Part 4 (1/2)

WORKMANs.h.i.+P

As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.

Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.

”You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will make in one season,” the boss told me. ”It will turn over next corn-planting time like a heap of ashes.”

That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.

I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of red firelight. Matters of craftsmans.h.i.+p were continually in my thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that word ”efficiency,” be reminded that the good old word originally had to do with workmans.h.i.+p and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad workmans.h.i.+p, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.

... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.

Toward the end of the week following I pa.s.sed him in the lane that leads down to the Lake--a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.

”I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese,”

he explained, as I came up.

It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I pa.s.sed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.

Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman.

I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover, I knew the man who would make it for me.

At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back fouled. That was all he said.

I pa.s.sed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous community. There were many children--a stilled and staring lot. They sat in dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their father had never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother would have spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came to the door as I pa.s.sed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the door-stone, and vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The virtue of fatherhood is not to be measured numerically.... April was nearly over, but the unsightly heaps that the snows had covered were not yet cleared away. Humped, they were, among the children. This is a world-old picture--one that need not be finished.

Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father--a burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of the human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred as reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplars.h.i.+p. He was a complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.

Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people.

In his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the low mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as it is, the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.

Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by--and in his own weak heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't ”hit one of them geese.” All his life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him into real production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless exhausted. That is the pace that kills--that sitting.

I went on to the forge of the workman. We talked together. I sat by while he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He will always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just as I think of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of the perfect damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there when I went back. The problem of him returned to mind after the freshening of the forge.

He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his children. We have sent them home from school because they were not clean. We complain that they waste what we give them; that they are harder on the shoes we furnish, than are our own children. We do not inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn on which side of the human meridian they stand--whether their disease is decadence and senility of spiritual life, or whether their spines are but freshly lifted from the animal levels.

As a purely physical aggregate--if our civilisation be that--our business is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He embarra.s.ses us, as sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is tolerated to the diseases with which he infects us, because we have weakened our resistance with cleanliness. But by the authority of our better understanding, by our sacred writings and the intuitions of our souls, we are men and no longer an animal aggregate. As men, our business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition, and hold him there; to make him and his children well first, and then to make workmen of them. _There are workmen in the world for this very task of lifting Monte and his brood._ We do not use them, because the national instinct of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet brothers.

In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain things to tell a group of young men. The cla.s.s was arranged. In the beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to offer no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather deep for me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which had helped me toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were gathered--all strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks afterward, I discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for months or years--that there was certain stuff in the seven that would write or die.

They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their minds with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done as a workman--that was my authority--a workman, a little older, a little farther along in the craft that called.

And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know, not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why, to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself, because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do; but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do just that for a larger cla.s.s, and in this effort I stumbled upon the very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal--for they are one and the same.

A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most hours each day--that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its pa.s.sions and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it--that man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.

It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very long in coming to the end of their fineness.