THE talk had been going
on for nearly an hour without affording me an occasion for saying anything,
which was exceedingly tiresome.
"The fact
is," said the Professor, and the rest of the company agreed with him,
"that the only place you can hear Wagner as he should be, is at
Bayreuth." The pines outside quivered at this announcement, and a blear
old sea fog came and peered through the panes at us. Suddenly the fire-log
snapped asunder.
The red glow leaped
into a three-inch point of flame. Instantly the fog caught it by reflection a
rod outside and made of it a desert camp-fire spiring upward from the crossed
ends of the back log. Dark against it by some superior sort of refraction from
my mind I could see the dreaming face of my friend Tinnemaha, the Medicine-man.
What I thought the
Professor had said was that the only place nowadays where you could see any
genuine song-dancing is in Shoshone Land, and, out of the velvet desert dark
beyond, Kern River Jim answered him.
"But in the old
days," said he, "right here in Sagharanite there was a Chisera who
could sing the wind up out of the west with the rains behind it; and she could
sing the rain away, too, when she had done with it; and you could no more be
still when you heard her than the wind could, but you must get upon your feet
and dance what she sang."
"In Shoshone
Land," said Tinnemaha, "I remember a man who could dance the heart
out of your bosom. He made a rattle of ram’s horn stopped with a round of
mescal stem, and would keep time with it. He taught me to dance some of his
songs for a bag of taboose, but I could never match with him, for the best of
his singing was that he made it new for every occasion."
What the Professor was
actually saying at that moment was that Wagner’s intellectuality made it
improbable that the French should ever be able to interpret him, but I went on
listening to Tinnemaha, for, besides being much the same sort of talk, it was
vastly more interesting.
"Nowadays in the
schools," said he, "they teach our children white men’s songs, but
they do not lay hold on your insides as the old songs do. White man’s songs,
they talk too much." He dropped out of his native speech into the clipped
English in which he courteously held any criticism of white men’s ways should
be couched. "What man sings too much with his mouth," said he,
"but Shoshone sings here"--he extended his hand across his body, palm
inward, with that most expressive gesture of the Indian to include the whole
region of the solar plexus, the seat of the Inside Man who sings and is sung
to--"here." The hand moved outward, slightly clutching at the strings
of sympathy.T dancin’; he cryin’ while he singin’. ’Tain’t the words that make
him cry. I’ss what he thinkin’ ’bout when he sing."
"Last night,"
said Kern River Jim, "I dreamed that I sang, and when I awoke I was
crying, but my song had gone from me."
"It was the
wolf-song," said Tinnemaha; and we were quiet while the flames lapped and flickered,
musing on what I have told you in another place, how there was a man who, when
the people met together, had no song and greatly desired one and was unhappy
over it. Then one day he bought a song from the wolf for a basket of tule roots
and sang it amid the tribe that night until the earth under him was beaten to a
fine dust and he fell into the deep trance which waits beyond the last ecstasy
of song.
So the wolf came in the
night and stole his song away. I remembered me of an equally old tale of a
Saxon singer, and I thought, Beast-god or Man-god, the myth told quite as much
as I had been able to fathom for myself of the source of all songs, dropping
into the mind spread to receive them, quietly as the shed ashes of the fire.
"But all your songs,"
I wished to know, "do they come so from inside you?"
"Every man’s own
song," they averred, "the one he makes for himself, and no one dares
sing without his per- mission. But sometimes when it is a very good song he
bequeaths it to his friend, and the tribe uses it; other times a man’s song is
so precious that no one gets to know very well what it is about, and it dies
with him."
"And when does a
man make a song?"
"How can I
tell?" questioned Tinnemaha. "It is when his Inside Man is raised up
within him. Perhaps when he has killed his first buck or made a woman to know
that he is man. When his son is born or his enemy is slain. Who knows his great
moment?"
"There was one I
knew," said Kern River Jim, "who made a song when he was drunk. Three
days he had herded the Bar-N cattle up Tunawai in a sand-storm, scarcely eating
or sleeping while the storm lasted, and when it was done the foreman gave him
as much whiskey as he liked, and when he was well drunken he made a song."
Jim’s eyes twinkled. "It was a good song."
I remembered to have
heard that air, the most lugubrious Indian melody I had known, and thought I
should have felt just that way if I had been thoroughly intoxicated, but Jim
esteemed it humorous.
We fell a-talking then
of the songs that are not personal, but come down to the people from old times:
cradle-songs, love-songs, songs for the beginning and the end of journeys.
Tinnemaha stood up and
began to sing one of Victory:
"Ha . . . ah--a,
Ha . . . ah--a!" A
sharp, throaty noise, as if the Inside Man had waked and fed on what he
relished:
"Ha . . .
ah-a!" while the Medicine-man stamped and swayed:
"Come, O ye
buzzards,
The feast is prepared!
Ha . . . ah!"
until I could fairly hear the sweep of their wide wings between the naked dead
and naked heaven.
"My father saw
that song made when he was a young man and we fought the Mojaves. We had killed
the best of their fighting men and taken away their weapons, for they had long
arrows that entangled in the brush so that they could not shoot so fast as our
men with the shorter shafts. The dead were beginning to swell, and one of our
men danced among them and made a song.
