The Bride of the Mistletoe Part 6

The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern forestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professors.h.i.+p his original researches in this field began to attract attention.

These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation to South Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent.

This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from his own college and country to a Northern university.

Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of an ancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed into that of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into the modern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the national American look had broadened into something more modern still--the look of mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like a man in the service of mankind.

This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself to her as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how the past had swept him along with its current; and of how the future now caught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old pa.s.sion living on in him--forest life; a new pa.s.sion born in him--human life. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselves to-night in a story of the Christmas Tree.

But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces something intensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in this wise.

In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they would go out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; she leading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautiful exactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not do this and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave.

Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her down the lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summer evening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows of the forest behind them and the light of the western sky in their faces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes from each other.

The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love's holiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil upon the low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses and turf of the s.h.i.+eld under them. The warmth of his body was as the day's sunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like its tawny bloom, native to the sun.

Life with him was enchanted madness.

He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write on the air of the room. Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in his cla.s.sroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standing at the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of his lecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as he finished each word, he read it aloud to her:

"A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK"

IV. THE WANDERING TALE

"Josephine!"

He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of it float over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls of the room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication.

Then he began:

"Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a spring morning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. I have seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question the blossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wis.h.i.+ng to probe the heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of their significance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragrant trumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It was where the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of a dead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces of their philosophy.

"So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modern man to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip of the vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach of life; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at the greatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all these instincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized, down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of the underhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies.

"While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of the story, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are to ourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kind of father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beings we are to our fellow beings--the pa.s.sions which swell as with sap the buds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes of conduct are fed from the bottom of the world's mould. You and I to-night are building the structures of our moral characters upon life-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip our drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.

"It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house on this Night of the Nativity."

He made the scholar's pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid Alpine snows.

He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of the human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral form was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the islanded Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he still bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his first set of memories--Sea Memories.

He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single picturesque phrase:

"Man himself is a closed living sea-sh.e.l.l in the chambers of which the hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are sounding."

Next he told her how man's last marine ancestor quit one day the sea never again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach and entered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-sh.e.l.l, soft to impressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shape it over from sea uses to forest uses.

A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at the sea-sh.e.l.l.

It remodelled the sh.e.l.l as so much clay; stood it up and twisted and branched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron; tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble; painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it up as a life tower--the world's one beacon: steadily sending it onward through one trial form after another until at last had been perfected for it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards to sob and to smile.

And thus as one day a wandering sea-sh.e.l.l had quit the sea and entered the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared at the edge of the forest the creature it had made. On every wall of its being internal and external forest-written; and completely forest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling, forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it could do or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it was forest-tethered.

At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelled to emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had been driven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn of our history of him.

And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endure within him, how much more powerful are the second set--the Forest Memories!

So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished as forest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant races on the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether and will become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerful that those highest races which have been longest out in the open--as our own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influence of the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning trees falling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset.

These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlike generations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuated affections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; these affections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. The writers of our day who speak of civilized man's love of nature as a developing sense err wholly. They are like explorers who should mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man's knowledge of nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.

Old are our instincts and pa.s.sions about Nature: all are Forest Memories.

But among the many-twisted ma.s.s of them there is one, he said, that contains the separate buried root of the story: Man's Forest Faith.

When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-sh.e.l.l, it had planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indian mythology was tethered to a different tree; each G.o.d of the later cla.s.sical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apollo to the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to the apple, on and on. Forest wors.h.i.+p was universal--the most impressive and bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever built up. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees.

Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the ages toward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew with his growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successive scythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth.

Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodily presence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost the Immortal as its indwelling creator.

Next the old forest wors.h.i.+pper peopled the trees with an intermediate race of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long he beguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; but the lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which the greater had already been expelled, and they too pa.s.sed out of sight down the roadway of the world.

Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and during yet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woods became freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals of his own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations of the G.o.ds. Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, and civilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitated only by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close around them, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through which so many a stranger to them had pa.s.sed in and pa.s.sed out; and henceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to all man's questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery.

After this the forest wors.h.i.+pper could wors.h.i.+p the woods no more. But we must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration of human life on the planet began but yesterday: even our own Indo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And the forest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepest spiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries to overrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses, instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and to shelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countries whenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature; in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonies with garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shaped hi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, G.o.d's first temple; and when we die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel of our rest. Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses some obscure instinct in us that it is G.o.d-forsaken.

Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for his spirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf and tendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every later world-wors.h.i.+p; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into the ritual of Christianity.

This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence at the Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man wors.h.i.+pping the tree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we see him using that tree in the wors.h.i.+p of the creative Father's Son come to earth in the Father's stead.

"On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brief tapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of that spiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees. It is the forest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal."

Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should address her thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual for them. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the ground of his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reached others. It was their high and equal comrades.h.i.+p. Wherever his mind could go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy.

But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on a motionless figure of stone. If he was sensible of this change in her, he gave no sign. And after a moment he pa.s.sed to the remaining part of the story.

"Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature: here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that they too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over into the service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these Forest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its branches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you in each case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything on the Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room."

It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and never afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe would have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself unexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She would meet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of the Years! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where a traveller must arrive, she waited for him there.

He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest wors.h.i.+pper began the wors.h.i.+p of the tree, he began to bring to it his offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in offering something: to wors.h.i.+p is to give. In after ages when man had learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the wors.h.i.+p of primitive man and is as ancient as forest wors.h.i.+p itself.