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THE SECRET OF THE SNOW| |
Lois Boynton’s work is done. In The Story of Waitstill Baxter, Kate Douglas Wiggin has told of the lives that brightened and of the homes that were sweetened by her gentle influence. And now she is dying! The Snow that falling outside the bedroom window seems to match the purity of her spirit. “After a windy moonlit night, a morning dawned in which a hush seemed to be on the earth. The cattle huddled together in the farmyards and the fowls shrank into their feathers. The sky was grey, and, suddenly, the first white heralds came floating down like scouts seeking for paths and camping places. Then
. . . . there fell from out of the skies
A feathery whiteness over all the land;
A strange, soft, spotless something, pure as light.
It could not be called a storm, for there had been no wind since sunrise, no whirling fury, no drifting; only a still, steady, solemn fall of crystal flakes, hour after hour.
And so a good woman is dying! And the soft white snow is falling! “Waitstill turned Mrs. Boynton’s bed so that she could look out of the window. Slope after slope, dazzling in white crust, rose one upon another and vanished as they slipped away into the dark green of the pine forests.”
The dying woman’s attention is divided between two objects, both very beautiful. She loves the snow and can scarcely take her eyes from its fleecy loveliness. She loves her Bible, too and that Book of Books lies open on her bed. She picks it up from time to time and searches her favorite portion—the book of Job—for a passage particularly dear to her.
“Here it is, daughter,” she whispers to Waitstill, “I have found it! It is in the same chapter in which the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy. The Lord speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and says: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” No, not yet; but, please God, I shall soon enter into the treasures of the snow and into many other treasures, too”; and, so saying, she closed her tired eyes.
All day long the airways were filled with the glittering army of the snowflakes; all day long the snow grew deeper and deeper on the ground; and, on the breath of some white-winged wonder that passed Lois Boynton’s window, her white soul took its flight!
II
The thought of Lois Boynton and her snowy passing rushed back upon my mind this morning. For this morning’s newspaper contained a thrill. The hills around the city, the paper said, were thickly coated with snow! Those who live further from the equator than I do will find it difficult to understand the excitement awakened by that announcement. Snow! Snow in Australia! Snow, not merely on distant mountains, but on hills close at hand! We had scarcely finished breakfast when there came a sharp ring at the bell. It was Douglass Pitt. At the gate stood his motor in which Mrs. Pitt and the two children were seated.
“We are going for a run over the Dandenongs to see the snow,” he explained, “and we want you to come.”
I went, and, in going, was distinctly in the fashion. The road swarmed with cars. Everybody was off to see the snow. Some, born and brought up in this sunny land, were moved by curiosity; others who, like myself, had come from overseas, were moved by sentiment. The Australians climbed the hills because they had not seen the snow before; the Englishmen made the journey because they had. Every Englishman settled in Australia cherishes in his heart a fond though frantic hope. He knows that it can never be realized: the stars in their courses are fighting against him; he is but crying for the moon. Yet, even though he be permitted to spend a hundred summers beneath these sunny skies, he will never quite relinquish that pleasing and passionate illusion. He will steal furtively to the window every Christmas morning and will throw up the blinds to see if at last, at last, his dream has all come true. How he would love to see the whole horizon a sheet of dazzling whiteness! He wants the snow; the graceful, fluttering snow; the deep and drifting snow; he wants the snow, and, however long he lives, Christmas will never be Christmas to him without it. Who then can wonder that hundreds of immigrants mingled with the native-born in scouring the snow-clad hills this morning? And who can wonder that, as I returned from these scenes of exuberant excitement, I found Lois Boynton’s question taking complete possession of my mind. “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?”
III
Treasures! The treasures of the snow! The world’s real wealth, Carlyle declares, consist in its great prophetic souls. I confess with shame that, in the days of my darkness and ignorance, I thought that prophets were few and far between. I fancied that God sends one prophet to every million people. The snowflakes taught me that God sends a million prophets to every one of us. For the snowflakes are themselves prophets. They are a great and white-robed throng; a goodly fellowship; a multitude that no man can number. They are vocal with inspired and wondrous speech. The man who would know the number of God’s prophets must not only climb these Australian hills on some such rare occasion as we have celebrated today; he must travel through Russia, Siberia, Greenland, and Alaska; he must tour the great Antarctic continent and climb all our snow-clad ranges; he must count the snowflakes as he goes; and then, when he returns, he will know the number of the prophets! This is the wealth of the world. Until I discovered that the snowflakes were prophets, and turned my ear to catch the accent of their myriad voices, this snowy treasury was to me like a gold-mine all unknown. But the patriarch’s question inflamed my avarice. “The treasures of the snow” I said to myself, “The treasures of the snow!” Like one who hears a whisper of diamonds hidden in his garden, I began to search. And then it was that I heard the voices whispering among the snow.
IV
Those voices were a revelation to me. They told me that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useful things in the world. Catch a snowflake on a sheet of glass; examine it under a microscope; and what a triumph of architecture you have here! Not among the palaces of the Pharaohs nor among the temples of the Athenians could you find anything to rival this in daintiness, in symmetry, in splendor! As it gleams and glitters under the glass, the eye is bewildered by its indescribable beauty. It is a dream of glittering whiteness! Search the four corners of the earth and you will nowhere find anything more beautiful than this! Did not Patrick Martin, the clever designer of Huddersfield, confess that his most bewitching conceptions were suggested to him by watching the arrangement and formation of the snowflakes?
