My Several Worlds (55 page)

“Dere it iss,” he said.

He pointed toward the shallow hill. I looked, and there it was, exactly as it had been in the postage stamp picture. We turned to the right along a still narrower road, the old mill road, he said, that ran between the house and the enormous red barn. Then we stopped and got out. I had seen plenty of better houses and to this day I cannot tell why I insisted upon that one, although I have never regretted the choice. But I tried to be prudent, I paid the down fee, and said I would let him know in a couple of days. He grunted a Pennsylvania Dutch grunt, and said he would show me some more houses if I liked, and since I felt I should in common sense see as many houses as possible, I spent the rest of the day in looking at them, and with difficulty restrained myself from buying mine instantly. Then I went back to New York and could hardly bear to wait the necessary days until I could get back. Had it not been a weekend, I could not have waited. Three days later I owned the house.

Books have been written many times in the intervening years between then and now by people who have done just what I did, and I have enjoyed all the books, reading avidly to see what others did. The only difference is that they seem to grow caustic, little or much, over the many trials of making an old house into a home for living. But I had no such trials. Everything was pure joy for me, perhaps because this house was my own first possession, or perhaps because I should have been an architect. Of course, did I build a house it would not be like the one I bought. It would be functional, shaped to the landscape I might choose, in the way that Chinese houses are built, or more truly, the Japanese houses. Frank Lloyd Wright knows exactly what I mean, for he has used the same philosophy and has often found his inspiration in Japan and Korea. The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

Yet there was something fit for me in the stone house I bought and have lived in ever since. I do not know what instinct led me to the part of Pennsylvania where my paternal ancestors first came, two hundred years ago. They left it, to be sure, after the War of Independence, and bought lands in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, but here my paternal family had its American beginning, nevertheless, and the knowledge was solid behind me. I believe in family, ancestors and all. The individual is a lonely creature otherwise in this changing world.

There were more than ancestors, there were traditions that came with my Pennsylvania house, and first of all the tradition of William Penn and his fair and just treatment of the red Indians. Rascality there sometimes was—I know it, for near my house is the storied Indian Walk where, a century and more ago, it was agreed between white man and red Indian that the white man could have as much land as his legs could cover in a day. The amiable Indian thought this meant honest walking with time out to rest and eat, but the shrewd white man trained himself to walk at a fierce pace and covered such territory in the day that the Indian was hotly indignant. “White man lun—lun—lun all day—” thus history records his remonstrance.

English Quaker and German Mennonite saw to it, however, that cheating and killing were kept at a minimum, and the tradition is still strong here that peoples are to be treated alike and with generosity, though of course generosity is always sensible rather than extravagant. Pennsylvania Dutchmen are not extravagant, and neither, I must say it, are the English-blooded Quakers. They live harmoniously together, firm in their belief in the value of money and land and good cows. Solidity is the habit in our region and Republicanism is our natural trend, yet when we like a man we can forsake all for him.

For myself I was pleased to discover that I had bought land belonging once to Richard Penn, William’s brother. And it was interesting that twice when we pulled up a vast dead tree we found coins mingled with its earth, not of great value, but once Spanish coin, and again English. I liked the evidence that earlier people had lived here before me. It was even pleasant to discover a ghost belonging to our house. In China ghosts are nearly always women, the vapory souls of beautiful women, part fox, part fairy, who incarnate themselves again in living female bodies. Our ghost, however, is a Pennsylvania Dutchman, Old Harry, politely called, but usually Devil Harry, whose remains lie in the Lutheran churchyard of the nearest village. I have never seen our ghost, but our hired man insisted that Devil Harry walks every Christmas Eve at midnight from the barn to the bridge and back again, and that anybody who knew what he looked like can see him plainly. Our Mennonite maid believed in him, and when a dish sprang from a cupboard and broke itself, or a door slammed on her finger, she cried out, “It’s Old Devil Harry again!”

