XVI

Jael’s reactions were bitter. She realized how unjust the “Herald’s” handling of Plaino was. That did not concern her so much. This was apparently a way men had of fighting; she had no doubt of the old man’s ability in any case to take care of himself. Besides, the “Herald’s” violence, she thought, would probably defeat its own purpose. But the treatment of her Lothians—that was insulting, vile, quite unforgivable.

It was a relief that Capuchin came no more to Little Jones Street, for she would not have known what to say to him. And now the stark question—what should she do?

It was not only that she could see no way to retire gracefully, although naturally she could not help thinking of that also. Merely to turn her back on the scene and reduce her orbit to the old Jones Street pattern seemed quite impossible, and not merely in terms of personal chagrin. Much more than her own pride was involved. There was some moral value to be upheld, if only she could see what that was. It seemed very important to save something intangible. This might be an attitude or a point of view, and she had neither. For several days her thoughts were in a state of confusion.

Meanwhile, there was the practical fact of having forty Lothians on her hands. They had resigned, their resignations had been accepted, and now they were out of work. They had all been uprooted and transplanted. This was her responsibility. Some were willing to return to New York; the college could absorb them in its faculty or place them in social research work. Others did not wish to return. It was while meditating what to do with them that she began to revolve an idea the germ of which had been dormant in her mind for a long time.

Going to and fro between New York and New Freedom had produced more than once that occasion in which everything one knows falls away, even one’s name and identity; things hitherto unknown, beyond good and evil, assume terrific importance. She became aware of the great mystery of the earth mother. Always it was west of the Mississippi river this happened, sometimes in the swooning glimpse one may remember but never recall, sometimes in dreaming reverie of which the mystical truth alone without object or subject may be remembered. Some inner region of herself became in these moments vast, co-terminous with the limits of the universe, pulsating with a knowledge the mind cannot share. These experiences left her wordless. She could neither describe nor define them.

Once it occurred to her in rational meditation that the life she knew, life as it appeared from the Jones street point of view, must either renew itself in the soil or perish. Directly or indirectly all those indescribable emotions associated themselves with the earth—the fundamental mother.

There was nothing new in the thought. It was as old as the nostalgia of city dwellers. There had been many trials of going back, of renewing life in that way by intelligent intention to forestall necessity. She turned to the literature of these experiments and was surprised at the extent of it. She read the fascinating history of Brook Farm, also that of the Oneida Community. In an obvious sense every such experiment had failed. That is, not one of them endured. No matter. In a spiritual sense they had not failed. The mistake was to suppose they might succeed materially. That was neither their point nor their meaning. In every case some vital principle had been renewed to go on with, and those in whom it was renewed had gone on.

Well now, in view of her problem, the idea of a soil colony, an adventure of prodigals with nature, opened a vista. It was the happy alternative.

She broached it to the Lothians and they were enthusiastic. They spent several evenings together setting out the rules to govern it, all very simple. Thirty subscribed. Then she went forth to find the suitable location, which turned out to be a place fifty miles from Liberty where there was available a large tract of land in the valley of the river flowing north; the land sloped gently to the hills that rose abruptly on the west in strange, grotesque formations. It was already somewhat developed. The romantic feature was a very old house that had been an inn on the cattle trail. She named it the Lothian Farm and proceeded to equip it on a considerable scale.

In finding this place she saw more of the country than she had seen before, and it grew upon her; also for the first time she came into direct contact with the people, not as they might present themselves in groups at Freemen’s League meetings and picnics—people as they lived and worked. She talked with them, ate with them, passed nights and evenings with them, and expanded sympathetically.

First of all, the contrasts impressed her deeply. Success and failure divided by a road. Independence and well-being on one side; aching discontent and poor living on the other side. The same soil, the same sun, the same seed.

What made this great difference? Not opportunity to begin with. Nearly every highly developed farm, with big barns, swelling herds, strong fences and comfortable dwellings, had the pioneer history. Settlers, a strong man and a good wife, nothing to begin with but their hands, access to the soil and the habit of toil. Often the hut they first raised over their heads had been preserved as an heirloom in the flower garden; all the children had been born in it.

And the running story on the other side of the road was of one general character, too. Wistful expectations, inexperience, something that was to have happened and didn’t.

Presently she could foretell by the look of a farm whether the people upon it would be Leaguers or anti-Leaguers and the degree in which they would be either. The successful farmers were not necessarily more intelligent than the unsuccessful, though very often they were; invariably, however, their intelligence was practical, not imaginative, and they had besides a kind of restraining wisdom. They were not satisfied. All of them, no matter how successful, had specific grievances, and many of them had been hoping through the Freemen’s League to remove certain economic evils; but now they were turning away from it in disgust.

The weak farmers, on the other hand, were still for it; the more unfortunate they were the more ardently they were for it, to the point of being fanatical. Capuchin was their demi-urge, their one hope in place of everything else that had not happened, the mighty leveller. Their notion of levelment was simple. The privileged few, those who had got or taken theirs, the strong in brief, were all to be levelled down while they themselves were to be levelled up.

Jael found herself thinking much more about these who were weak than about those who were strong. Wherein was their weakness? In some significant way they were all alike, though apparently so unlike, and for a, long time she could not get hold of it.

Some were lazy. The squatter type, with nothing of their own to lose, and a low, cunning interest in politics. Not so many of these. More numerous were those whose works seemed foredoomed to fail. On this gray side of the road, in fact, was every kind of temperament save one. The successful temperament was not there. Nevertheless, that was the side of the road on which the humanities and sympathies were rich; it was the more hospitable side, and Jael found herself preferring it. The people were more likable than those on the other side, likable as children were.

And this was at last the word she had been wanting to express a common fact about them. They were children precisely in the sense of lacking what children lack, namely, judgment and wisdom. In everything else—will, passions, sentiments, knowledge of facts, activity of imagination—they were grown up; and one had to know them well to realize what it was they were doing to defeat themselves. Rejecting reality, as children do, because it is not what they wish to believe.

It was true they had been exploited. They were obliged to think that was why they had failed. It was not the reason. They were susceptible to begin with; they had been led by imagination into a struggle with nature for which they were unprepared by understanding, by experience, by any economic test. There were some, to be sure, whose trouble was stupidity and ignorance, such as would have failed anywhere at anything.

At this time, however, Jael was less interested in economic analysis than in a new way of regarding life from an emotional approach. She was down on rational thinking. Deliberately to give herself up to feeling alone had become a conscious aesthetic experience. She knew what she was doing. That was the pleasure of it. She could say, “Now I am feeling,” and enjoy it, just as she could say, “Now I am reasoning,” and enjoy that. Feeling was the new enjoyment.

Seeing and feeling all these people on the unsuccessful side of the road as children gave her a strange, intense pleasure. What they needed to know more about was nature and how to live with her alone by their own strength—not economics, not politics, not how to have the comforts, manners and distractions of the city brought to them, but how to do without the very things they were petulantly demanding. She had an impulse to go among them saying: “Your problem is not economic. Stop thinking of this machine civilization, its wonders and cruelties. You must find a spiritual way with nature. Turn to the impersonal mother.”

How futile it would be! No one would listen. It was Capuchin’s language they understood—the language of the demagogue.

In one of these moments of pure feeling she identified herself with the earth, unable to impart wisdom to her children otherwise than through the language of experience—a language painfully pieced together by many generations that may be altogether lost in one.

She was now at the age of thirty-five, and that part of her which was woman, not mind, was asserting its hunger.