have had an experience during the past five or six days which is one of my rewards for letting nature live, and, for a space, it quite completely upset me, so far as work was concerned.
In other words, I have been having an experience with a species of vermin which I love. The baby vermin of this particular species are, to me, almost as lovable and quite as cute in their ways as human babies; and for the adult vermin, the mothers and fathers of the babies, I have a far greater love and respect than I have for many males and females of my own breed. And, taking it all round, they are a cleaner, handsomer, and more wholesome-looking lot than the average crowd of humans, though they are—because of the mightiness of man’s edict—nothing more than vermin.
I am speaking of bears. A few years ago, one of my most thrilling sports was to hunt them—blacks, grizzlies, and polars. Now I consider them, in a way, my brothers, and I am having a lot of fun in the comradeship. I am filled with resentment when I consider that in all the states of this country, with the exception of two or three, the law says these friends of mine are “vermin,” along with lice and fleas and maggots, and that they may be killed on sight, babies and all, because,—perhaps once in his lifetime,—a bear living very close to civilization may make a meal of pig or lamb. If every human mother in the land could hold a baby cub in her arms for five minutes, there would be such an uprising of feminine sympathy that the laws would be repealed.
In thinking again of our mothers, I would give a good year of my life if a million of them could have seen what I have seen during the past few days. For, after all, I believe that nearly all great movements toward better and bigger and more beautiful things must and will begin with women. No amount of “equality” will ever take that blessed superiority to men away from them. To-day, even religion, shameful to men as the fact may be, rests on a pillar of women’s white shoulders, and all the faith that the world possesses first finds its resting-place in their soft breasts. And I look ahead to the day, with unbounded faith of my own, when women will see, and understand, and begin the great fight toward comradeship with all that other life which is so utterly dependent about them now—life which throbs and urges in every living thing from the grass-blade and the oak to the “instinct” creatures of flesh and blood. Then shall we have a “religion of nature,” with a force and a might behind it which will glorify the earth, and man will come to realize that he is not God, but only an insignificantly small part of God’s handiwork. And when man comes to that point, where he casts off his arrogance and his ego, then will the time have come for the birth of a satisfying and universal faith in that great and all-embracing Power which we know and speak of in our own language as God.
And the very foundation of this faith, I believe, will be an understanding of all life, the acknowledgment at last that man himself may not be a more precious physical manifestation of the Supreme Vital Force than many of the other created things about him.
It is because I believe that nature, the mother of all life, is trying to teach us this great truth in a thousand or a million different ways, in the smoke and grime and crush of big cities as well as in farm-land and forest, that I come back to my little experience with the bears.
About six or seven miles to the north of me is a great ridge, plainly visible from one of the halfway limbs of my lookout spruce, a sort of barrier which rises up between me and the still vaster hinterland beyond it. Sometime in the past, a fire swept over it, so that now it is covered with a gorgeous and splendid growth of young birch and poplars, and virile patches of vines on which, a little later, there will be an abundance of strawberries, raspberries, rose-berries, and black currants. It is also richly sprinkled with mountain-ash trees, which give promise of a yield of hundreds of bushels of fruit this late summer and autumn. Altogether, it is an ideal feeding-range for wild things, hoof, claw, and feathers. Three times I have traveled for miles along the cap of this ridge. To me, in all its richness and promise, it is a glorious manifestation of Life. It breathes under me and about me. I can fairly hear its compelling youth bursting from its growing leaves, its swelling fruits, its flowers, and from the mold that pulses and throbs with the vital forces under my feet. I almost think I could live and die on this ridge, or another ridge like it, and never be at loss for company.
On my first visit to the ridge, being overtaken by storm, I built me a brush shelter in a lovely spot close to it, with a tiny creek of spring-cold water not more than a dozen paces away. On my third and last visit, I returned to this spot, and ran face on into my adventure.
From the sheltered bower of balsams where I had built my wigwam, I could look up a rolling, meadowy breast of the ridge, so perfect in its adornment of vine and bush and small clumps of young trees that, to one not entirely acquainted with the exquisite art of nature, it would almost seem as though a human landscape-architect had “laid out” the little paradise which was my hillside back yard. On this particular morning, coming up quietly, my eyes were greeted by an amazingly pretty spectacle. The green hillside, soft and velvety in the sunlight and shadow of the morning, was in full possession of two families of black bears.