And the mason, who built the walls of the new wing after the children came told me that Devil Harry was so obstreperous, being given at times to liquor, that one night when he came home drunk his own wife decided to make an end of him. He threw himself on the kitchen floor in a stupor, whereupon she tied the end of a rope around his neck and pushed it through the stove hole in the wooden ceiling into the bedroom above and then went upstairs and hauled him clear, as she thought, and tied the rope to the four-poster. After waiting a suitable length of time she went down again expecting to find him dead. But the mischievous old man was sitting in the rocking chair in fits of silent laughter. He had come to, and comprehending her purpose, he had tied the rope around the leg of the iron kitchen stove, which she had hauled up and which was now swinging clear of the floor. And once the very ancient man who cut the grass in the cemetery paused above our ghost’s grave to talk with me and his chief complaint against him was that in life, he had heard, Old Harry had a way on “thrashing” days of rushing to the dining table ahead of everybody and getting a start on the food. Farm wives outdid themselves to feed the “thrashers” well, and it was considered only just and decent for all hands to wait outside the door and go in together, seat themselves at the same time and then fall to without talking for the first fifteen minutes.

The ghost has never molested us, however. Man, woman and children, we have lived peacefully and happily in the house, enlarging it as the babies grew tall and independent. In one such change, we felt it necessary to take the two top panels from the old double door in the south wall of the living room and put in glass. When the panels were removed we found between the inner and outer layers these words written in soft black pencil:

“I, Joseph Housekeeper, made and work this door. August, 1835, I married Magdaleine, my true love.”

Thus Joseph Housekeeper, who married his true love, is our tradition, too, although we know no more of him than the hidden words he wrote with his own hand so long ago.

Our ghost brings to my memory two other figures of our countryside, but they are not ghosts for I saw them in the flesh with my own eyes. Yet they were such strangers in a modern age that they might as well have been ghosts.

The first was a little hunchbacked man, a traveling preacher, a small figure always dressed in black and wearing a wide black felt hat, whom I used to meet when I walked in the back roads and lanes. He had a white, thin face and when I spoke to him, he only raised his bony hand in reply and plodded on. He carried a canvas bag slung from his shoulder, and every mile or so he stopped and took from it a hammer and nails and a strip of cardboard whereon was printed in large uneven letters a Bible text, and he nailed it to a tree. This was his way of preaching his gospel, so that wherever people went they would be confronted with the solemn words he could not speak. “Ye must be born again” must have been his favorite, for I came upon it often and in the most unexpected places, even in the deep woods.

The little preacher is dead now and it is ten years since I saw him last and then it was in a thunderstorm. He was walking slowly, against a driving rain, and in a direction opposite to my own. The texts he nailed upon the trees have rotted away. I never knew his name nor ever met anyone who knew it.

The other figure is a woman and I saw her only once. It was on a warm afternoon in late spring and I was going down our long lane to see if the wild strawberries were ripe by the big ash tree. Suddenly I saw her coming up the lane toward me, a woman in a black dress, very full in the skirt and so long that it swept the ground. Her sleeves were long, her collar high, and she wore a close black bonnet. When she came near I saw that she was old and that she looked frightened. Her full round face, white and softly wrinkled, was unsmiling, and her dark eyes were like a child’s in terror.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I just did want to see the place,” she said. “I was born in the house. People say you have made it nice and have planted much shrubbage.”

“Please go wherever you like,” I said.

We passed, and when I returned with my bowl full of wild strawberries she was gone. I asked my neighbors about her but none knew who she could have been. Our hired man simply insisted that she was a ghost, too.

For myself, I am indifferent to jewels and personal adornment, but I must have roses and a vegetable garden, and some years ago I indulged myself to include camellias, for these flowers, formal and exquisite, are Chinese in origin and were in China one of my favorites. Such roots I put down for myself, for roots are what one must put down, if one is to live. My roots were deep in China, and when they had to be pulled up it was necessary to put them down again as quickly as possible if life were to go on in growth. I have learned that any tree can be transplanted and live, if roots are not left long unsheltered in the drying air. Roots are meant to be in the earth, and quickly, quickly plant them there, pile the common soil around them, stamp it down and water it, and life goes on. But let a tree wait, unplanted too long, and it never roots. It makes a half-hearted attempt, a few leaves are put forth, and inexorably the top begins to die and after it the branches and then one spring there is no green. The laws of life are the same for every kingdom.

