III—EDGED TOOLS

I was motoring among the semi-tropical landscapes of Queensland. We swept past gardens that were gay with scarlet flame trees, brilliant creepers, bright-red corals, and bougainvilleas of many gorgeous hues. Spread out in endless panorama about us were orange groves, vineyards, sugar plantations, and fields in which the pineapple, the banana, the paw-paw, the mango, and the breadfruit luxuriated. And then we burst into the bush, which only differed from the bush to which I was more accustomed in that it was sprinkled with enormous anthills and dotted with green clumps of prickly pear.

After several hours spent in this delightful way, the car unexpectedly stopped, and my host and hostess prepared to alight. I peered about me for some explanation of their behavior, but could nowhere discover one. There was no house to be seen nor any sign of civilization or of settlement. My first impulse was to remain in the car with the driver.

'We are going a little way into the bush,' my host explained, addressing me; 'if you care to come with us, we shall be very pleased.'

I joined them instantly, and we were soon out of sight of the car. We picked our way through the thick undergrowth for about a quarter of a mile, then emerged upon a little plot carefully fenced off from the surrounding wilderness. It was a cemetery only a few feet square; and it contained three graves! It was evidently to the central one that our pilgrimage had been made. My companions stood in silence for a moment beside it, and then seated themselves on the grass near by.

'In our early days,' my host explained, 'we used to live not very far from here. It was a lonely place and a hard life; and it had joys and sorrows of its own. The greatest of its joys was the birth of Don, our firstborn; and the greatest of our sorrows was his death. He was only five when we buried him.'

'Yes,' added his wife, brushing a tear from her eye, 'and we buried him with a broken penknife in his hand. A swagman who had sheltered for the night in one of the out-buildings had given it to him before leaving in the morning, and Don thought it the most wonderful thing he had ever possessed. He was working away with it from morning to night. He would not trust it out of his sight. He had it in his hand when, a few days afterwards, he was taken ill. He clung to it all through his sickness. If he dropped it in his sleep, he asked for it as soon as he woke. He raved about it in his delirium. And it was firmly clasped in his hand when he died. We had not the heart to take it from him, and so he went down to his grave still holding it.'

Often since I have thought of that burial in the bush, not merely because the incident was so touching, but because it was so intensely characteristic. A boy's infatuation for his first pocket knife! It may have a rusty handle and a broken blade; the edge may be as jagged as the edge of a saw and the spring may have vanished with the days of long ago; it makes no difference. With a knife in his hand a boy feels that he is monarch of all he surveys. With a knife in his hand he feels himself every inch a man. A boy's first consciousness of power, of dominion, of authority comes to him on the day on which he grasps his first knife. It is by means of a knife that he carves his way to destiny.

Civilization may be said to have dawned on the day on which the first man in the world held in his hand the first knife in the world. It was made of stone, like the knives of all savage and primitive peoples. It came into his possession almost by chance. He was gathering together some huge stones, and building for himself a wall. Presently one heavy stone slipped from his hands, fell with a crash upon another, and broke. But it was not a clean break. There lay at that first man's feet two large fragments of stone and a multitude of splinters. He picked up the largest of the splinters and found that it had a keen, sharp edge. He cut his finger as he stroked it, and the blood crimsoned the stone. He dropped it as he would have dropped a snake that had bitten him. But, as he nursed his smarting hand, he saw the possibilities that the sharp-edged splinter opened to him. He remembered the toil with which he had torn down branches of trees and shaped them to his use. The splinter would simplify his task. He forgot his lacerated finger. He seized another stone, dashed it against its neighbor, and, by repeating the process, soon secured for himself a more shapely splinter—a splinter with which he could cut down the branches less laboriously. He tried it. He laughed as he found that, armed with the splinter, he could hack the yielding timber to his will. He was more excited than he had ever been before. Here was the first man with his first knife—the pioneer man with the pioneer knife! For that first man was the father of men of many colors, and that first knife was the father of blades of many kinds. From it sprang the sickle and the scythe, the chisel and the saw, the spade and the tomahawk, the rapier and the dagger, the scalpel and the poniard, the razor and the sword.

The joy that the boy feels as he looks lovingly on his first knife is the joy of shaping things. The world about him has suddenly become plastic. It is a block of marble and he is the sculptor. He may make of it what he will. Until he possessed a knife, the hard inanimate substances about him defied him. He was the bird and they were the bars. But now he defies them. The knife makes all the difference. The knife is his sceptre. He is a king and all things are subject to him.