So close were the nearest of them to me that I dropped like a shot behind a big rock, and the breath of air that was stirring being in my favor, I was at a splendid vantage-point to take in the whole scene. Within forty yards of me were a mother and three cubs, and a little higher up—perhaps twice that distance—were a mother and two cubs. At almost the very crest of the ridge were two more bears, which I at first thought were adults. A closer inspection assured me they were last year’s cubs, and possibly not more than a third grown, though to which of the two mothers they belonged, if to either, I could not make up my mind. Frequently, instead of setting out in life for itself, a black bear cub will follow its mother through a second season, and I judged this to be the situation here.
For two hours, I did not move from my place of concealment. That spectacle of motherhood and babyhood on the hillside, with the virile and luxuriant life of nature pulsing and beating all about it, was a new chapter in my book of religion. It was pointing out to me, in perhaps a hundredth or a thousandth lesson, that all life is the same, and that it is only language, or the want of language, that makes the difference in the “life-relationship” of all created things. I could fancy, as I lay there, just how the Supreme Arbiter of things had given physical being to all this life that was about me, as well as the life that was in me. It has all come from the same dynamo, so to speak—a spark of it in each tree, a spark of it in each flower and shrub, and blade of grass, a spark of it in each of the beasts of flesh and blood on the hillside, and a spark of it in me. Our life was the same. It had all come from the same vital source, from the same supreme fount of existence. Yet how different were the forms it animated! Close to my hand was a beautiful rock-violet, blue as the sky, its velvety petals freckled with tiny flecks of gold; a few yards away, perched among the rustling leaves of a birch, a brush-warbler filled the air with melody; back of me, the tops of the thick balsams whispered softly, and up there I could hear the grunting of the mother bears, the squealing of the little cubs, and a gentle murmuring sound that came from the ridge itself, as if all living things were fighting for a language, struggling to give voice to something that was in them.
I have had some amusement and a little discord over the teapot tempests that so-called nature-scientists occasionally stir up among themselves over the “humanizing” of wild life. Man’s ego has possessed him so utterly that it is distasteful to him to concede anything “humanlike” to any creature that is not in his own flesh and form. For my part, loving all wild life as I do, I am proud and glad that it does not possess more of our human qualities. If I write honestly of what has come to me in my own wide experience in nature, I must—no matter how unpleasant the statement may be—confess that wild life does possess a great many characteristics that are very “human,” and the ways of its members are in many instances strangely the same. I could see little difference between my bears on the hillside and two human mothers and their children, except in their physical appearance, and the fact that the humans would undoubtedly have made a great deal more noise. But the bears were handsomer—begging the ladies’ pardon. Their sleek coats shone like black satin in the sun, and the cubs were cute enough to hug to death. But they were a worry to their mothers for all that, and especially one of them, which appeared to be the hog-it-all member of the family nearest me. Whenever the mother bear pawed over a stone or pulled down a tender bush, this little customer was always there ahead of the rest of the family, licking up the choicest grubs and ants and getting the first mouthful of greens. Half a dozen times, the mother slapped him with her paw, rolling him over like a fat ball. But there could have been no very great corrective power in the cuffings, or else he was toughened to them by usage, for he was back on the job again without very much loss of time.
