But to go back to my sad children. It seemed to me that in them I was
seeing the South with new eyes, perhaps because I have been away just
long enough to get the proper perspective. And my life has been, you
see, lived in the Southern cities, where one touches rarely the
primitive.
The older boys are, perhaps, ten and twelve, blue-eyed and tow-headed.
I saw few signs of affection or intelligence. They did not kiss their
father when he came, except the small girl, who ran to him and was
hugged; the others seemed to practice a sort of incipient stoicism, as
if they were too old, too settled, for demonstration.
The mother, as we entered, was like her children. None of them has the
initiative or the energy of the man. They are subdued by the
changeless conditions of their environment; his one adventure of the
week keeps him alert and alive.
It is a desolate country, charred pines sticking up straight from white
sand. It might be made beautiful if for every tree that they tapped
for turpentine they would plant a new one.
But they don't know enough to make things beautiful. The Moses of this
community will be some man who shall find new methods of farming, new
crops for this soil, who will show the people how to live.
And now I come to a strange fairy-tale sort of experience--an
experience with the children who have lived always among these charred
pines.
All that evening as I talked, their eyes were upon me, like the eyes of
little wild creatures of the wood--a blank gaze which seemed to
question. The next day when I walked, they went with me, and for some
distance I carried the baby, to rest the arms of the big girl, who is
always burdened.
It was in the afternoon that we drifted to a little grove of young
pines, the one bit of pure green against the white and gray and black
of that landscape. The sky was of sapphire, with a buzzard or two
blotted against the blue.
Here with a circle of the trees surrounding us, the children sat down
with me. They were not a talkative group, and I was overcome by a
sense of the impossibility of meeting them on any common ground of
conversation. But they seemed to expect something--they were like a
flock of little hungry birds waiting to be fed--and what do you think I
gave them? Guess. But I know you have it wrong.
I recited "Flos Mercatorum," my Whittington poem!
It was done on an impulse, to find if there was anything in them which
would respond to such rhyme and rapture of words.