Saturday. A full moon tonight, which made the dogs uneasy. First a neighbor’s dog, a quarter of a mile away, felt the moon—he began shortly after dark, a persistent complaint, half longing. Then our big dog, whose supper had not sat well, took up the moonsong. I shut him in the barn where his bed is, but he kept up the barking, with an odd howl now and again; and I could hear him roaming round in there, answering the neighbor’s dog and stirring up Fred, our dachshund and superintendent, who suddenly, from a deep sleep, roused up and pulled on his executive frown (as a man, waking, might hastily pull on a pair of trousers) and dashed out into the hall as though the moon were a jewel robber. The light lay in watery pools on lawn and drive. The house seemed unable to settle down for the night, and I felt like moaning myself, for there is something about a moon disturbing to man and dog alike.
Once, when I was a child, I waked from a bad dream to find moonlight pouring into the room, falling across my face like the flashlight of a prowler. I was frightened; the moon seemed an intruder in the bedroom. Since that night I have been uncomfortable on moon nights and have seen to it that the shade was drawn. I don’t know what it is dogs feel, but it must be something very deep troubling them—perhaps an ancient intimation of good hunting.
Last night my neighbor C. died. He was here at the house in the forenoon, driving his truck. He mentioned that he wasn’t feeling just good. Later, in the afternoon, he took a chill. Before midnight he was dead. C.’s death came just a few months after he had got his life fixed up to suit him—a common enough sequel to endeavor. After years of planning it, he built a new workshop last fall, his proper dream. I think the extra effort it took to get his life arranged to his liking was too much for his strength and brought on his death—a coincidence that, in milder form, happens to everyone.
Sunday. Woke to find the wind blowing from the sea, and the sky overcast. Three starlings sat gloomily in the Balm o’ Gilead tree, awaiting better times, and in the plowed field some crows held a special meeting and took a vote. In an hour it was snowing.
Dameron, the lobster fisherman, stopped in tonight to return some books. He is the one book borrower I fully trust. He borrows more of my books than anyone ever has before, but he brings back more too, usually wrapped in paper and tied with a string—which is the proper way to transport a book in unsettled weather. Mrs. D. is one of the two people I know who have read Joseph in Egypt. I know many who own it, few who have read it.
Dameron stayed a while. He told me that at one time a great deal of clam bait for the Banks fishermen was dug here in this cove. An acre of clams used to be about the best crop any man could cultivate, but nowadays a man can dig a tide in and out and does well to make a dollar. Every tide was good for four to six dollars in the old days. D. says the gulls have ruined clamming: they eat the seed that the clammers leave—that is, the small clams that the rake turns up but that are too small to be harvested. The government protects gulls of course, but D. thinks gulls should be destroyed before they destroy us. Seals too. Seals are death to lobsters. Seals and gulls are the enemies to watch out for, in D.’s opinion, as well as Germany and Italy.
The rumor got round that I was running for the school board. (There was nothing to it.) D. tells me that it was a lucky thing I didn’t run. “You would have been murdered.” He said he heard a woodcock yesterday and would take me to where I can see its sky dance.
Monday. The cat, David, is lying beside me, a most unsatisfactory arrangement, as he gives me cat fever.
My sensitivity to cats defeats the whole purpose of a cat, which is to introduce a note of peace in a room.
Tuesday. News today from friends who are here in America from Vienna. They are able to stay one year, on a visitor’s passport: but they say that one year sounds to them like eternity, after the day-to-day existence of European living. Although they are, in the phrase, Aryans, they are against the Hitler government; hopefully and patiently they await its end. So, they say, do the majority of the citizens of Vienna.
In Vienna the only topic of conversation is genealogy. You go out to visit friends and you spend the evening in the branches of their family tree. The matter of blood is so vital, no one can think of anything else. A writer whose wife’s grandmother was a Jew is not permitted to write; a doctor whose father’s half-sister lacked the Aryan stamp is not allowed to practice. “These fine people are dying,” says my friend.
“But we mustn’t talk about it. Spies are everywhere. We dare not speak of Vienna.”
Wednesday. Today the warmth struck through for fair and reached the earth, the sun boring into the snow, the ditches alive with overflow and gurgle, the daylight strong and ample along the planks bridging the mud in the yard. Under the spruce boughs that overlay the borders, the first green shoots of snowdrops appeared, the indestructible. When I walked to the mailbox, a song sparrow placed his incomparable seal on the outgoing letters. Spring, however, began officially in the late afternoon when I went into the brooder house, thrust a handful of shavings into the stove and struck a match, starting the fire that must burn steadily and without interruption (dropping 5° a week) for six weeks, warming the two hundred and fifty chicks that are to hatch tomorrow, a hundred miles away, on Maundy Thursday.
Thursday. Today read in the paper about a plan the Catholics have for a sound hookup of schools in the Archdiocese of New York. According to the newspaper account, the plan is contingent on their finding a commercial sponsor. This was the most important item in the news, I thought, far outdistancing the day’s aggression in Middle Europe. For although the parochial system is not the pattern for our American public schools, nevertheless, most children’s diseases are contagious and I have no doubt this latest one is too. The desire to make one adult voice audible to all children, even though the expenses are best met by a commercial product, is too attractive to be denied for long. Such dissemination is inevitable, just as it was inevitable that one orchestra should serve a hundred hotel dining rooms and that music should be called Muzak. The expenses can be defrayed by the manufacturer of a licorice candy, who then automatically becomes a leading educational force in the nation, holding in his two hands the coveted gift of sound. Probably before these words reach print, the archdiocesan headquarters will be broadcasting direct to the classroom, and one more wall will have crumbled that once made a house. Instruction will be by experts—the invisible experts, speaking with the voice that is not a voice, delivering to the invisible pupil the canned lesson, courtesy of the advertised product.
One of the proponents of the Catholic communications system explained that it would be a most useful device in academic emergencies—as for instance in the case of an examination containing an unfair question being distributed to the schools. “Attention!” he said, pretending that he was already wired to the children. “There is an error in the test paper for 6B in arithmetic. Question 3, part 2, does not belong … etc.”
There would then presumably be a slight pause for diocese identification, and a two-minute plug for licorice candy.
This emergency of the faulty examination paper and the unfair question is, I should think, just a taste of the greater emergencies that a government-sponsored sound system could cope with. For when the time comes the public educator’s voice will be heard in the tiniest schoolhouse on the farthest hill: “Henceforth all children will read only from the Brown book, and will raise the right hand in allegiance to the Third American Realm, saying ‘Hail Peabody!’”
I have been trying to think who would be the perfect sponsor for the American educational network, the nationwide hookup that would instruct all children from coast to coast, giving them the Word. I have decided that Wheaties is the perfect company, for Wheaties gives flashlights as premiums—and these lights might help the children find their way out of a room that had grown dark.
Friday. A letter this morning from John McNulty, my most satisfactory correspondent, as he writes infrequently and on matters that concern us both equally. His letter begins: “Dear Andy, Describe in detail the purchase and installation of a Welsbach mantle. In so doing, tell specifically of: (a) The carrying home of the Welsbach mantle and from what kind of store, (b) The kind of box it came in and the method of extraction from the box. (c) The putting of the mantle in place of the old one. (d) Describe the next steps and any attendant spectacle in connection therewith, which may have served to delight the onlookers. P.S. It so happens that on this, the eve of the invasion of Albania, I have spent the afternoon thinking of Welsbach mantles.”