And yet, and yet! More than once I have crossed our great Australian desert. And why, I have asked myself, why is it a desert? Its soil is fertile. It needs but one thing to transform it into a garden. It needs water. If only I could fling across it a range of lofty mountains! The heat of summer would melt the priceless stores of winter snow, and the irrigating streams, pouring down from virgin heights, would turn all our deserts into fruitful fields. A few of New Zealand’s snow-capped and sky-piercing summits would be worth millions of tons of gold to Australia.
Again, those voices told me that Purity is Power. The snow is so stainlessly pure that, by comparison with it, our whitest things are put to shame. Yet it can hold up our most powerful engines and defeat armies that had proved invincible. The troops that followed Napoleon from conquest to conquest were vanquished at last by the resistless might of the snowflakes. That is what Tennyson means when he says of Sir Galahad that
His strength was as the strength of ten
Because his heart was pure.
Purity and Power are inseparable. The snowflakes always conquer at the last. Whether in private or public life, the soul that is as chaste as the snowdrifts wields an influence and exerts an authority that nothing can withstand.
V
The gently rustling leaves of Lois Boynton’s Bible! The gently falling snowflakes outside Lois Boynton’s window! What was there in common between these two things? What associated the rustling pages with the falling flakes? Lois Boynton was about to take her place in the great white throng before the Great White Throne. And she felt that these two things—the Bible and the snowflakes—could prepare her spirit, as nothing else could, for that great transition. Their message is essentially a message of cleansing, of absolution, of redemption. Les us see if we can harmonize and focalize it.
Hugh Macmillan tells a pretty fairy story concerning a little pool of water in a hollow on a mountainside near Tarbet, at Loch Lomond. It is called the Fairy Loch. “If you look into it,” says the doctor, “you will see a great many colors in the water, owing to the varied nature of the materials that form its bottom. There is a legend about it which says that the fairies used to dye things for the people round about, if a specimen of the color was left along with the cloth on the brink of the pool at sunset. One evening a shepherd left beside the Fairy Loch the fleece of a black sheep, and placed upon it a white woolen thread to show that he wished the fleece dyed white. This fairly puzzled the tiny folk. They could dye a white fleece any color; but to make a black fleece white was impossible. In despair they threw all their colors into the loch and disappeared forever.” Hence, according to the story, the lovely pool acquired its rainbow-tinted bed. Is there, I ask myself, as I think of that Scottish loch, is there any process by which a black fleece may be made white? Lois Boynton feels that she is about to pass into a realm of stainless purity; how can a smudged soul be cleansed and fitted for that world of whiteness? The fairies of Loch Lomond gave up the black fleece in despair: can the snowflakes or the Bible solve the deeper problems of the soul?
VI
Away on a frozen headland in the Arctic Sea, surrounded on every hand by toppling icebergs, jostling ice-floes, and hills all wrapped in snow, is a lonely tomb. Standing not far from Cape Beechy, it is the northernmost grave in the world. A member of Sir George Nares’s polar expedition died at sea, and his comrades buried him on this desolate spot. The tomb is marked by a great flat stone, and, on a copper tablet at the head, are inscribed these words: “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”
Now look around you! The outlook, both seawards and landwards, is a blinding sheet of virgin whiteness! Could anything be made whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow? Let us think!
And, thinking, we remember Dr. Alexander Whyte’s holiday experience at Bonskeid. For days a horror of great darkness had overshadowed him. He could endure it no longer. “I stole into my hat and coat,” he says, “took my staff, and slipped out of the house in secret. For an hour and three-quarters, I walked alone and prayed; but, pray as I would; I got not one step nearer God in all those seven or eight cold miles. For two hours I struggled on, forsaken of God, and met neither God nor man all that chilly afternoon. When, at last, standing still, and looking at Schiehallion clothed in white from top to bottom, this of David shot up into my heart: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” In a moment I was with God. Or, rather, God, so I believe, was with me, till I walked home under the rising moon with my heart in a flame of prayer and my eyes a fountain of tears.”
VII
This is very wonderful and very beautiful; but it does not completely satisfy us. How, we ask, how can that which is defiled be made as white as snow? We must submit this baffling question to the snowflakes themselves. The snowflakes, we have seen, are prophets. A prophet is born out of a great and memorable experience. Isaiah, for example, tells how he, a sinful man, was purged by fire taken from off the altar, and was then called to his prophetic office. The snowflakes, I have said, are prophets; have they known any experience akin to this? Let us release the Snowflake from the microscope in which we just now examined him and ask him this more crucial question.
“We were not always as you see us now,” explains the Snowflake. “We lay about the earth in stagnant pools, in pestilential marches, in filthy puddles, in noisome swamps; some of us were found in city gutters and in wayside ditches; we were all unclean. But the sunlight kissed us and caught us to itself. How it happened we none of us can tell. Before we knew what was taking place, we were swept through the skies and then set free again. But, when we were set free, we gazed at each other in astonishment. For, in some wonderful way, we had been cleansed from all that previously defiled us, and had been made as white as we are now!”
The Snowflake says no more; but somehow, I think that I have guessed the patriarch’s secret. I fancy I have entered into the treasures of the snow. The Snowflake has helped me to understand, as I had never understood before, the text that captivated the heart of Lois Boynton as she prepared to take her flight to the City of the Undefiled; and it has helped me to understand, as I had never understood before, the wondrous words that stand inscribed above that Arctic grave. | | | Posted 4/7/2007 11:12 PM - 69 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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