For almost two hours, the bears fed on the hillside. Several times the two families drew so near together that the cubs intermingled and the mothers almost rubbed sides. I feel that the interest of this particular page would be greatly increased for many of my readers if I added a ferocious imaginary fight between the two mothers and a bloody feud between the youngsters. Bears do fight when they meet—sometimes—just like humans, only not as often. But it is my duty to relate that these bears were at peace on this particular day, and that they seemed to enjoy the mutual companionship. It was all so fine that I had an impelling desire to go up on the hillside and become a comrade with them. When the feeding was over, and the cubs were wrestling and running about in play, I almost rose up from behind my rock to call out my friendship to them. The lack of one thing held me back—that one thing which all nature is crying out for—a language. I feel they would have welcomed me could I have told them I was a friend, and wanted to play with them, and make them a present of some sugar. But instead of that this is what happened:
In their play, two of the cubs had descended within twenty feet of my rock. One of these was the gourmand. Somehow, he lost his balance, rolled over, and came tumbling down. When he stopped he was not more than half a dozen feet from me. As he brought his fat little body to its feet he saw me. His eyes fairly popped. It seemed to me that for a full minute he did not move or breathe. And during that same minute I remained as still as a rock. In his amazement and his wonder, he was the funniest thing I had ever seen, and in spite of myself, my face broke into a grin. Instantly there came out of him a little, piggish grunt,—and he was off. Up that hillside he went as if the world was after him. He did not stop when he reached his mother and the other cubs, but seemed to hit it still faster for the top of the ridge. The mother looked after him, sniffed the air, and rose to her feet. In half a minute, she was lumbering after him, the two remaining cubs hustling ahead of her.
A hundred yards away, the second mother bear took the warning. In a very short time, they had all disappeared over the cap of the ridge. I had not shown myself. I had made no sound. The wind was still in my favor. Yet the frightened cub had given warning to them all. For no other creature but man would they have fled like that. Even in the face of a pack of wolves, the mothers would have turned to fight. Something had told them that man was near—yet only the cub had seen and smelled that man, and he had probably never seen or smelled another. Yet he knew, and all the others knew, that man was the deadliest of all enemies. And I am half convinced, as I write this, that nature has at least the beginning of a universal language, that the centuries and hundreds of centuries have given it four words, and these words are: “Man is our enemy.” I might fancy that the winds carry these words, that the tree-tops whisper them, that they are in the undertone of running waters, that all life outside of man and man’s pitiably few friends has, in some strange way, come to learn them. It is, I confess, an elusive sort of fancy,—but it sets one to thinking.
It makes one wonder, for instance, why man is so jealous of himself. The Supreme Power is immeasurable, he tells himself. It has no such a thing as limitation. Heaven, no matter in what form he may conceive it, is utterly boundless. Yet he is jealous of it. He does not want to concede that any other life will form a part of it but that of his own breed. He has tried, through unnumbered centuries, to fool himself into the belief that he is the one and only thing in all creation upon which the Ruling Power of the universe has its guardian eye. He has tried to make himself believe that he is the one toad in the huge puddle of life. He has not conceded that an all-powerful but tender God might love flowers and birds and trees and many other living things as well as he loves man. And as I sit here under my spruce trees again, it seems to me that, just because he has been so near-sighted, man has not yet found a faith which is all-comforting and of which he is utterly sure.
I seem to see a very clear reason for this. In this age, though still fettered by his egoism, man is not utterly blind to his own deformities. As “civilization” progresses, he sees more and more what a monster he has been in the past, and what a monster in many ways he is to-day. He sees his breed committing every crime known to the ages, from petty larceny to world-slaughters that devastate nations. He sees everywhere the strong taking advantage of the weak. He sees millions go hungry and cold that a few may profit. In great convention-halls, he sees the “statesmen” that rule the destiny of a mighty nation cutting capers and acting generally like a lot of silly little children. He sees every man in a great game fighting to see who can accumulate the most dollars, no matter at what cost to the others. He sees sickening and disgusting fads come and go. He looks on a world-brothel of iniquity, of discontent, of avarice and greed and butchery among men. Nowhere does he see the stability, the dignity, and the mighty forces of good that should walk hand in hand with “the chosen of God.”
He is beginning to see himself, at last, as a contemptible specimen of life—in spite of his brain and his inventions.
He is beginning to understand that the most perfect airship his brain will ever conceive cannot take him to heaven.
He is beginning to realize that there is a thing greater than brain, greater than mechanical progress.
And as he comes to understand more and more how imperfect a thing he is, the more unstable his faith becomes; and the sacrilegious thought comes to him, unconsciously but with terrific force: “If I am the chosen handiwork of God, then I can have no very great faith in the judgment and workmanship of God.”
