Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

But I would show my Princess what her pearls were worth. I would string them in globes of beauty around her neck, and brow, and belt, and I would put my crowning Great Pearl of Sacrifice into the diadem of her hair, and then I would lead her down to the sweet glassy sea of her own unbartered, unbought home, her own sweet kingdom of kindness and content, and by the still waters, in God's own groves, I would lead her until her feet dipped into the mirroring pools, and, kissing her, bid her look for the first time and behold Love crowned.

Would she barter herself for baubles then? Would she not know the difference between pearls and paste beads? I, yes, happy I, would show it to her; I would introduce Eloise to herself—Eloise loveless to Eloise in love.

I laughed now in the happiness of my little conceit. Very distinctly I could hear my Aunt Lucretia say: "Sure, Jack, that is the way Andrew Jackson did—took her from the toad who had deceived her, right out of his arms, and then killed every other toad who croaked about it. Sure!" ...

There was much for me to do, both of love and duty. My duty was work, and that came first. For I had faith both in God and myself, and if I did my duty and my work, God would give the rest to me.

Work—the glory and sweetness of it! And to find one's work in one's life—that One Work which fits the One Life: this to me has always been the greatest gift of the Giver.

There was so much for me to do. I was the pioneer of a great truth in the world's greatest country. In all great causes it is the pioneer who is the sacrifice, it is he who is held up to contempt and scorn. Strange that it should be so! That he who sees first the Great New Truth, the Blessing that has been withheld because of no one to see it, the Great Invention uplifting through one man all men into a new world, that it is he who must suffer....

The hurt does not matter from those who love us not. I was willing that the herd should think of me as it would, as its own little light permitted, but I had that pride of race which every honest man has, and I wanted the love of my fighting old grandsire. And he openly despised my profession, and he secretly despised me. "What's the use of worrying about making more on an acre of this rich soil?" he would say. "Ain't The Home Stretch rich enough? And fiddling about saving trees—why damn it, ain't there too many of them already? Didn't I have all the hard work of my life clearing some of the land, and my father before me, that it might make us a living!"

He would never understand me, of course. The discoverer is never understood, and the forester falls in the same class, more maligned than any of them. He would never understand that it was not a sentimental dream to save trees because they are trees, but to grow them and harvest them in the right way, even as wheat is harvested: that we did not want to see rich acres, the homes of unborn people, covered only with trees, when the land was needed for bread, but the unfertile hillside, and the heads of our water streams. There, we insisted, trees should remain because that was Nature's own way of protecting the land from droughts and floods. Nor could I hope to make him understand that rich as the land was—even as a man of genius—it should have a chance to bring forth all the fruit that was in it. That our waste was something appalling, our methods crude, and that our people, with all their plenty, were only half fed; that while we were rich and The Home Stretch was a garden, the poor farmers of the hills and less fertile places were living only half lives, they and their families, because there was no one to show them something better.

My Aunt I knew was sorry for me; but I could see she hoped and believed I would yet get over it. And in my own heart I felt that if I had chosen West Point, perhaps Eloise—

I flushed, ashamed. How prone our little weak Self always is to play Arnold with our Soul!