My American home, then, has been the root place of my American life, and my first years were absorbed in its building. For the making of a home is a profound educational experience. Thus I grew to know my community as I could never have known it had we not been building together. The workmen, the mason, the plasterer, the plumber, the carpenter, the well digger, the groceryman and garageman, have taught me more than they can imagine. I had the vast human experience of the Chinese behind me, and so trained I could appreciate every likeness and every difference between these citizens of my new world and those of the old. The likenesses were amazing. For some time I could not account for the fact that Americans and Chinese are so much alike. It is not imagination, since the Japanese, for example, are very different from us, and so are the people of Korea. As for the people of India, our temperamental differences are so great that I sometimes fear our permanent misunderstanding.

How are we alike, the Chinese and the Americans? We are continental peoples, for one thing; that is, we are accustomed to think in space and size and plenty. There is nothing niggardly about either of us—there seldom is about continental peoples, possessing long seacoasts and high mountains. We both have the consciousness that we can always go somewhere, we are not hemmed in, we need not be cautious. We are careless, easygoing, loving our jokes and songs. True, the Chinese have existed for so long that they have achieved a naturalism toward which we are still struggling. Ernest Hemingway did much for us in daring to be abruptly naturalistic toward life, and in writing pure naturalism. It was a revolution for the American mind, at first a shock and then an adoration, but to anyone brought up in the Chinese common tradition there is neither shock nor adoration, nothing indeed very new in what is simply a truthfulness, limited only by individual taste. Thus I had since childhood seen as everyday sights and events the life between man and woman, birth and death, starvation and feasting, disease and health, beggary and wealth, superstition, hypocrisy and religion. Superstitions have always interested me, especially, as the unconscious revelations of inner fears and hopes, and it was amusing to discover among the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers of our region many of the same superstitions that I had found among Chinese farm families. I find, too, the same literal and rather casual attitude toward deity. And how it is I do not know, but in the castlelike museum of our county seat, an inspired monstrosity built by one of our local great men—and I say monstrosity because I have never seen another such building, and inspired because there is something beautiful about it and we are proud of it—anyone can see the extraordinary likeness between the tools the early Pennsylvanians used and the tools which the Chinese used and do still use. Our great man saw the likeness and sent his own explorer to China to bring back the evidence, and there it is, and I am not imagining it.

Green Hills Farm

Here are our people at their best. It is two weeks before Christmas of this year, and the weather has turned suddenly cold. I know how cold it is, for when I get up in the morning I always look from my open window into the stone courtyard to see how the rhododendrons are. This morning at six o’clock their leaves were curled tight in little rolls and the hoarfrost upon them was like snow. When I came down to breakfast my good friend in the kitchen told me that during the night a little wooden house on the other side of our hill, which sheltered man, woman and nine children, the youngest seven months and the eldest eighteen years, had burned to the ground and everything with it, including the Christmas gifts. What will they do? Neighbors have taken them in and will keep them until the house can be built again. And when will it be built? Immediately! All the contractors hereabouts and their workmen are beginning at once on the building and they will have a roof on it and equipment enough for living before Christmas. Our whole community, which can be as quarrelsome and divided over certain issues as any in the world, has united instantly in time of need for one of its families. There was never a more generous or spontaneously unselfish people than the Americans, and this same spirit would work, I am sure, if it had the freedom and the knowledge, anywhere in the world. It is said abroad that we Americans are wonderful in an emergency but that we have no sustaining power and never carry through to the end of a problem. This is often true, for we are easily diverted and are swept by many winds of opinion. It is also true that we grow quickly impatient when we detect signs that those whom we help do not also help themselves. I like, nevertheless, on this cold morning with Christmas on the near horizon, to remember the new house springing from the ashes.