And as the suspicion grows upon him that he may not be the “one and only” child of God, he cries out wildly in these modern days for evidence. He tries to bring spirits back from the dead that they may offer him some proof. He quests vainly for “revelations” that may satisfy him. He says with his mouth, “Yes; I believe absolutely in God,” yet, in his heart, he knows that he is half lying,—because of fear of what his neighbor will think if he speaks the truth. He wants to believe there is a God. He wants to know there is a God. Yet he is afraid.
And, personally, I am glad that the time has come when he is afraid. I think it is the real beginning of his salvation and the dropping-away of his egoism. To-day he is beginning to see all life as he did not see it yesterday. And to-morrow his eyes will be wide open.
That is my faith. I believe that God is greater than humanity has ever conceived him to be. I think he is “a common sort of fellow,” and I write these words with all the holy reverence of which the soul is capable. I do not mean to imply that I think he is in my form, or in any particular form. But he is Life. And it is his intention and his desire that every living thing that is worthy of life be a part of him. I am almost Indian in this faith. I can hear the buoyant, cheering call of Life in a waterfall. The inspiration of it comes into my own body from out of a whispering tree, from a bush glowing with bloom, from a flower, from the song of a bird, from the rain itself. I find great peace and contentment in my faith that this God is everywhere, and that we may meet him face to face fifty times a day if we throw off the hard shell of our egoism, and realize that all nature is God—and that we, as men and women and children, are a part of that all-embracing nature.
Even now the sun is filtering through the tree-branches upon this partly written page. I look at it, and I see again the inconceivable greatness of the Supreme Power, and my own microscopic littleness. For we of the earth have thought that the earth is great, and that we, having inherited the earth, are of all things greatest. Yet is that sun which warms and lights my page as I write—more than a million times as large as the earth—more than eight hundred thousand miles from one end of its diameter to the other. And the still more stupendous fact is that this sun is itself only a small bit of mechanism in the mighty forces of infinity, for there are a hundred million other suns in space, each lighting and warming its own worlds—innumerable worlds—each peopled with its own type of flesh and blood, and each possessing, perhaps, its own peculiar forms of “civilization” and its own savagery.
Just that great, and vast, and all-embracing is the handiwork of that vital force which rules all infinity—and to which we have given the name of God.
And here I emphasize again that great truth which nature has impressed upon me—that, just so long as man considers himself the one and only chosen part of God, and therefore next to him in greatness, just that long will his egoism and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the faith which might be his. I believe that Christ was a great teacher, that he was a great student of his times, and incorporated into his teachings all that was highest and best in the teachings of other great men who had lived and died before him. And I have always regretted that Christ was unfortunate to have for his historians a set of men who were unequal to their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved by “visions” and superstitions instead of fact, men who believed in all the miracles of the imagination from conversing with angels to stopping the sun,—men utterly incapable of writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty teachings of Christ which, had they been written as they were spoken, would have meant so much for the world to-day. For I believe, in my own heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of nature that history knows of to the present day. I believe that in the many years of his “disappearance,” Christ was not only studying the teachings of the past, but that, close to the breast of nature, he was learning the splendid truths of life—all life—which were afterward the very heart and soul of his messages to mankind.
I believe that Christ, could he return to earth to-day, would say: “My biographers have given you a wrong impression of me, and they have misquoted me. What my soul was called upon to teach nineteen hundred years ago, they have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. For I am a man, even as thee and thine. But I have found the true faith. And that faith, as I told them then, depends utterly upon the dropping of the scales of self from man’s eyes, and his understanding of all life. For that I gladly died.”
The greatest regret I have is that Christ, as a man, did not foresee more clearly the tremendous influence his teachings were to exert upon humanity through the ages. Had he guessed this, he would have written down with his own hand those teachings which were so carelessly left to the mercy of superstitious—frequently fanatical—and at nearly all times incapable biographers. For Christ, of all men that ever lived, was undoubtedly one of the best and the most humble. His teachings came straight from his heart. He did not intend that they should be smothered in hyperbole, metaphor, and rhetorical embroidery until no two living men could agree absolutely upon their meaning. I believe that he spoke simply and directly, for only in that way could he have reached the hearts of the masses. And I believe that the greatest of all his lessons was the lesson of humility. As a man, he had dropped his egoism, had submitted himself to the Master of all life, and in that submission he had found the truth, and the glory of a great faith. The misfortune of the humanity to follow in after-ages was that the world of Jesus Christ was small—so small that by word of mouth he could reach from end to end of it. Had he dreamed that there were still undiscovered worlds so great that in comparison his own was but a handful of dirt out of a wagon-load, I am convinced within myself that the world to-day would not be struggling to understand a faith written in parables and riddles, for Christ would have set his own hand to the task which others so poorly accomplished.
