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THE BEAN-FIELD
MEANWHILE
my beans, the length of whose
rows,
added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be
hoed, for
the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground;
indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this
so
steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I
came to
love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They
attached me to
the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I
raise them? Only
Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this
portion of
the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries,
johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant
flowers,
produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?
I
cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and
this is my
day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the
dews and
rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil
itself,
which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool
days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of
an acre
clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break
up their
ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too
tough for
them, and go forward to meet new foes. When I was four years old,
as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town,
through
these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest
scenes
stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes
over that
very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have
fallen, I
have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all
around,
preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort
springs
from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length
helped
to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the
results
of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades,
and
potato vines. I planted about two acres
and a half of upland; and as it was only about fifteen years since the
land was
cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did
not give
it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the
arrowheads
which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt
here
and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and
so, to
some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop. Before yet any woodchuck or
squirrel had run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub
oaks,
while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it
— I would
advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on —
I began to
level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon
their
heads. Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a
plastic artist
in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered
my feet.
There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and
forward over
that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods,
the one
end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade,
the other
in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by
the time
I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about
the bean
stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow
soil
express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in
wormwood
and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass
— this
was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired
men or
boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and
became much
more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even
when
pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of
idleness.
It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it
yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers
bound
westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they
sitting at
their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in
festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my
homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and
cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road, so
they made
the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of
travellers'
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so
late!" — for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe
— the
ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder;
corn for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black
bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his
grateful
dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the
furrow, and
recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be
ashes or
plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe
for cart
and two hands to draw it — there being an aversion to other carts
and horses —
and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared
it aloud
with the fields which they had passed, so that I came to know how I
stood in
the agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr. Coleman's report.
And, by the way, who
estimates the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder
fields
unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully
weighed, the
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and
pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and
various crop
only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link
between
wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others
half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though
not in
a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully
returning to
their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the
Rans
des Vaches for them. Near at hand, upon the
topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher — or red
mavis, as some love
to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would
find out
another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting
the seed,
he cries — "Drop it, drop it — cover it up, cover it up
— pull it up, pull
it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such
enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur
Paganini performances on one string
or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to
leached ashes
or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire
faith. As I drew a still fresher
soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled
nations
who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small
implements of
war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay
mingled
with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been
burned
by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and
glass
brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe
tinkled
against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was
an
accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable
crop. It
was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I
remembered with
as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had
gone to
the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the
sunny
afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote
in the eye, or in
heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if
the heavens
were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless
cope
remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground
on bare
sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful
and
slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by
the wind
to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is
aerial
brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect
air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the
sea. Or
sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
alternately
soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one another, as if
they were
the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of
wild
pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound
and
carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish
portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the
Nile,
yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and
sights
I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible
entertainment
which the country offers. On gala days the town fires
its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs
of
martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my
bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a
puffball
had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was
ignorant, I
have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching
and
disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon,
either
scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of
wind,
making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me
information of
the "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's
bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice,
by a
faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic
utensils,
were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the
sound died
quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told
no
tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into
the
Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with
which it
was smeared. I felt proud to know that
the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe
keeping;
and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible
confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the
future. When there were several
bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows
and all
the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But
sometimes
it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods,
and the
trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican
with a good
relish — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and
looked round for a
woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial
strains seemed
as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in
the
horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree
tops which
overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though
the sky had
from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears
daily,
and I saw no difference in it. It was a singular experience
that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with
planting, and
hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling
them — the
last was the hardest of all — I might add eating, for I did
taste. I was
determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from
five
o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the
day about
other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes
with
various kinds of weeds — it will bear some iteration in the
account, for there
was no little iteration in the labor — disturbing their delicate
organizations
so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe,
levelling
whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That's
Roman
wormwood — that's pigweed — that's sorrel — that's
piper-grass — have at him,
chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a
fibre in
the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t' other side up and be as
green as a
leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those
Trojans
who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
come to
their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies,
filling up
the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector,
that
towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon
and
rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some
of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and
others to
contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I
thus, with
the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I
wanted beans
to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned,
whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but,
perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes
and
expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a
rare
amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a
dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them
all once,
I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the
end,
"there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation
whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and
turning of
the mould with the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere,
"especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it
attracts
the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is
the
logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all
dungings
and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this
improvement." Moreover,
this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy
their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks
likely, attracted
"vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be more particular,
for it is complained that Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the
expensive
experiments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, —
My income was, (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from
Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8.71½. This is the result of my
experience in raising beans: Plant the common small white bush bean
about the
first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being
careful to
select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and
supply
vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an
exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean
as they
go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have
notice
of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting
erect
like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if you
would
escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss
by this
means. This further experience also
I gained: I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so
much
industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as
sincerity,
truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will
not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me,
for
surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to
myself;
but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am
obliged to
say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were
the seeds of those virtues, were worm-eaten or had lost their vitality,
and so
did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were
brave,
or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new
year
precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first
settlers to do,
as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at
least, and
not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander
try new
adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and
grass crop,
and his orchards — raise other crops than these? Why concern
ourselves so much
about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new
generation of
men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were
sure to
see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize
more than
those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and
floating
in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile
and
ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the
slightest
amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be
instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help
to distribute them over
all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We
should
never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there
were
present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus
in haste.
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are
busy
about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever,
leaning on
a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but
partially
risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows
alighted and
walking on the ground: —
so that we should suspect
that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish
us; but
it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and
makes us
supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any
generosity
in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology
suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is
pursued with
irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large
farms
and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor
ceremony, not
excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the
farmer expresses
a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred
origin.
It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not
to
Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather.
By avarice and
selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of
regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property
chiefly, the
landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer
leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says
that the profits of
agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius
quæstus), and
according to Varro
the old Romans
"called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who
cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were
left of the
race of King Saturn." We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. |