A just price was agreed upon, and
Darling's deed was officially filed.
Next came a more crushing blow. Darling's access to market was
destroyed. The road he had built was fenced across by triple barb-
wire fences. It was one of those jumbles in human affairs that is
so common in this absurdest of social systems. Behind it was the
fine hand of the same conservative element that haled the Nature Man
before the Insanity Commission in Los Angeles and that deported him
from Hawaii. It is so hard for self-satisfied men to understand any
man whose satisfactions are fundamentally different. It seems clear
that the officials have connived with the conservative element, for
to this day the road the Nature Man built is closed; nothing has
been done about it, while an adamant unwillingness to do anything
about it is evidenced on every hand. But the Nature Man dances and
sings along his way. He does not sit up nights thinking about the
wrong which has been done him; he leaves the worrying to the doers
of the wrong. He has no time for bitterness. He believes he is in
the world for the purpose of being happy, and he has not a moment to
waste in any other pursuit.
The road to his plantation is blocked. He cannot build a new road,
for there is no ground on which he can build it. The government has
restricted him to a wild-pig trail which runs precipitously up the
mountain. I climbed the trail with him, and we had to climb with
hands and feet in order to get up. Nor can that wild-pig trail be
made into a road by any amount of toil less than that of an
engineer, a steam-engine, and a steel cable. But what does the
Nature Man care? In his gentle ethics the evil men do him he
requites with goodness. And who shall say he is not happier than
they?
"Never mind their pesky road," he said to me as we dragged ourselves
up a shelf of rock and sat down, panting, to rest. "I'll get an air
machine soon and fool them. I'm clearing a level space for a
landing stage for the airships, and next time you come to Tahiti you
will alight right at my door."
Yes, the Nature Man has some strange ideas besides that of the
gorilla pounding his chest in the African jungle. The Nature Man
has ideas about levitation. "Yes, sir," he said to me, "levitation
is not impossible. And think of the glory of it - lifting one's self
from the ground by an act of will. Think of it! The astronomers
tell us that our whole solar system is dying; that, barring
accidents, it will all be so cold that no life can live upon it.
Very well.
