The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

And here are the teachers, preachers, writers, reformers, politicians—men who deal, not in shoes, but in theories, ideals, principalities, and powers, those large, expansive, balloonish commodities that show the balloon’s propensity to soar and to explode—do they not need ballast as much as the shoemaker, bags of plain sand in the shape of the small domestic job?

Daring some months’ stay in the city not long ago, I sent my boys to a kindergarten. Neither the principal nor the teachers, naturally, had any children of their own. Teachers of children and mothers’ advisers seldom have. I was forced to lead my dear lambs prematurely forth from this Froebel fold, when the principal, looking upon them with tears, exclaimed, “Yes, your farm is no doubt a healthful place, but they will be so without guidance! They will have no one out there to show them how to play!”

That dear woman is ballooning, and without a boy of her own for ballast. Only successful mothers and doting old grandfathers (who can still go on all fours) should be allowed to kindergarten. Who was it but old Priam, to whom Andromache used to lead little Astyanax?

The truth is, all of the theorizing, sermonizing, inculcating professions ought to be made strictly avocational, strictly incidental to some real business. Let our Presidents preach (how they love it!); let our preachers nurse the sick, catch fish, or make tents. It is easier for the camel, with both his humps, to squeeze through the eye of the needle than for the professional man of any sort to perform regularly his whole duty with sound sense and sincerity.

But ballast is a universal human need—chores, I mean. It is my privilege frequently to ride home in the same car with a broker’s bookkeeper. Thousands of dollars’ worth of stock pass through his hands for record every day. The “odor” of so much affluence clings to him. He feels and thinks and talk in millions. He lives over-night, to quote his own words, “on the end of a telephone wire.” That boy makes ten dollars a week, wears “swagger clothes,” and boards with his grandmother, who does all his washing, except the collars. What ails him? and a million other Americans like him? Only the need to handle something smaller, something realer than this pen of the recording angel—the need of chores. He should have the wholesome reality of a buck-saw twice a day; he might be saved if he could be interested in chickens; could feed them every morning, and every evening could “pick up the eggs.”

So might many another millionaire. When a man’s business prohibits his caring for the chickens, when his affairs become so important that he can no longer shake down the furnace, help dress one of the children, or tinker about the place with a hammer and saw, then that man’s business had better be put into the hands of a receiver, temporarily; his books do not balance.

I know of a college president who used to bind (he may still) a cold compress about his head at times, and, lying prone upon the floor, have two readers, one for each ear, read simultaneously to him different theses, so great was the work he had to do, so fierce his fight for time—time to lecture to women’s clubs and to write his epoch-making books.

Oh, the multitude of epoch-making books!

But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live among a people who are Commuters, and I have stood with them on the banks of the Ohio, according to the suggestion of one of our wisest philosophers (Josh Billings, I think), and, in order to see how well the world could get on without me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow current, pulled it out, and looked for the hole.