With such a priceless inheritance in the form of Christ’s own handiwork, I am equally sure that humanity would no longer have an excuse for its egoism, or be ashamed of that humility which is necessary to the understanding of life, and essential to the possession of a deep and abiding faith.
I have, at times, heard intelligent people express amazement that I should dare to place human life on an equal level with all other life, that I should so “blaspheme the Creator” as to say that the life in a two-legged animal who can talk is the same as that in a flower or a plant or a tree or some other animal which cannot talk. I have sometimes allowed myself to point out the innumerable advantages possessed over man by many living things which have no language, as we know language. I could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures of the thousands and tens of thousands of advantages which living things outside of man possess over man, and which, if man could achieve, would be stupendous miracles. But man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism to the marvelous attainments of all life that does not walk and talk as he walks and talks. When confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and apparent miracle of other life as compared with his own I have nearly always found that men and women fall back, as a last resort, on the absurd and shallow argument: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul.”
Once a beautiful young matron said to me, “There is much in your creed that is inspiring and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is inconceivable, for you must concede that a human being is the most perfect of all created things.”
I gave her an exquisite rose which I had plucked from my garden only a few minutes before.
“There are, outside of men and women and children, innumerable things more perfectly created than this flower,” I said. “Are you, in your youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose?”
And yet I know that such arguments as these, innumerable though they might be, cannot prevail until men and women bring themselves face to face with nature itself, filled with a willingness and a yearning to understand. They point out the pests of life—the serpent, the deadly insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet they cannot see themselves as perhaps the deadliest and the most relentless of all pests. For it is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that every living thing—flower, and tree, and beast, and man—has a pest born unto it; and unto these pests other pests are born, until at last,—when the thing is analyzed,—a pest is a pest only in so far as its enemy, and not its friends, judge it to be a pest. If the world to-day were eliminated of human pests as each individual in the world might judge for himself, how many of us would be left alive to-morrow?
And always, when I have listened to the age-old arguments prompted by man’s egoism and self-glorification, I love to return to the peace and the comfort of nature, whether that nature be in the form of a deep forest, a clover field, an orchard, or the little back plot of a crowded city home. And if I am where there is no cool earth to stand my feet upon, I find my peace and rest in the printed pages which describe that nature-world of mine. From the most beautifully written volumes to the honest pages and unembellished fact of farm-journals, I have, times without number, found enthralling interest, consolation, and the strength and courage of the cool and glorious earth itself. Nature’s Bible is not hard to find. It is everywhere, living, breathing, printed—the one universal and ever-present Book of Life.
Whenever I think of the commonest of human arguments: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul,” my mind always travels back to a certain incident in my experience as a refutation. I could, had I the space, answer that argument with a hundred compelling facts; I might answer it from the point of the flower, the vine, the tree, the grass that carpets the earth, but I always think first of the particular tragedy I am going to describe, because of the chief human actor in it, and because this actor was, in my humble estimation, one of the most physically perfect of her species.
I will not give her name. She is the daughter of one of the best known men in the nation, and one of the foremost scientists of the world; and should she happen to read these lines, I hope that she will see, with a new vision and a new understanding, that “triumph” of years ago.
I think she was about twenty when my outfit happened to join trails with her father’s in the far north. She will remember that early afternoon when we camped together close to the Cochrane, in the Reindeer Lake country.
I believe that I am quite reasonably sure of myself when I say that she was the most beautiful woman I had seen up to that time or have seen since. It is simply because of her perfection that she has always appealed as having furnished to me one of the most dramatic object-lessons of my experience. She was athrill with life. She worshiped her father. She loved the sun, the sky, the wind, the trees, the whole world. Life seemed to have given her everything that it possessed—the rare coloring of the most beautiful flower under her feet, a form that was divine, hair and eyes that no artist could paint, and, I think, one of the sweetest voices I have ever heard. She is, I have heard, beloved in her own environment. She is a worker for human betterment, and spends much of her time in actual work with the poor. Not long ago she was responsible for the building of a home for unfortunate little children.
