The Common Lot

by Robert Herrick

Greed, greed! The spirit of greed had eaten him through and through, the lust for money, the desire for the fat things of the world, the ambition to ride high among his fellows. In the world where he had lived this passion had a dignified name; it was called enterprise and ambition. But now he saw it for what it was,—greed and lust, nothing more. It was in the air of the city which he had breathed for eight years.... In his pride he had justified knavery by Success. He had judged himself mean and small merely because he had failed to cheat and steal and trick "in a large way." Only the little and the weak need be honest; to the strong all things were right—he had said glibly. Now, for the first day since the strength of his manhood, he saw acts, not blurred by his own passions, not shifting with the opinions of the day; but he saw them fixed and hard,—living, human acts, each one in its own integrity, with its own irrevocable fate; acts expressed in lowered eyelids of consent, in shrugs, in meaningful broken phrases; acts unprofessional, sharp, dishonest, criminal.

He lay in the gathering twilight, listened, and saw. And at last the soul of the man, which had been long in hiding, came back, and flowed into him once more. A deep, new longing filled his heart, a desire to be once again as he had been before, to rise from his debasement and become clean, to slough off this parasitic self into which he had grown all these years of his strife in the city, to be born anew like the springtime earth—such longings as come to men when they are sickened with the surfeit of their passions.

... He knew now why his wife had left him. She had felt the leper taint, which had been eating at his heart all the years of their marriage, and had repudiated it. She had cried out against the mere getting and spending of money, to which low ebb those lofty ambitions of his youth had descended before her eyes. She had loved him as the creator, the builder; and he had given her no visions, but only the sensualities of modern wealth. "Let us begin again and live the common life," she had cried out to him. "Let us live for work and not for money." He had put her aside with contempt, and refused to open the dark places of his life to her. Now he knew that she had done well to leave him to his own day of judgment. And the first impulse in the man's new soul was to go to her, humbly, and say to her: "You were right. I have sinned against myself, against you, against life, all along the way. Will you accept my repentance, and love me again from the beginning, knowing now the truth?" Ardently he desired to hear her answer; but his heart left him in doubt as to what that answer might be. For he understood at last that he had never known this woman, who had been his wife for eight years.

Nevertheless, despite this hunger of his heart for the woman he loved, there rose in him slowly a purging sense of relief from crime and sin committed. It had passed away, was put off from himself. Surely he was to come once more into peace! The upspringing life of the reincarnated earth chanted all about him but one song: "Here I leave my uncleanness. Life is strong and good. There is, for all, forgiveness and peace. Here I bury the filth of my deeds, and renew my hope." Thus man rises again and again from the depths of his abasement; thus springs in him a new hope, a vital, imperishable element, the soul of his being; and he is prepared afresh for the struggle. Deep within him there lies forever the unconquerable conviction of his power to rise, to renew himself.

So, after the tempest of debauch, little men wake from their carnal desires, and, leaving behind them the uncleanness of their flesh, go forth into the pure morning, subdued and ashamed, yet irresistibly sure that life is good and holds forgiveness and hope for them. With the new day they will become like their dreams, clean and pure. Thus, also, those larger men, not eaten by bodily lusts, those greater sinners who are caught on the whirling spikes of bolder passions, who are torn and twisted—these, also, return at certain hours to the soul within them, and renew there the pure fire of their natures, so that they may enter again the endless contest having hope and health. Thus, above all, the great heart of things, the abundant mother of life, the earth, renews herself eternally according to the laws of her being, and comes forth afresh and undiminished for the business of living.

The mere lump of man lying there inert upon the ground felt this great process of renewal all about him, and sucked in fresh life and health. In like manner, years before, in his youth, he had gone down to the sea, and there had known something of this mysterious sensation of renewal. His body plunged in cool, black sea-water, he had drawn through the pores of his flesh the elemental currents of life. He longed now to escape again from men, to go down to the sea and touch those waters washing in from their remote tidal courses up and down the earth. By such means Nature cleanses and teaches man. Heedless of man, unconcerned with his follies and vices, impersonal, irresistible, majestic, she receives his head upon her breast, and renews within him his spirit,—the power to battle, the power to live.

The fruitful earth holds in her bosom death and life, both together, and out of her comes health. In like manner there lie in the heart of man diverse instincts,—seeds of good and evil, ready to germinate. For long seasons seeds of one kind burst forth in the soil of a man's nature and thrive. Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat, their germinating impulse. And the world about them, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. But in their own time other seeds, perchance ripening late and slowly, come to their day of germination, seeds of unlike nature, with diverse fruit. Such sprout and send their life forth into the man, creating a new nature which the world will not recognize as his. Thus it was happening with this man: commingled in his heart and brain there had lain diverse seeds of many kinds,—seeds of decay and seeds of life. Impulses of creative purpose, of unselfish work—these had been long dormant; impulses of lust and greed and deceit—these had grown rankly in the feverish life of the city until they had flowered in crime. Now had come to him the time of fate; the first harvest of his acts was garnered; and the new seeds of his life were ready to wake from their sleep in the depths of his being, to put forth their energies, their demands. Some great shock—the agony of dying men and women—had quickened this new growth. So happened the miracle of rebirth, hidden far away from all human observation, first revealing itself in the consciousness of purification and renewed health.

The song of the springtime earth rose ever upward, calming and healing the man, who at last had caught its message. It said to him: "Another sun, a new day, an earth ever fresh from the hand of God! Eternal hope—the burial of the corrupt body with its misdeeds; health, and not decay; life, and not death. For life is good. There is forgiveness and renewal for all those who heed." ... Through the misty heavens above the trees the stars glimmered faintly. Over the prairie, fields, and woodland the night wind passed, soft, odorous, charged with the breath of the earth in the conceiving time of life....

Under the starlight of the spring night there might be seen the figure of a man walking southward toward the black horizon of the great city. He walked neither fast nor slow, but steadily, evenly, as if urged by one powerful purpose,—some magnetic end that set his nerves and his muscles to the rhythm of action.