"Then one and
another of ours took it from him, and all the way home they danced it until the
women heard them returning on the trails. So the song came to the
Shoshones."
"And do you always
dance when you sing?"
"How else should
it be?" said Tinnemaha, with mild amazement.
"First," said
he, "the song is, then there are three things--the dance and the music--
"Ha . . .
ah--a!"
The muscles of his
chest rippled under the thin cotton shirt, the throaty syllables gurgled out of
him as though jarred by the rhythm of his dancing. "And then," he
finished, "there are the words. Sometimes the words are very old and are
forgotten, and the people make new words, but it is not a new song because of
that. The song is behind them."
It flashed upon me
inwardly as accounting for the accompaniment of meaningless syllables that ran
along with much of their tribal ceremonial, swelling with the movement of the
ritual into even billows of song with just a sentence or two like a riffle of
foam on the crest of each; the song behind the song singing itself out of all
their memories and knowledges.
"Give me that song
again which you danced for me at the beginning of wild almond bloom," I
begged, beating with my hands a sketch of the body rhythm that accompanied it.
"The grass is on
the mountain," crooned Kern River Jim. "It is a very old song of the
Paiutes."
And the song behind
it?" I urged.
"’Oh, a long time
The snow is over all
the mountain.
The deer have come down
and the big-horn,
They have passed over
Waban.
A long time now we have
eaten seeds
And dried flesh of the
summer’s killing,
We are wearied of our
huts.
The mists have come
down like a tent,
They have hid the
mountain.
And on a day suddenly
comes the sun.
The mists are withered
away,
The grass is seen on
the mountain!"
"Therefore,"
said Jim, "we make a dance and go to the meadow to look for taboose and
the young shoots of the tule.
"Also," said
he, "I remember a song a woman made to me on Kern River. I had come to it
late in the evening and found it big with rains. The woman had a wickiup on the
other side and went about her fire to tend the cakes; I called across to her,
but I did not attempt the river because of the flood, and I saw that the woman
was alone and no man came to her. By and by when it was dark she piled pitchy
boughs on the fire till it leaped up and showed the straight high pines and the
river between us like a thick, hurrying snake. Then she made a song and I heard
it above the water. So I went into the river as I was, and the woman pulled me
out half dead on the other side. But I did not mind it because of the
song."
"And the song
was?"
"The fire
burns," quoted Jim. "It leaps up and nobody is warmed by it. Though
it was a very long time ago, I have never forgotten it." I did not ask him
for the song behind that. . . .
Once when I had tried
to persuade Poco Bill to render a love- song he had refused on the ground that
"white men don’t like those kind of words. Thass all right song for
Paiute, but with white man those words mean bad." Later when one of the
women translated the song for me I felt how immeasurably we had dropped behind
the Indian in having no words with which to communicate the issues of life
except such as "mean bad."
"But still,"
I insisted, "I do not understand why you must dance. We also have many
songs, but we do not dance to them."
Something drifted down
to me just then from the talk going on over my head to remind me that when the
white man sings best and most expensively he comes as near dancing as is
compatible with the utmost breath: feet of innumerable choruses twinkled across
my memory, but I didn’t exactly see my way to explain that to the Medicine-man.
I had heard a great deal that evening of how a certain cantatrice had waved her
arms and swung her magnificent torso in the part of Lucia; there was not a
whisper of why. I had seen the bucks in the beginning of October pawing up the
earth in deep ravines, pawing and tossing their branched foreheads with a slow,
majestic rhythm, and once at Buena Vista, where the slough fell over the ruined
drop into the vast reedy lagoon, long since drained away to profitable fields,
there in the middle of the hot morning mist I had seen the dipping of the
pelicans to their mates, the strange wing-bowing, the retreats and advances of
tall water-birds, with the white expanse of wing feather against the
fawn-colored land, most like the extended arms and floating draperies that flee
forever about the red ground of an Etruscan vase. I had seen these and divers
wonders that, with due respect to Mr. Darwin, I didn’t altogether accept as the
procreant urge of the world.
That was a good theory
as far as it went, but it failed to explain the dance of the Grass on the
Mountain, nor why the tenor felt obliged to declare his undying opposition to
the basso with both arms at length in the direction of his chest expansion.
At any rate, it would
be interesting to know what the Medicine-man said of it. He said it very much
to the point.
"We dance
always," said he. "It is the shortest road to the Friend of the Soul
of Man."
I had heard more or
less of this Friend among all the Indians I had known or known about, under
various names: Great Spirit, The Mystery, The Power, The Trues, God or Holy
Ghost. It has nothing to do with their ordinary spirits or supernaturals, has
no appearance and no history. It is the supreme intelligence, perhaps, that
plane of consciousness touched in great crises along which runs from mind to
mind communicating fire. Through it cures are affected and messages transmitted
from the dead.
"By dancing,"
said the Medicine-man, "the Inside Man erects itself, it is lifted up, it
lays hold on the Friend; then singing comes, and many things are possible that
were not."