He may, of course, abuse his power. He probably will. A boy with a knife is very liable to carve his name in the polished walnut of the piano or to cut notches out of the neatly-turned legs of the dining-room table. From all parts of the world people go on pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey. And, at the Abbey, they are shown the Coronation Chair. Seated in it, all our English sovereigns have been crowned, and it is encrusted with traditions that go back to the days of the patriarchs. But a boy with a knife feels no reverence for antiquity. On the night of July 5, 1800, a Westminster schoolboy got locked in the Abbey. He curled himself up in the Coronation Chair and made it his resting-place until morning. And, in the morning, he thought of his pocket-knife. And, as the dawn came streaming through the storied eastern windows, he carved deeply into the solid oak of the seat of the chair, the notable inscription: P. Abbot slept in this chair, July 5, 1800. Thus he buried his blade in one of the noblest of our great historic treasures. It was enough to make the illustrious dead, by whom he was everywhere surrounded, turn in their ancient graves. George the Fourth and all his successors have since been crowned in a Chair that bears that impertinent record! Yet, as the chips flew, the boy felt no compunction. And, in his stolid calm, he is the type and representative of all who abuse the authority with which they are invested. He feels, as he wields the knife, that all things are at his mercy; he can shape them to his liking. He forgets that power carries its attendant obligations, and that, foremost among those obligations, is the obligation to restraint. A boy with a knife in his hand is merely a miniature edition of a man with a sword in his hand. And a man with a sword in his hand is often tempted to bury his blade in that which is even more precious than the oak of a Coronation Chair. Piano-frames and table-legs are not the only things that cry aloud for protection. The greatest lesson that the world has learned in our time is that the power of the sword involves its possessor in a responsibility that is simply frightful. The blood of brave men, the tears of good women, and the hard-earned wealth of nations must never be frivolously or lightheartedly outpoured.

From the moment at which, with sparkling eyes, that first man seized that first sharp splinter, the knife has steadily grown upon the imaginations of men. It took a thousand generations to discover its potentialities. Indeed, our own generation is only just beginning to realize the possibilities that it unfolds. Think of the marvels—I had almost said the miracles—of modern surgery.

'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!' said Dr. Ferguson to Barney Boyle, in The Doctor of Crow's Nest. The old doctor had just fallen in love with Barney. He liked his looks, he liked his temperament, and he liked his hands.

'You must be a surgeon, Barney! You've got the fingers and the nerves! A surgeon, sir! That's the only thing worth while. The physician can't see further below the skin than any one else. He guesses and experiments, treats symptoms; tries one drug and then another. But the knife, my boy!' The doctor rose and paced the floor in his enthusiasm. 'The knife, boy! There's no guess in the knifepoint. The knife lays bare the evil, fights it, eradicates it! The knife at the proper moment saves a man's life. A slight incision an inch or two long, the removal of the diseased part, a few stitches, and, in a couple of weeks, the patient's well! Ah, boy, God knows I'd give my life to be a great surgeon. But he didn't give me the fingers. Look at these!' and he held up a coarse, heavy hand. 'I haven't the touch. But you have! You have the nerve and the fingers and the mechanical ingenuity; you can be a great surgeon. You shall have all my time and all my books and all my money; I'll put you through! You must think, dream, sleep, eat, drink bones and muscles and sinews and nerves! Push everything else aside!' he cried, waving his great hands excitedly. 'And remember!'—here his voice took a solemn tone—'let nothing share your heart with your knife!'

Let nothing share your heart with your knife! That is always the knife's appeal. It is a plea for concentration. I was talking to an old gardener the other day. He was pruning his trees. The gleaming blade was in his hand and the path was littered with the wreckage of the branches. He seemed to be working a shocking havoc, and I told him so. He laughed.

'Oh, they're well-meaning things, are trees!' he exclaimed. 'They are anxious to do their best for you, but they attempt too much, far too much. Just look at this one!' and he laughed again. 'It thought it could cover all these branches with roses; and, if we left it alone, it would try. But what sort of roses would they be, I should like to know? No, no, no; it is better for them to produce fewer blossoms but to produce good ones. We mustn't let them attempt too much!'

'Let nothing share your heart with your knife!' said old Dr. Ferguson, as he urged Barney to do just one thing and to do that one thing well.

'We mustn't let the rose-trees attempt too much,' said the old gardener, as he lopped off the branches with his pruning-knife.

That seems to be the lesson that the knife is always teaching. I remember going one bright afternoon to see Gregor Fawcett of Mosgiel. Gregor was passing through a troublous and trying time. Hard on top of heavy business losses had come the collapse of his health. To my delight, however, I found him in a particularly cheerful mood.

'I've been reading aboot the knife, d'ye ken?' he explained. 'It's a bonny passage!' He took the open Bible from the table beside the bed and pointed me to the fifteenth of John. 'Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, he cutteth away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit.'

'It brought me a power o' comfort,' Gregor explained. 'For it says, ye ken, that there are only two sorts o' wood on the tree—the dead wood and the live wood. He cuts away the dead wood for the sake of the live wood that he leaves; and he cuts the live wood that bears fruit so that it may bear still more and still better fruit. Well, I thocht o' all the losses I've had lately. I dinna ken whether the things that have been taken were dead things or live things, but it doesna matter. If they were dead things, I'm better without them. And, if they were live things, they were only cut away because my life is like a tree that bears fruit and that may yet bear more. And, in either case, the best remains. The tree is the richer and not the poorer for the pruning. The pruning only shows that the gardener cares. Ay, it's a bonny passage that!' and Gregor laid the open Bible lovingly on the pillow beside him. 'After you've gone,' he said, 'I shall go over it again!'

And, from the frequency with which he quoted the words to buffeted spirits in the days that followed, I could see that, on that further inspection, Gregor had kissed the husbandman's knife even more reverently and rapturously than before.