James Lane Allen

“ A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a moss on a sluggish pond. A deep robust land; and among its growths he—this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of his kind borne in from far some generations back, but springing out of the soil naturally now, sap of its sap, strength of its strength. ”

“ As those unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply—killing them as they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage.
But the questions ceased. They had hurried out as though there were a myriad pressing behind—a few issuing bees of an aroused swarm. But they ceased. The pastor leaned back in his chair and drew a quivering breath through his white lips. ”

“ Gone? or still under the trees?
"Ah, Gabriella, it is love that makes a man believe in a God of Love!"
"David! David!"—
The south wind, warm with the first thrill of summer, blew from across the valley, from across the mighty rushing sea of the young hemp.
O Mystery Immortal! which is in the hemp and in our souls, in its bloom and in our passions; by which our poor brief lives are led upward out of the earth for a season, then cut down, rotted and broken—for Thy long service! ”

“ An assemblage of men have a perfect right to turn a man out of their church on theological grounds; but they have no right to do it in the name of God. With as much propriety a man might be expelled from a political party in the name of God. In the long life of any one of the great religions of the globe, how many brief theologies have grown up under it like annual plants under a tree! How many has the Christian religion itself sprouted, nourished, and trampled down as dead weeds! What do we think now of the Christian theology of the tenth century? ”

“ She was standing on the low steps of the church, in charge of the children. In one hand she held an unfinished wreath, and she was binding the dark, shining leaves with the other. A swarm of snowflakes, scarce more than glittering crystals, danced merrily about her head and flecked her black fur on one shoulder. As David, not very mindful just then of whither he was going, stepped forward across the light and paused before the pile of cedar boughs, she glanced at him with a smile, seeing how his path was barred. Then she said to them:—
"Hurry, children! The night comes when we cannot work!" ”

“ Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son. For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their own offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like sluggish canals running between far-separated oceans—from the deeps of life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pass. ”

“ These myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of history.
The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth of new ideas, it must go deeper. ”

“ Saturday forenoons of spring were busy times for the town in those days. Farmers were in, streets were crowded with their horses and buggies and rockaways, with live stock, with wagons hauling cord-wood, oats, hay, and hemp. Once, at a crossing, David waited while a wagon loaded with soft, creamy, gray hemp creaked past toward a factory. He sniffed with relish the tar of the mud-packed wheels; he put out a hand and stroked the heads drawn close in familiar bales.
Crowded, too, of Saturdays was the book-shop to which the students usually resorted for their supplies. ”

“ But this was a Southern girl of strong, warm, deep nature, who felt David's life in its simple entirety, and had no thought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one of its parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member. Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, she had never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference to his. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable character, his manners, his manhood—these were what Gabriella had always been taught to look for first in a man. ”

“ He thrust his hand through the broken pane and tugged at the shutters; they could not be shaken. Running downstairs to the kitchen and returning with hot water, he melted away the ice embedding the bolts and hinges.
A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before, enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and hung in silver. ”

“ Witnesses all to that sublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt—Doubt respecting his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual half-night of his planet-mind—that shadowed side of his orbit-life—forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity, but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra! Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. ”

“ It is the path of the dog following the hot scent—ever baffled.
A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre,—that strength of cables when the big ships are tugged at by the joined fury of wind and ocean. And now some morning at the corner of the field stand the black men with hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent at right angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be the strongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. ”

“ Amid the gathering darkness the workman remained gazing toward that great light—into the stillness of it—the loneliness—the eternal peace. On his rugged face an answering light was kindled, the glory of a spiritual passion, the flame of immortal things alive in his soul. More akin to him seemed that beacon fire of the sky—more nearly his real pathway home appeared that distant road and gateway to the Infinite—than the flickering, near house-taper in the valley below. Once before, on the most memorable day of his life, David had beheld a winter sunset like that ”

“ Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees—or does he not see?—the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertain flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green? A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling. Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green of young oats and wheat ”

