22
MIRACLES
From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the world can show is a battlefield of human beings.
Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature. Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos. The word Cosmos means order, as stated once before.
One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part. With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light. After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with another man's money,—standing alone, tormented with the thought of how little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank them for going away.
In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found myself turning in pleasure to it—the thought would come that it wasn't really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used to go from the building and grounds then—cutting myself clear from it, as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.
I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went. I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living—and for pennies the hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation—one house after another through life—to accept money and call their work paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry—every stone is different—but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid—nor the house paid for....
One evening I went through the structure when all but the final finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name; yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the fireplaces—finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still—and presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house—a week or two more from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.
The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there by the fountain one night—mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the patio....
And here was its northern replica—sunken area paved with gold-brown brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and front doors. I wanted it so—a house to see through like an honest face. Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted it so.