That day in camp there was a sudden excitement. Three of the Indians had driven a cow moose, a yearling, and a bull into a small cover. It was a splendid chance for the girl. I can see her eyes glowing with the fires of excitement now, as she caught up her rifle and hurried with her father and brother and the Indians to the refuge-place of the family of moose. She was placed at the head of an open space, and the moose were driven out. First came the yearling calf, then the mother, and after them came the old bull. The girl’s lovely face, as I looked at it, was flushed. It seemed as though I might hear the excited beating of her heart as she waited, quivering with the desire to kill.
She fired first at the calf, and then at the mother—and from that moment all that was big and beautiful and noble in life seemed to leave her own body and enter that of the old bull moose. For the first shot had struck the calf, laming it so that it could run but slowly, with the mother urging it on from behind. Not once in the moments that followed did the mother run ahead of her calf. And then I beheld a thing that I believe to be as noble as anything that man has ever done in all the ages. Believe, if you will, that the magnificent old bull had no reason. Believe, if you cannot sacrifice your egoism, that he did not think. Do not give him the credit of possessing a heart or a soul or feelings, if that sacrifice of egoism hurts you. But consider what happened.
The old bull ran alongside the cow, alongside the calf, and then, by reason or instinct, he knew what had happened. He did not forge ahead. He did not race for safety, but deliberately he dropped behind, turned himself broadside, and stopped, making of his own splendid body a barrier in the path of the bullets.
I heard the girl’s rifle cracking. Twice I saw the bull flinch, and I knew that he was struck. Then I heard her cry out, almost frantically, that her last shot was gone. In the same instant, her brother ran up from the cover and thrust his own rifle into her hands.
“Give it to him, sis!” he cried. “Give it to him!”
The big bull had turned. He staggered a bit as he ran, but in a hundred feet he had overtaken the cow and the calf. The calf was going still more slowly, and in my desire to see the cow and the bull break away, I shouted.
Almost simultaneously with the sound of my voice, the bull stopped again. He placed himself broadside, at perhaps a three-quarter angle, so that, by turning his head slightly, he was looking back at us. He was directly between the cow and the calf, and the girl’s bullets continued to rip into him. I remember that I cried out in protest, but she did not sense my words. Every fiber of her being was strung to the thrilling achievement of that crime. She was deaf and blind to the nobility of the great-hearted beast who, in my eyes, was deliberately sacrificing his life. The flaming lust to kill had driven all other things out of her heart and soul. Her father had run up, and brother and father cried out in triumph when the old bull sagged suddenly in the middle and almost fell to his knees. Four times he had been struck when again he went on.
From my experience in big-game hunting, I knew that he was done for. Yet, even in these moments when he was dying, the glorious soul of him was unafraid. Three hundred yards away he stopped and turned again, giving the cow and the calf a last chance to reach the timber. The girl fired her last shots, and missed. Then the bull swung after the cow and the calf and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, there came back to us a terrible, deep-chested cough, and my heart gave up its hope. It told me the heroic old bull was shot through the lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her father and brother as they ran over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing for a few moments. Then it was silent. When I came up to them, just inside the timber, the three were standing in triumph close to the dead body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but not quite dead. The brother had ended it with a revolver-shot.
And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later,—red-lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,—the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on the neck of her victim.
When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.
I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life. This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage to countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the world do flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering us when we come with our grief to the place of our lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the world would be hard and bleak to live in.
To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the two. When we breathe our last, our life—our soul—is gone. The two, I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but when we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent many wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city, hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty and the glory of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never before, one must come to understand the brotherhood of all life. It seems to me that the very stillness and peace of a resting-place of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret which those who are lying there have at last discovered—that life is the same, that its only difference is in form and manifestation. I seem to feel that I have come into the one place where there are only charity and faith and good will, and I have always the thought—which to me gives courage and hope—that this is why the flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so comforting there. I have stood in other cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been barren and ugly, where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but even there, if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the Flower, the same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater courage to inspire one to “keep on.”