"What
things?"
Tinnemaha considered.
"Do you know Mahala Joe?"
"Who was condemned
to wear a woman’s dress because he once ran away from battle?"
"He was scarcely
grown and it was his first fight," said the Medicine-man, excusingly.
"But it is not an easy thing to appear as a woman in the face of men, and
Joe has told me often that unless he had danced greatly, until the Friend knew
him for a very man, he could not have continued in it."
"It was he,"
continued Jim, "who danced the fear out of our minds during the great
sickness."
This was an epidemic of
pneumonia which decimated the campodies a few years back, and Tinnemaha nearly
lost his life in it, according to the Paiute law, because his own dancing
failed to check the progress of the disorder.
"That," he
acknowledged, "was because there was no fear in the mind of Mahala Joe.
But it is true that by dancing much for one’s self the power grows. There was
Carson Charlie. His father had been shot by a Washoe in a very old quarrel, and
Charlie should have killed the killer, but he had been to Carson to school
where they showed him the Jesus road and he was soft-hearted. Then I took him
apart in the hills, for his father was my friend and it is not right that the
son should grow fat while the killer of his father is abroad. Three days we
danced and sang together, and it was not easy for Charlie, he had been to
school so long; but I taught him our ancient dances. Three days I strove with
him, fasting, and in the end he found the Friend."
"And--?" I
queried--the flicker of a smile played on the face of Tinnemaha--"and he
was also not so soft-hearted."
He took up my thought
and carried it on beyond the personal instance. "It is so," he said;
"by dancing power comes to medicine the souls of men."
"And the
bodies?" But, in fact, he had no phrases to signify the partition of man
into physical and spiritual which is the graft of theology on an unscientific
observation of life.
What he really believed
was that if the Inside Man was invulnerable, as he might be made by Good
Medicine, to assault of weapon or disease, so would his outside be. I had seen
a Shoshone Medicine-dancer cure an abscess on the lungs by this method, and a
Methodist Evangelist brings souls to healing by singing of hymns and pounding
the pulpit, and found the processes not entirely dissimilar, but it hadn’t
occurred to me until now to attempt the valuation of literature and art on the
same basis. O Dante! O Bach! The shortest road to the Friend of the Soul of
Man!
I explained to
Tinnemaha that we had songs and other matters of our own with which merely to
be confronted was to be shot upward into the plane of power, but we hadn’t been
able, except in rare instances, to manage it with our dances.
"That," said
the Medicine-man, "is because you do not dance to yourselves." He
went on to say that once when he had been to Reno, in the matter of the Washoe
Boundary Dispute, he had seen some dancing-women at a theater, and he was quite
explicit as to the effect upon his outside. But when a man danced to himself
and the Friend, it was otherwise. He thought it was reasonable, the Inside Man
being so entangled with the body that when it began to move itself aright the
body would respond first, and when, by free motion the spirit ascended, then
the song came and visions and healing.
"It is so,"
he explained, "that it is more fortunate to die in battle. For if a man
dies before disease has eaten him, he can the better make his song." . . .
It had taken, of course, much more explanation than this, on divers occasions,
for me to understand that death to an Indian is no such catastrophe as we
modernly conceive it; rather an incident which even their gods and Great Ones
are liable to suffer, but it needed no further touch just then to have me see
in all manner of dying rites, death songs, battle cries, extreme unction, a
vine of the spirit climbing till it laid hold on the Friend and sustained itself
in the swelling of Jordan. I knew without doubt where I should go if I died
immediately upon reading:
"I was with
Hercules and Cadmus once
When in the woods of
Crete they bayed the bear."
Good Medicine! There I
had the whole business of song-makers; painted songs, printed songs, or
whatever; not to preach, not to please merely, but to make a short road to the
mood of power, to touch the Friend. But you had by Tinnemaha’s account to touch
him yourself first, to swing up by the skirts of the Great Moment and to let
down a hand to stumbling men.
The fire snapped and
went out; the two ends of the back log burned so far asunder that unless you
had seen the live flame at work on them you couldn’t have told that they
belonged together any more than the two ends of the conversations--mine with
the Medicine-man, and the talk within the room, which had by this time fallen
off into that reminiscent exchange of dates and places, as to when you last
heard Melba or where you saw the portrait of Whistler’s mother, which many
estimable folk pursue determinedly under the fond imagination that they are
talking Art.
As the company rose for
breaking up I stood up with them, and it occurred to somebody to inquire why I
hadn’t said anything for quite an hour.
"I was thinking,"
I said by way of reply, "that I should like to write a song like
this."
I swung my arms out,
palms upward, the chest raised, the body slightly swaying forward, saluting the
six Quarters, as I had seen the Medicine-man in the business of the cure of
souls, and the company, especially the younger portion of it, looked at me
commiseratingly. They understood that it was not my fault that I hadn’t at that
time had the advantage of the Metropolitan Museum and Covent Garden, and they
meant, of course, to be kind. I could see the Professor, visibly in the
interest of hospitality, hold back a disposition to lecture me. But they do not
know even yet why I didn’t particularly mind it.
MARY AUSTIN.