THE NATURAL HISTORY CLUB HAD FREQUENT FIELD EXCURSIONS[ToList]
More and more, as the seasons rolled by, and page after page of the book of nature was turned before my eager eyes, did I feel the wonder and thrill of the revelations of science, till all my thoughts became colored with the tints of infinite truths. My days arranged themselves around the meetings of the club as a centre. The whole structure of my life was transfigured by my novel experiences outdoors. I realized, with a shock at first, but afterwards with complacency, that books were taking a secondary place in my life, my irregular studies in natural history holding the first place. I began to enjoy the Natural History rooms; and I was obliged to admit to myself that my heart hung with a more thrilling suspense over the fate of some beans I had planted in a window box than over the fortunes of the classic hero about whom we were reading at school.
But for all my enthusiasm about animals, plants, and rocks,—for all my devotion to the Natural History Club,—I did not become a thorough naturalist. My scientific friends were right not to take me seriously. Mr. Winthrop, in his delightfully frank way, called me a fraud; and I did not resent it. I dipped into zoölogy, botany, geology, ornithology, and an infinite number of other ologies, as the activities of the club or of particular members of it gave me opportunity, but I made no systematic study of any branch of science; at least not until I went to college. For what enthralled my imagination in the whole subject of natural history was not the orderly array of facts, but the glimpse I caught, through this or that fragment of science, of the grand principles underlying the facts. By asking questions, by listening when my wise friends talked, by reading, by pondering and dreaming, I slowly gathered together the kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous panorama which is painted in the literature of Darwinism. Everything I had ever learned at school was illumined by this new knowledge; the world lay newly made under my eyes. Vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea of a great country, when I exchanged Polotzk for America, it was no such enlargement as I now experienced, when in place of the measurable earth, with its paltry tale of historic centuries, I was given the illimitable universe to contemplate, with the numberless æons of infinite time.
As the meaning of nature was deepened for me, so was its aspect beautified. Hitherto I had loved in nature the spectacular,—the blazing sunset, the whirling tempest, the flush of summer, the snow-wonder of winter. Now, for the first time, my heart was satisfied with the microscopic perfection of a solitary blossom. The harmonious murmur of autumn woods broke up into a hundred separate melodies, as the pelting acorn, the scurrying squirrel, the infrequent chirp of the lingering cricket, and the soft speed of ripe pine cones through dense-grown branches, each struck its discriminate chord in the scented air. The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension; inanimate things were vivified; living things were dignified.
No two persons set the same value on any given thing, and so it may very well be that I am boasting of the enrichment of my life through the study of natural history to ears that hear not. I need only recall my own obtuseness to the subject, before the story of the spider sharpened my senses, to realize that these confessions of a nature lover may bore every other person who reads them. But I do not pretend to be concerned about the reader at this point. I never hope to explain to my neighbor the exact value of a winter sunrise in my spiritual economy, but I know that my life has grown better since I learned to distinguish between a butterfly and a moth; that my faith in man is the greater because I have watched for the coming of the song sparrow in the spring; and my thoughts of immortality are the less wavering because I have cherished the winter duckweed on my lawn.
Those who find their greatest intellectual and emotional satisfaction in the study of nature are apt to refer their spiritual problems also to science. That is how it went with me. Long before my introduction to natural history I had realized, with an uneasy sense of the breaking of peace, that the questions which I thought to have been settled years before were beginning to tease me anew. In Russia I had practised a prescribed religion, with little faith in what I professed, and a restless questioning of the universe. When I came to America I lightly dropped the religious forms that I had half mocked before, and contented myself with a few novel phrases employed by my father in his attempt to explain the riddle of existence. The busy years flew by, when from morning till night I was preoccupied with the process of becoming an American; and no question arose in my mind that my books or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a time when the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged itself automatically, and I had leisure once more to look over and around things. This period coinciding with my moody adolescence, I rapidly entangled myself in a net of doubts and questions, after the well-known manner of a growing girl. I asked once more, How did I come to be?—and I found that I was no whit wiser than poor Reb' Lebe, whom I had despised for his ignorance. For all my years of America and schooling, I could give no better answer to my clamoring questions than the teacher of my childhood. Whence came the fair world? Was there a God, after all? And if so, what did He intend when He made me?
It was always my way, if I wanted anything, to turn my daily life into a pursuit of that thing. "Have you seen the treasure I seek?" I asked of every man I met. And if it was God that I desired, I made all my friends search their hearts for evidence of His being. I asked all the wise people I knew what they were going to do with themselves after death; and if the wise failed to satisfy me, I questioned the simple, and listened to the babies talking in their sleep.
Still the imperative clamor of my mind remained unallayed. Was all my life to be a hunger and a questioning? I complained of my teachers, who stuffed my head with facts and gave my soul no crumb to feed on. I blamed the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding over the emptiness of knowledge, and praying for revelations.
Sometimes I lived for days in a chimera of doubts, feeling that it was hardly worth while living at all if I was never to know why I was born and why I could not live forever. It was in one of these prolonged moods that I heard that a friend of mine, a distinguished man of letters whom I greatly admired, was coming to Boston for a short visit. A terrific New England blizzard arrived some hours in advance of my friend's train, but so intent was I on questioning him that I disregarded the weather, and struggled through towering snowdrifts, in the teeth of the wild wind, to the railroad station. There I nearly perished of weariness while waiting for the train, which was delayed by the storm. But when my friend emerged from one of the snow-crusted cars I was rewarded; for the blizzard had kept the reporters away, and the great man could give me his undivided attention.