Home Again

“Why, that girl, of course!”

“But I never said anything!”

“Twenty times a day!”

“What then made you doubt her worth?”

“That you cared less for your father.”

“I am a brute, Molly! Did he feel it very much?”

“He always spoke to God about it, not to me. He never finds it easy to talk to his fellow-man; but I always know when he is talking to God! May I tell your father what you have just told me Walter? But of course not! You will tell him yourself!”

“No, Molly! I would rather you should tell him. I want him to know, and would tell him myself, if you were not handy. Then, if he chooses, we can have a talk about it! But now, Molly, what am I to do?”

“You still feel as if you had a call to literature, Walter?”

“I have no pleasure in any other kind of work.”

“Might not that be because you have not tried anything else?”

“I don’t know. I am drawn to nothing else.”

“Well, it seems to me that a man who would like to make a saddle, must first have some pig-skin to make it of! Have you any pig-skin, Walter?”

“I see well enough what you mean!”

“A man must want long leisure for thought before he can have any material for his literary faculty to work with.

“You could write a history, but could you write one now? Even for a biography, you would have to read and study for months—perhaps years. As to the social questions you have been treating, men generally change their opinions about such things when they know a little more; and who would utter his opinions, knowing he most by and by wish he had not uttered them!”

“No one; but unhappily every one is cock-sure of his opinion till he changes it—and then he is as sure as before till he changes it again!”

“Opinion is not sight, your father says,” answered Molly; and again a little pause followed.

“Well, but, Molly,” resumed Walter, “how is that precious thing, leisure for thought, to be come by? Write reviews I will not! Write a history, I can not. Write a poem I might, but they wouldn’t buy copies enough of it to pay for the paper and printing. Write a novel I might, if I had time; but how to live, not to say how to think, while I was writing it? Perhaps I ought to be a tutor, or a school-master!”

“Do you feel drawn to that, Walter?”

“I do not.”

“And you do feel drawn to write?”

“I dare not say I have thoughts which demand expression; and yet somehow I want to write.”

“And you say that some begin by writing what is of no value, but come to write things that are precious?”

“It is true.”

“Then perhaps you have served your apprenticeship in worthless things, and the inclination to write comes now of precious things on their way, which you do not yet see or suspect, not to say know!”

“But many men and women have the impulse to write, who never write anything of much worth!”

Molly thought awhile.

“What if they yielded to the impulse before they ought? What if their eagerness to write when they ought to have been doing something else, destroyed the call in them? That is perhaps the reason why there are so many dull preachers—that they begin to speak before they have anything to say!”

“Teaching would be favorable to learning!”

“It would tire your brain, and give you too much to do with books! You would learn chiefly from thoughts, and I stand up for things first. And where would be your leisure?”

“You have something in your mind, Molly! I will do whatever you would have me!”

“No, Walter,” exclaimed Molly, with a flash, “I will take no such promise! You will, I know, do what I or any one else may propose, if it appears to you right! But don’t you think that, for the best work, a man ought to be independent of the work?”

“You would have your poet a rich man!”

“Just the contrary, Walter! A rich man is the most dependent of all—at least most rich men are. Take his riches, and what could himself do for himself? He depends on his money. No; I would have the poet earn his bread by the sweat of his brow—with his hands feed his body, and with his heart and brain the hearts of his brothers and sisters. We have talked much about this, your father and I. That a man is not a gentleman who works with his hands, is the meanest, silliest article in the social creed of our country. He who would be a better gentleman than the Carpenter of Nazareth, is not worthy of Him. He gave up His working only to do better work for His brothers and sisters, and then He let the men and women, but mostly, I suspect, the women, that loved Him, support him! Thousands upon thousands of young men think it more gentlemanly to be clerks than to be carpenters, but, if I were a man, I would rather make anything, than add up figures and copy stupid letters all day long! If I had brothers, I would ten times rather see them masons, or carpenters, or book-binders, or shoe-makers, than have them doing what ought to be left for the weaker and more delicate!”

“Which do you want me to be, Molly—a carpenter or a shoe-maker?”

“Neither, Walter—but a farmer: you don’t want to be a finer gentleman than your father! Stay at home and help him, and grow strong. Plow and cart, and do the work of a laboring man. Nature will be your mate in her own work-shop!”

Molly was right. If Burns had but kept to his plow and his fields, to the birds and the beasts, to the storms and the sunshine! He was a free man while he lived by his labor among his own people! Ambition makes of gentlemen time-servers and paltry politicians; of the plowman-poet it made an exciseman!

“What will then become of the leisure you want me to have, Molly?”

“Your father will see that you have it! In winter, which you say is the season for poetry, there will be plenty of time, and in summer there will be some. Not a stroke of your pen will have to go for a dinner or a pair of shoes! Thoughts born of the heaven and the earth and the fountains of water, will spring up in your soul, and have time to ripen. If you find you are not wanted for an author, you will thank God you are not an author. What songs you would write then, Walter!”

He sat motionless most of the time. Now and then he would lift his head as if to speak, but he did not speak; and when Molly was silent, he rose and again went to his room. What passed there, I need not say. Walter was a true man in that he was ready to become truer: what better thing could be said of any unfinished man!

CHAPTER XXXII. THE LAST, BUT NOT THE END

It was the second spring, and Molly and Walter sat again in the twilighted garden. Walter had just come home from his day’s work; he had been plowing. He was a broad-shouldered, lean, powerful, handsome fellow, with a rather slow step, but soldierly carriage. His hands were brown and mighty, and took a little more washing than before.

“My father does not seem quite himself!” he said to Molly.

“He has been a little depressed for a day or two,” she answered.

“There’s nothing wrong, is there, Molly?”

“No, nothing. It is only his spirits. They have never been good once your mother died. He declares himself the happiest man in the county, now you are at home with us.”

Walter was up early the next morning, and again at his work. A new-born wind blew on his face, and sent the blood singing through his veins. If we could hear all finest sounds, we might, perhaps, gather not only the mood, but the character of a man, by listening to the music or the discord the river of his blood was making, as through countless channels it irrigated lungs and brain: Walter’s that morning must have been weaving lovely harmonies! It was a fresh spring wind, the breath of the world reviving from its winter-swoon. His father had managed to pay his debts; his hopes were high, his imagination active; his horses were pulling strong; the plow was going free, turning over the furrow smooth and clean; he was one of the powers of nature at work for the harvest of the year; he was in obedient consent with the will that makes the world and all its summers and winters! He was a thinking, choosing, willing part of the living whole, its vital fountain issuing from the heart of the Father of men! Work lay all about him, and he was doing the work! And Molly was at home, singing about hers! At night, when the sun was set, and his day’s work done, he would go home to her and his father, to his room and his books and his writing!

But as he labored, his thought this day was most of his father: he was trying to make something to cheer him. The eyes of the old man never lost their love, but when he forgot to smile, Molly looked grave, and Walter felt that a cloud was over the sun. They were a true family: when one member suffered, all the members suffered with it.

So throughout the morning, as his horses pulled, and the earth opened, and the plow folded the furrow back, Walter thought, and made, and remembered: he had a gift for remembering completions, and forgetting the chips and rejected rubbish of the process. In the evening he carried borne with him these verses: