ONLY A SHAVING

Evening Star, Issue 19411, 20 November 1926, Page 2

ONLY A SHAVING

The present writer’s earliest ambition was to be a carpenter. It was not so ranch the profession as its results that he desired. The profession, indeed, was attractive enough. What could be more lovely than to smooth the rough wood, saw it and chisel it into shape, and fit it together with the joiner’s accuracy and neatness? And then the products of the carpenter’s art, how attractive to the hoy—the wheels and miniature carts so satisfying to the instinctive passion for swiftness of movement. Then the ability to make boxes for his pets, coops for his pigeons, and twenty other things that a country lad of half a century ago so dearly prized. Nest to the wonders and joy of the smiddy was the carpenter’s shop, with its clean, sweet shining tools, and their power of eating their way through the unprotesting wood. We are romindea of all this as some shavings from a carpenter’s workshop were blown about, our foot the other day. We picked up one of them, and what a thing of beauty it is! Its smooth shining surface, the deft and delicate curl like a rippling ringlet of golden hair, the thin, transparent veins, and the light orange color of it was all very lovely in itself, and it stirred recollections. “Oh, memories! Oh, past that is!” * <*■ * Amid the recollections was a quaint little poem in Lord Lytton’s (“Owen Meredith”) ‘Fables in Song.’ And if the truth must be confessed, the Fables are much better than the song. The latter often lacks music. It is the work of an authentic singer, but of a slovenly one. One of the Fables tells the story of a little child of five finding near the door of a carpenter’s workshop a shaving. Ho had never seen such a beautiful thing before— It was tender, transparent, light, Silk soft, odorous, veined so fine, With rosy waves in the richest white, Rare damask of dainty design. As it fluttered about his feet in the golden sunshine like a live thing, he looked at it in wonder and touched it with awe. Ho was a poor widow’s boy, with few playmates, gentle and dreamy. He would like to have carried off the treasure, but what would his mother say? So he knocked at the half-shut door. Behind it was a sturdy workman with brawny muscles and jet black hair that gave him a forbidding look. He had seen the child, expected he had come with some message: asks him what he wanted., The little chap, abashed at the sight of the big carpenter and the noise of the other workmen in the shop, timidly holds out the shaving, tells that as he was passing he saw it fall, and has brought it to him.

Have you not missed HP It must, I know, Have boon hard to make. I hav© taken' care. The wind was blowing round the wall, And I never saw anything half so fair. The rough, burly workman was touched By the vision of the child’s beauty and bis guilelessness. He laid his strong hand on the child’s head, drew him up on his knees, asked his age and other things, and then “ This ringlet thing, it pleases you?” The child nodded. H© put him down, tells him to hold up his pinafore, sweeps a heap, a whole “curly clan,” of the shavings into it, and says: “ Now run home, little mam” The little xnaja is astonished, can’t believe all this riches for him. But it is, and off he goes with the happiest heart he will perhaps ever have again. The workman—he was the “boss” of the shop—filled his pipe and dreamily watched the thin wreaths of smoke fade out in the summer air.

I know not what were his thoughts. But I know There be shavings that down from a man’s work fall, .Which the man himself as they drop below Haply accounts of n 6 worth at all. And I know there bo children that prize them more Than the man’s true work, be its worth what it may. « * « » All of which is undeniable, and yet overlooked to our misfortune. Where are now. the works of this carpenter immortalised by Lord Lytton? Possibly all of them have been turned into firewood, and have vanished from the land of the living. But this act ministered to make a child happy is twice blessed, blessing alike the doer and the receiver. While the labors of his hands are forgotten, the incidental kindness to a little boy lives on, “ smells sweet, and blossoms in the dust.” It is a parable of what is happening everywhere in life. The results of not learning its significance are tragic. There is no end of fathers who neglect their children in the interests of their business. They are so eager to get on and make a pile that they cannot find time to respond to their children's higher needs. They are anxious, of course, to provide the means to feed and clothe them, but for the rest the business is relegated to the mother. The father imagines ho is fulfilling the whole duty of man when he spends all his day in the workshop or the store, and then, feeling the need of relaxation, goes out in the evenings to the club or the theatre or the pictures. So the children are a sort of by-product that come in as a secondary or subordinate concern of life. It may turn out, however, that it is these by-products which are the supremo things, and their neglect tragic. W© are already face to face with the perils created by this neglect. We have swarms of youths growing up in our cities who are the puzzle of the politician and the despair of the guardians of law. They are this because fathers have failed to realise that their children have the first claim on their time and teaching. And while of their business it may- be said this ye ought to have done, it may still more imperatively he asserted of the other this yo ought not to have left undone. And the individual issue broadens out into national significance. We are only beginning to discover that the State rests upon the child; that the nation which regards the child as its primary and essential product is the nation that commands the future. But on this we need not now insist. » # « c Another point which this little story suggest/; is how often the seemingly incidental things of life turn out to be the essential ones. It was a slight episode, this child and the shaving in the day’s work of the carpenter, yet it is the only one that has lived. How often it happens that what we directly aim at we do not get. And what was a secondary or unthought-of and unexplained event turns out to be

the best thing in , our, life. When the anglers go off to whip the rivers in these spring days, their one idea is to catch fish. But Nature, again, has another and. a better one, for, as John Burroughs says, every angler catches a great deal more and better than the fish he brings home in his basket, if, indeed, he brings any. He catches health and vigor and a spring cleaning out of those ill humors that are the inevitable issue of keeping the nose too close and too long to the grindstone. So in higher things. Happiness, for instance, is never got by those who seek it directly. It comes incidentally to something else.

Oh, righteous doom that they who make Pleasure their only end, Ordering their whole life for its sake, Miss that whereto they tend; While they who. bid stern duty lead, Content to follow, they of duty only taking heed Find pleasure by the way. So of other and higher things—selfsacrifice, goodness, for instance. When we aim directly at these, when we become conscious that we are doing them, their bloom and beauty are at ouce destroyed. •* * u * So well-nigh universal is this incidental indirect principle of life that it has been daringly suggested man. himself may he only an incidental, a by-product of the Cosmos. Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, and others are hinting at this. In one of her impressive sonnets, Miss Emily Pfeiffer arraigns Nature as stumbling on thought and throwing off the spheres. Thou crownedst thy wild work with foulest wrong When first thou lightest.on a seeming goal, And darkly blundered on man’s suffering soul.

But a deeper view of the universe and of man’s work in it helps to steady us. For we begin to see that there is no such thing as waste anywhere in it; and that often when we fail in our efforts after some direct object we stumble upon something greater and more enduring. There are Madame Curie and her husband setting out to study certain rays that were puzzling the scientific world, and lo! they lighted accidentally, as it were, upon radium. Sir William Ramsay is on record as saying that a London firm had been paying dustmen three or four shillings a load to cart away the pitch-blende from which radium can he extracted. A mem her of the firm called it a nuisance; yet this nuisance, had they only known it, was worth millions of pounds. People are constantly misjudging the relative worth of their works. Dr Philip Doddridge used to entertain himself on Sunday night condensing the sermons he had preached’ into poetic form. Nobody now rends the former, but the poetic products—many of them —are in every hymn book. And there is Bishop Ken, a learned prolate who produced a lot of literary matter of one sort and another—all now as dead as the dust of his own body. But “Praise God, from-Whom ail blessings flow,” “Awake, my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run ” will live till we all become Bolshevists in creed, and that will not bo the day after to-morrow. Thus what often seems to men a blind alley turns out to be a gateway opening into immortality. Nature abhors waste as she does a vacuum, and never permits it.