I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I happened, at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the Northland, and when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I knew of was at a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles away. Thirty miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved roads and level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense forest and swamp, without trails or guide-posts—and especially when one is badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I took a chance along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped, fell, and came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a terrific blow, probably on a projecting ledge of rock.
The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in my carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent while I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten days thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my injured foot.
With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than a quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under the circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to twice their normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling, cut it as I lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all semblance to form, and was so badly discolored that a cold and terrible dread began to grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that some wandering adventurer might have drifted within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the second day found me in the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physical agony, I prepared myself for the worst—placed my possessions within the reach of my hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with a small pail of water.
I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. Racked with pain, with the fever in my blood, my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The rising sun first lighted up the waterfall, then it fell in a warm and golden flood where I had made my camp. In that silence, broken only by the music of the water, every soft note that was made by the wild things came to me distinctly. It was a morning to put cheer and hope into the heart of a dying man. Then my eyes turned, and, a few feet beyond the reach of my hand, I found something looking at me.
Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing living and vibrant with life, and yet it was nothing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a foot high, and the face of it made me think of one of our home-garden pansies; only, the flower was all one color, with longer petals—a soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to face the morning sun, and, in facing the sun, it was squarely facing me—a piquant, joyous, laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in words, “What can possibly be the matter with you on this fine morning?”
I am not going into the psychology or soul-language of that flower. I am not going to argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did for me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to something, you may say it was because I was out of my head a part of the time with fever. But that flower was my doctor through the days of torture and hopelessness that followed. Now and then a bird sang near me; occasionally a wild thing would come and peer at me curiously, then go its way. But the flower never left me, and only turned its face partly away from me in the hours of its evening worship. For its God was the sun. It faced the sun in the morning, wide-awake and open. Late in the afternoon, it would turn a little on its stem, and with the setting of the sun, its soft petals would begin to close, and it would go to sleep, like a little child, with the coming of dusk. Day after day, it grew nearer and more of a beloved comrade to me.
After the fourth day, it did not, for an instant, allow me to think that I was going to die. Never for an instant did it lose its cheer and confidence. It was there to say “Hello!” to me every morning, and there to say “Good-night” to me when the shadows grew deep—and all through the day it talked to me, and bobbed its little head in the whispers of the breezes, and I had the foolish sentiment, at times, that it was actually flirting with me. I do not think I realized how precious it had become to me until, one day, there came a terrific thunder-storm. I thought the first blast of the wind and beat of rain were going to destroy my comrade, and, almost in a panic, I dragged myself right and left, forgetful of pain, until I had built a protection about my flower.
That was the sixth day, and, from that day, the swelling and the pain began to leave my limb. On the tenth, I could move about a little on my feet. On the fifteenth, I was prepared to undertake my journey again. I felt a real grief in leaving that solitary flower. It had become a part of me, had encouraged me in my blackest hours, had cheered and comforted me even in the darkness of nights, because I knew it was there—my little comrade—waiting for the sun. For me, it had individualized itself from among all the other flowers in the forest. And now, when I was about to go, I saw that the flower itself had about lived the span of its life; in a very short time it would fade and die. On the morning I left, the petals were drooping, and its tiny face did not look up at the sun and at me as brightly as before, and I fancied that I could hear its little voice saying, “Please take me with you.” And I did. Call it foolish and trivial sentiment if you will, but the flower and I went together, and afterward I wrote a novel and called it “Flower of the North.”
I have often heard strong men say, “Oh, that is merely a matter of sentiment. Life is too hard and real for a thing like that.”
I agree with them to an extent. Sentiment does not play a large part in the world to-day. For sentiment, as that word is understood by the millions, is the heart and soul of all that is good and great. Without sentiment in the hearts of a man and a woman, there cannot be the fullness of real love between them, even though the law has made them man and wife. Without sentiment, no good act is ever done from the heart out. Without sentiment—a sentiment that warms the soul as a fire warms a cold room—there will never be a deep and comforting faith. I have seen this “co-operation of rational power and moral feeling” make plain faces beautiful, and I have seen the lack of it make others hard as rock. Selfishness, egoism, the desire to get everything possible out of life, no matter at what expense to others, is its antithesis.
