THE FASCINATION OF LIGHT
The strange fascination of light takes hold of all animated creatures, and commands a subtle devotion that cannot be set forth in a confession of faith. The delight of a boy in a bonfire is a breath of the heaven that is about us in our infancy. Though it be but a heap of rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big sticks break into glowing coals, darting out new tongues of flame to lick up the escaping embers!
Fire is one of nature's universal fascinations. The wildest and most wary animals approach and gaze at it in the night, and though it sometimes warns them off, it always holds them by a spell. The night migrating birds perish in scores against the plate-glass of coast lighthouses, swerving from the control of the all-powerful migratory instinct toward the fascinating glare that is their destruction. It is not sportsmanlike to hang a lantern in the marsh and shoot the duck that gather under it. But the night, the silent marsh, and the lantern have charms that the sportsman, with his legal and mechanical paraphernalia, can never understand. Fish are devoted fire-worshippers, and that boy who has never speared by a jack-light is an object of compassion.
The earth and the waters under the earth have no more fascinating sight than the gray, silent form of a pike, moving and motionless in the shallow water, a shadow more tangible than himself thrown by a jack-light on the mottled yellow rocks and sands of the bottom. A passing breath of wind, even the slightest motion of the punt, breaks every shadow and indentation into myriad fleeting ripples and waves of light, transforming the slender, silent fish into a sheaf of wriggling glimmers. With the stilling of the surface, the waiting pike and all the shadows and lights of the bottom grow once more still and distinct. There floats the greatest cannibal of the fishes, paying his devotion to the flame, and above him stands the greatest cannibal of all created beings, pointing his deadly spear.
There is no moon. The stars cannot penetrate the thickening clouds. The bay is still and its shores invisible, the distant light of a farmhouse only serving to intensify the lonely silence. The savage joy of that moment repays the boy for all his laborious preparations. He brought two boards down the river from the mill, and toiled at them with all the tools in the woodshed till the ends and edges were made smooth. He collected lumber from all available sources for the ends and bottom, fastening them on with a miscellaneous collection of nails and springs. Then he patiently picked an old piece of tarred rope into oakum, and caulked it into the seams with a sharpened gate-hinge. He notched a pine tree, gathered the gum and boiled it into pitch to make the joints tight. That extraordinary pair of oars he sawed, chopped, and whittled from an old plank. The spear is a family relic which he dug up and fitted with a white-ash pole, and the anchor is a long stone, tied by the slack of a clothes-line. The jack is a basket made of old pail-hoops, and fastened to an upright stick to hold the burning pine knot. Yet we wonder why it is always the country boy who succeeds in the city!
Will he too, be lured by the seductive glimmer? Will he turn away from the conquest of nature and embark in the conquest of his fellow-mortals? Will he go to a resort for his fishing and a preserve for his shooting? Will that bunch of hair protruding from under his hat be worn thin and gray in scrambling after the delights of the vain and the covetous? Will he devote his superb strength of body and mind to outstripping and circumventing his fellows in the pursuit of that transient glimmer, that all-alluring ignis fatuus which the Babylon world calls success?
S. T. Wood