Straining at the Tether

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

ON a grass-grown hillside, wearing the softest green in all the world, I sit in a mood of absolute content, for it is a goodly moment. Soft, spicy odors are in my nostrils, of cedar and of wild sage that grows profusely all about; far and near, the blue-green waters ripple in unending loveliness, and the air touches forehead and finger-tips with a new gentleness. Here I sit and think, for, though you cannot think hard in Bermuda, you cannot stop thinking. There is a bland inspiration in the air; your ideas are curiously mixed up with your sensations, and, as the latter constantly present new moments of charm, your mind, like your feet, keeps jogging on, not into new regions, but traveling in content old paths of thought; for the beaten tracks seem safe and sweet.

It is not a new idea that comes to me as I idly watch the goats browsing here and there below me on the hillside, but it comes with a new freshness, due, doubtless, to the air, and the fragrances, and the little imperceptible sounds that enhance the quiet. Surely it is very odd that every goat in sight is straining at its tether! For the grass is fresh and toothsome, and none is fastened near a bare spot; there are no bare spots. This slope to the sea is a very goat paradise; no Theocritus in the vales of Sicily, in his most idyllic mood, could have dreamed a fairer. At left and right, at rare intervals, one sees the little houses with snow-white roofs where dwell colored folk who apparently fashion their roofs to match their souls, not their skins. In each lives a kindly master of some fortunate goat; a soft-voiced woman, and gentle little brown-faced children who dance with the dancing kids. One can see in approaching these tethered animals that they are respectfully treated, as members of the family; they expect attention, and start a conversation as you approach; they seem to share the Bermudian sense of hospitality in wishing you to feel at home, and they give you a wholly pleasant feeling, not doctrinal but actual, of the brotherhood of men and goats.

Sitting in the warm sunshine, I watch them through half-closed eyes; that makes colors and outlines clearer, thoughts too, sometimes. Why should they do this thing? Every goat and goatlet in Bermuda is straining at its tether; with green and living grass closeby, — for the coffee-colored women in purple calico who come out to tie their respective goats have a genius for choosing the most fertile spots, — is straining after morsels just beyond reach, browner though they be. What , I wonder, is this instinct to escape, which drives us all on and on, over the long track, dominating alike the endless migration of the birds, the wandering of wild-beast herds, and the pioneering of human kind? Never, perhaps, have I been so free from it, and therefore so able to think about it, as I am at this moment, for I am minded to stay here forever, or as long as I can bear these spring-like bird notes mingled with the sound of plashing water on the delicate shore below. For heaven’s sake, why can none of us ‘ stay put,’ and rest content? Why, after choosing out of all the world a lot on which to build a little house in far New England, am I haunted and tormented thus by a vision of the lot just beyond? That has come to seem wholly desirable, with its eastern exposure, and its southerly slope for daffodils, while our own, which represented the sum total of desirability when we found it hard to get, is full now of imperfections that urge us on and away. The next lot, the next lot, — so it will go on until I reach that small and ultimate bit of real estate which leaves the location of the next lot too uncertain for covetousness.

Here I go, — a frequent occupation in Bermuda, — to unwind the nearest goat, which has so entangled and tied itself up in its eager and leaping aspiration, — one might suggest parallels, — that it is well-nigh choked; then I go back to my green spot. And in the sunlit air I see pictures of those driven by the immemorial impulsion of the race toward the new, — far-off, forgotten, Asiatic hordes, with their shaggy ponies and their shaggy sons and daughters, forever ‘stepping westward’ on a ‘wilder destiny,’ driven they knew not whither, by they knew not what.

I see, what I shall never forget : a great alkali plain beyond the prairies, a dusty prairie schooner drawn by discouraged-looking horses, a discouraged man and woman looking vaguely out and on; and I recall a fact some one had told me, that the ground along this trail was sown thick with human bones. So is it along the trail of all human ideals!

Forever and forever, come the immigrants to our great ports, father, mother, and children, with carpetbags and embroidered jackets. All faces wear a look of stolid expectancy, as these close-packed masses move along on the everlasting trek.

None can say what it means, or foresee an end, for God, when he set before us the far horizon, constantly escaping, set also the longing for it within our hearts. It is only because of the innate impulse to escape one’s present self that we are here at all; otherwise our forbears had waited quite content without us. Forever a-pace, never arriving, has been the timeless past, and shall be the endless future.

Yes, but in the light of the fact that a man’s reach always does exceed his grasp, what is a heaven for? Oddly enough, all the sons of earth, in spite of their life-experience of the necessity of perpetual motion, at least of the spirit, have conceived it as something static, fixed, final. Dreaming now of the walls of paradise, I see only rows upon rows of heads, with wistful eyes straining, longing for even the thistle patch, the thorn patch, any patch beyond.

And I, who could not be more absolutely contented in sense and in inmost soul than I am at this minute, think I see (a malediction on all aspiration, anyway!) a greener spot just beyond, where the juniper-grown slope stands out against water of a softer blue, so again I rise and trudge, with an insidious plan forming itself somewhere down in my subconscious self, where I cannot get at it to stifle it, to write something to-morrow which shall in some fashion voice this endless search of the spirit. It is only the goat impulse, at another stage of the game! No one else could express as well as Mr. Moody has done, the longing from which we may not escape: —