As I write these last pages, I have at hand facts which seem to show that sentiment, and therefore faith, is as nearly dead as it has ever been. For science in all the great nations of the earth is planning and plotting frantically for the extermination of their fellow men, and this, in the hour when all the world is crying out for a faith, is what is being achieved:
Deadly gases that will make gunpowder and the rifles anachronisms, that in the next war will depopulate whole regions, men, women, and little children alike.
Perfection of the lethal ray, which will shrivel up and paralyze human beings over vast areas, irrespective of whether they are combatants or not.
Development of plans for “germ-warfare,” whereby whole nations will be infected by plagues.
And then consider the words of one great military scientist of the English-speaking race: “Germ-warfare was tried on a small scale in the late war, and its results have been promising. The method of its use was in the poisoning of water supplies with cholera and typhus germs, and the loosing of dogs inoculated with rabies and of women inoculated with syphilis into the enemy country. Here apparently is a promising beginning from which vast developments are to be hoped for.”
A promising beginning—vast developments expected for the future—typhus—rabies—the commercial breeding of diseased women.
Yes; the world is crying aloud for a great faith, even as it smashes itself into moral fragments on the rocks of its own egoism and its own selfishness. But there has come a rent in its armor, and as it commits crimes and plans for still greater crimes, it also begins to realize its colossal wickedness. And in its terror it shrieks aloud for a manifestation of the Divine Power. It demands proof.
And again I say that the proof is so near that the world looks over its head—and does not see it. Not until man’s egoism crumbles will he understand. For ghosts will not come back from the dead to quiet his frenzies, nor will angels descend from out of the heavens. The Divine Power is too great and all-encompassing for that. God, speaking of that Power as God, is not a trickster. He is not a mountebank. He is not a lawyer arguing his case. He is Life. And this Life That Never Dies has no favorites. Such is my humble faith.
A long time has passed since I wrote these pages. All day the countryside has lain in that sleepy, golden shimmer that is the pulse of Indian summer. The nights are touched with frost. There is glory in the warmth of the sun.
I am in a little valley that I love—Sleepy Hollow, I call it. The farmhouse is old and unpainted, and it has stood on its stone foundation for almost a century. The barn is sagging in the middle, and between the barn and the house is an old well that a long-dead grandfather rigged when the timber in the hollow knew the howl of wolves and the screech of bobcats. Crowding close up to the back of the old house is an orchard of apple and cherry trees, so old they could tell many an interesting story if they could talk.
And all about the sides and the front of the house are great trees—a huge cottonwood, and ancient oaks from which the Indians may have shot squirrels with their bows and arrows two hundred years ago. The “woman of the house” has been in an invalid’s chair for years, and the husband does little but care for her. Therefore Life has crept up and almost inundated the place. The grass grows high and uncut. Wild flowers bloom in the yard. Quail come to feed with the chickens. And beyond this, all about, is the whisper of corn fields in growing-time, the ripples of fields of wheat and oats and rye, the music of the mowing-machine and the lowing of cattle. In this little old house of Sleepy Hollow, there is a woman who has not walked for years, and who will never walk again; and there is a little man with a great fierce mustache who watches her tenderly, and who knows that he must go on watching her until the end of her time—and yet in this house there is happiness, and also a great faith. And nature seems to rejoice in that faith. Birds build their nests under the porches. There is melody in the trees. At night, crickets sing in the long grass under the open windows, and the whippoorwills come and perch on the roof under the old sycamore.
Here are suffering—and peace; few of the riches of man, but an unlimited wealth of contentment and faith. These two, prisoned to the end of their days, have found what all the world is seeking. The little old house of the hollow, even with its tragedy, is glad. And life has made it so, the understanding of life, the voice and living presence of life as it whispers about me now in the golden sheen of Indian summer.
And its whisper seems to be, “Men are seeking me, reaching out for me, crying for me—yet they do not find me. They are looking far, and I am very near—so far that they look over and beyond me when I am waiting at their feet. When at last they see me, and understand, then will they have discovered the greatest of all treasures—Faith!”