GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES

Father was sensitive to the sublime. The calm mind of the heavens on a clear starlit night could move him to the noblest flights of imagination. He must stretch himself mentally and let out a spark of eloquence or prophecy; it made no difference so long as he relieved the pressure of infinities upon his strident soul.

He had a habit, when I was this very small child, of pacing back and forth in the warm moonlit darkness of summer evenings. I recall myself like a caterpillar sticking to him there. With one bare foot placed upon the toe of each of his dusty boots and my arms clasped about his long legs, I rode backwards; still, the stride was exciting.

One night when we were traveling in this fashion beneath a particularly clear starlit sky, he halted, swung a grand gesture, peered down at me as from a great height.

‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds!’ he said.

‘Corra,’ mother interrupted hastily from the porch, ‘come in, wash your feet and go to bed!’

I obeyed, too young to suspect that she was guarding me from what was supposed to be a streak of insanity in father’s family.

It seems that one of his remote ancestors had conceived this same idea of flying through the heavens on his own wing power. He was humored in this hobby until the day he ascended to the roof of his mansion geared up in two huge wings of his own devising and hopped off. He survived only because they did break the force of his fall, but he spent the remaining years of his life in close confinement.

From this time forth some one in each succeeding generation of father’s people had been born with this predilection for flying. Mother was determined it should not be her child in this generation. She was a sensible woman, who had a legitimate imagination and conceived only of incandescent angels being properly endowed with wings.

On the other hand, father had his anxieties. Mother’s Uncle John was an intensely religious man in an age when only preachers were distinguished for their piety in this section, and he was not a preacher. His mind was fixed on the Bible and he read no other book. Father believed he was quite mad on this subject.

I had a rather unusual memory long before I had any of the other intellectual ingredients that go to the making of a mind. When mother began to read Genesis aloud to me, my ear caught the tune of that genealogical chapter which records the generations of Adam with so many repetitions of the word begat.

One day I climbed upon father’s knee and recited too many verses from this chapter to him. I should have let him have them all but for the fact that he interrupted. He exchanged a look with mother.

‘Stop reading that book aloud to her. Remember your Uncle John!’ he said.

Parents are strangely suspicious of what Nature may have done to their children. The first thing they do when one is born is to look him over to be sure he is made up properly, not too long or too short anywhere, and not one-sided. The mother’s travail is never over until she calls out faintly, ‘Doctor, is my child all right?’ and receives the assurance that he is. Then she lets go and fades away into the bliss of motherhood. My parents received the best assurances about me then. Still, as I grew, strangeness of one sort and another showed up in me; then they would hark back, each behind the other, to account for it. It was not the child I was; it was what they knew about themselves which might crop out in me that disturbed them. I suppose all parents suffer from this same sense of ancestral guilt toward their offsprings.

Somewhere in another book I have set down at length the impression made upon me by the story of creation as related in Genesis. Here, following the trail of my mind rather than the emotional effects created upon the life of a child, I pass on with the bare statement that it fitted the mind I had then. And I venture to add that it still spreads amazing and veracious before the mind I have now. It is that book in the Bible most like God. In the others the record is diminished to His dealings with us. There is more room in this first one for seeing just God, is what I mean. The more you live in the open, in remote and quiet places where the evidences still show like green-growing scriptures, the easier it is to believe. For me it will remain to the last my favorite gospel of the goodness and wonders of the Almighty. I do not know why, unless, as life, duty, and conscience pressed hard upon me, these first chapters turned out to be less obligatory than, say, the Ten Commandments. Many a time they have been like great visions in a dark place. It was like seeing original things take shape. I suppose other people have had the same experience; but in this mood the first herbs of the field have been almost visible, in their fresh greenness, through the mists of the first morning of time.

Long afterwards, when I began to write a few scriptures of my own, and must accomplish some feat of imagination to reach what I know, I used to read the first chapter of Genesis as devout Episcopalians read prayers to God from a book. I never caught the rhythm of that great moment when the light was divided from the darkness and the waters from the lands, but hearing the roll and rumble of it has certainly lengthened the stride of my mind.

I had a good deal of the Old Testament imparted to me before I received my other mental training. As far down as I can reach now into the mind I had then, I am a very small human, traveling by speculations through Deuteronomy, Judges, and believing that Second Samuel was Samuel’s son. I am keeping company with the major and minor prophets. I am the little girl who knew Ruth and could see her in the wheat fields, gathering the scattered heads that fell behind the reapers. I was very much attached to her and to David in his youth. But never to the Song of Solomon. Mother always skipped it as ‘unsuitable’ when she read from the Bible. She had a certain look on her face when she would be turning the leaves and came upon this Song, as if she had seen something indelicate, and invariably flirted the page over it hastily as you would cover such a thing. My impression is that she did not think very well of Solomon. To this day I share her prejudices. Too much of his wisdom is derived from the bad end of experience.

But imagine a child’s mind taking shape under these influences. I was haunted by ghosts and fed on the stately Scriptures of the Old Testament. Jerusalem and Nineveh are the first cities I remember hearing about. I was particularly interested in the latter because of the deep-sea disaster which overtook Jonah on his way there. I believed everything, but not with the literal humble mind of the obedient spirit. I have always reserved the right to believe in the Scriptures intelligently. So far as I am able to judge, stupid faith is as dangerous and belittling to the soul as a false doctrine.

This story of Jonah gagged me even at that early age. And to this day I am still wondering if any one saw the whale swallow him, or if it was a mere wave that vomited him upon the shore. Not that I doubt the Scriptures, you understand, but Jonah. What I mean is that in the horror of being cast overboard and drowned, he may honestly have believed he was being swallowed by a great fish, when he was really descending into the bowels of the sea.

The instruction I had from the Old Testament marked my first definite formations mentally. They seemed, as I look back now, to have opened the casements of my mind to more gallant illusions, verified by the angels and prophets who appeared so constantly in these Scriptures. I used to strain myself to see Elijah rising in a chariot of fire. A red cloud in the sunset sky might have convinced me of the repetition of this miracle. I was a small human drop in the eternity of summer days. I had no sense of time. I felt very near the beginning of things. But I was unaffected morally. I went about my business as usual, without a scruple as to what was right or wrong.