“ Strips of snow ermined the field; but on the stumps, wandering and warbling before Gabriella as she advanced, were bluebirds, those wings of the sky, those breasts of earth. She reached the spot she was seeking, and paused. There it was—the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; the charred rind of a stump where he had kindled a fire to warm his hands; the remnant of the shock fallen over and left unfinished that last afternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly broken out. ”

“ Sad chapter in the history of the Kentuckians! Perhaps the saddest among the many sad ones.
For such an institution must in time have taught what all its court-houses and all its pulpits—laws human and divine—have not been able to teach: it must have taught the noble commonwealth to cease murdering. Standing there in the heart of the people's land, it must have grown to stand in the heart of their affections: and so standing, to stand for peace. For true learning always stands for peace. Letters always stand for peace. ”

“ Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth, trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroad under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign in the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth far away at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of the hemp, goes forth into the fields. ”

“ The coarse toil of the day was forgotten; his loved dependent animals in the wind-swept barn forgotten; the evening with his father and mother, the unalterable emptiness of it, the unkindness, the threatening tragedy, forgotten. Not that desolate room with firelight and candle; not the poor farmhouse; not the meagre farm, nor the whole broad Kentucky plateau of fields and woods, heavy with winter wealth, heavy with comfortable homesteads—any longer held him as domicile, or native region: he was gone far away into the company of his high-minded masters, the writers of those books. ”

“ There was silence.
"What is the next book?" she asked.
"The fourth," said David, with a twinkle in his eye at her refusal to answer his question, "takes up the history of the earth's surface—its crust—the layers of this—as one might study the skin of an apple as large as the globe. In the course of an almost infinite time, as we measure things, it discovers the appearance of Life on this crust, and then tries to follow the progress of Life from the lowest forms upward, always upward, to Man: another time infinitely vast, according to our standards." ”

“ A single candle, in a low, brass candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough light to reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden, crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it—honey from the bees in the garden—a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from the food and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of the woman.
Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. ”

“ On the hillside opposite was a field of young hemp stretching westward—soon to be a low sea of rippling green. Beyond this field was the sunset; over it flashed the evening star; and for the past few days beside the star had hung the inconstant, the constant, crescent of ages.
She liked to spread her shawl on the edge of the orchard overlooking the valley—a deep carpet of grass sprinkled with wind-blown petals; to watch the sky kindle and burn out; see the recluse Evening come forth before the Night and walk softly down the valley toward the woods ”

“ In time, she had out of short disjointed threads sown a continuous path; it was made up of her loves, and she loved it. Of mornings a brisk walk along this braced her mind for the day; in the evening it quieted jangled nerves and revived a worn-out spirit: shedding her toil at the schoolhouse door as a heavy suffocating garment, she stepped gratefully out into its largeness, its woodland odors, and twilight peace. ”

“ His agony, his searching! which has led him always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from less truth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrow of his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy, literature, art—in his religion itself; which keeps him humble not vain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts to solve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeks to trace law, to clarify reason, and so to find whatever truth it can. ”

“ He was in the church, which was crowded from pulpit to walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir, the number of the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he began to sing, with hundreds of others, the music which then released the pinions of his love and faith as the air releases the wings of a bird. The hymn ceased; he could see the pastor rise from behind the pulpit, advance, and with a gesture gather that sea of heads to prayer. He could follow the sermon, most of all the exhortation; around him was such stillness in the church that his own heart-beats were audible. ”

“ And so he crosses the broad acres, and so each of the big black followers, stepping one by one to a place behind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the prostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the smell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the air.
So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment they have drawn from it ”

“ The moment for the lad may have been one of those in the development of the young when they suddenly behold familiar objects as with eyes more clearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive; when the sermon is found in the stone. As he now took curious cognizance of the budding wood which he, seeing it only in winter, had supposed could not bud again, he fell to marvelling how constant each separate thing in nature is to its own life and how sole is its obligation to live that life only. All that a locust had to do in the world was to be a locust ”