Part 1 (2/2)

Is it, indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for which I am waiting? I do not know.

_The Busy Bees_

Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those honey-merchants--sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the late sun to their night-long labours-I have sought instruction from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old industrious lesson.

And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last--might I not finally teach them--a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the s.h.i.+ning hour?

_The Wheat_

The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.

Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees, I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky; how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the h.o.a.rded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern landscape, the antique, pa.s.sionate, Biblical beauty of the South!

_The Coming of Fate_

When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that s.h.i.+ne for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me with their wings and pa.s.sed me by: when Fate beckoned and I did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not held out, and the Might-have-been s.h.i.+vered and vanished, dim as a into the waste realms of non-existence.

So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, to-day, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.

_My Speech_

”Ladies and Gentlemen,” I began--The Vicar was in the chair; Mrs. La Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the little schoolroom, with its maps and large Scripture prints, its blackboard with the day's sums still visible on it, were a.s.sembled the labourers of the village, the old family coachman and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners and boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few phrases, I had composed a speech which I delivered with a spirit and eloquence surprising even to myself, and which was now enthusiastically received. The Vicar cried ”Hear, Hear!”, the Vicar's wife pounded her umbrella with such emphasis, and the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was warmed. I began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well to the Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express my real ideas and hopes for the Commonwealth.

Brus.h.i.+ng therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my safe principles, I began to refas.h.i.+on and new-model the State.

Most existing inst.i.tutions were soon abolished; and then, on their ruins, I proceeded to build up the bright walls and palaces of the City within me--the City I had read of in Plato.

With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with eloquence, I described it all--the Warriors, that race of golden youth bred from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest and most extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual greatness, possessed the truest fort.i.tude, looking down indeed with a kind of disregard on human life and death. And then, declaring that the pattern of this City was laid up in Heaven, I sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending little audience.

And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on walls and the doors of barns, among advertis.e.m.e.nts of sales, or regulations about birds' eggs or the movements of swine, little weather-beaten, old-looking notices on which it was stated that I would ”address the meeting,” I remembered how the walls and towers of the City I had built up in that little schoolroom had shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar's party.

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