The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

But I have been belated and forced to cross this wild night-land of his; and I have felt him pass—so near at times that he has stirred my hair, by the wind, dare I say, of his mysterious wings? At other times I have heard him. Often on the edge of night I have listened to his quavering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me by the meadow. But oftener I have watched at the casement here in my castle wall.

Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.

Yes, yes, but one must be pretty much of a child, with most of his childish things not yet put away, to get any such romance out of a rotten apple tree, plus a bunch of feathers no bigger than one’s two fists. One must be pretty far removed from the real world, the live world that swings, no longer through the heavens, but at the distributing end of a news wire—pretty far removed to spend one’s precious time watching screech-owls.

And so one is, indeed,—sixteen miles removed by space, one whole day by post, one whole hour by engine and horse, one whole half-minute by the telephone in the back hall. Lost! cut off completely! hopelessly marooned!

I fear so. Perhaps I must admit that the watching of owls is for babes and sucklings, not for men with great work to do, that is, with money to make, news to get, office to hold, and clubs to address. For babes and sucklings, and, possibly, for those with a soul to save, yet I hasten to avow that the watching of owls is not religion; for I entirely agree with our Shelburne essayist when he finds, “in all this worship of nature,”—by Traherne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and those who seek the transfigured world of the woods,—“there is a strain of illusion which melts away at the touch of the greater realities ... and there are evils against which its seduction is of no avail.”

But let the illusion melt. Other worships have shown a strain of illusion at times, and against certain evils been of small avail. And let it be admitted that calling regularly at an old apple tree is far short of a full man’s work in the world, even when such calling falls outside of his shop or office-hours. For there are no such hours. The business of life allows no spare time any more. One cannot get rich nowadays in office-hours, nor become great, nor keep telegraphically informed, nor do his share of talking and listening. Everybody but the plumber and paper-hanger works overtime. How the earth keeps up a necessary amount of whirling in the old twenty-four-hour limit is more than we can understand. But she can’t keep up the pace much longer. She must have an extra hour. And how to snatch it from the tail-end of eternity is the burning cosmological question.

And this is the burning question with regard to our individual whirling—How to add time, or, what amounts to exactly the same, How to increase the whirling.

There have been many hopeful answers. The whirl has been vastly accelerated. The fly-wheel of the old horse treadmill is now geared to an electric dynamo. But it is not enough; it is not the answer. And I despair of the answer—of the perfect whirl, the perpetual, invisible, untimable.

Hence the apple tree, the owls, the illusions, the lost hours—the neglect of fortune and of soul! But then you may worship nature and still find your way to church; you may be intensely interested in the life of an old apple tree and still cultivate your next-door neighbor, still earn all the fresh air and bread and books that your children need.

The knoll yonder may be a kind of High Place, and its old apple tree a kind of altar for you when you had better not go to church, when your neighbor needs to be let alone, when your children are in danger of too much bread and of too many books—for the time when you are in need of that something which comes only out of the quiet of the fields at the close of day.