The sound of victrola music right after breakfast gives the summer day a loose, footless feeling, the sort of inner sadness I have experienced on the outskirts of small towns on Sunday afternoon, or in the deserted city during a holiday, or on beaches where the bathhouses smelled of sour towels and yesterday’s levity. Morning is so closely associated with brisk affairs, music with evening and day’s end, that when I hear a three-year-old dance tune crooned upon the early air while shadows still point west and the day is erect in the saddle, I feel faintly decadent, at loose ends, as though I were in the South Seas—a beachcomber waiting for a piece of fruit to fall, or for a brown girl to appear naked from a pool.
* * *
Asterisks? So soon?
* * *
It is a hot-weather sign, the asterisk. The cicada of the typewriter, telling the long steaming noons. Don Marquis was one of the great exponents of the asterisk. The heavy pauses between his paragraphs, could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages.
* * *
Don knew how lonely everybody is. “Always the struggle of the human soul is to break through the barriers of silence and distance into companionship. Friendship, lust, love, art, religion—we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit.” Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page—you with the book in your lap? You’re not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit. Even if you read only to crab about everything I say, your letter of complaint is a dead give-away: you are unutterably lonely or you wouldn’t have taken the trouble to write it.
* * *
How contagious hysteria and fear are! In my henhouse are two or three jumpy hens, who, at the slightest disturbance, incite the whole flock to sudden panic—to the great injury, nervously and sometimes physically, of the group. This panic is transmitted with great rapidity; in fact, it is almost instantaneous, like the wheeling of pigeons in air, which seem all to turn and swoop together as though controlled electrically by a remote fancier.
* * *
The cells of the body co-operate to make the man; the men co-operate to make the society. But there is a contradiction baffling to biologist and layman alike. On the day last spring that I saw a flight of geese passing over on their way to the lonely lakes of the north (a co-operative formation suggesting a tactical advantage imitated by our air corps)—on that same day cannibalism broke out among my baby chicks and I observed the brutality with which the group will turn upon an individual, literally picking his guts out. This is the antithesis of co-operation—a contrariness not unobserved in our own circles. (I recently read of a member of an actors’ union biting another actor quite hard. I believe it was over some difference in the means of co-operation.)
* * *
“How are you going to keep from getting provincial?” asked one of our friends quite solemnly. It was such a sudden question, I couldn’t think of any answer, so just let it go. But afterward I wondered how my friend, on his part, was going to keep from getting metropolitan.
As a matter of fact the provinces nowadays are every bit as lurid, in their own way, as the centers of culture. One of the farm owners here—a very rich man who up until quite recently owned herds and flocks for the sheer hell of associating with animals—sent his registered Guernseys on a tour of the fairs last fall. When the cows returned home heaped with glory they were met at the station by a trumpeter and led triumphantly through town in a pompous parade that conquerors of old would have envied.
All sorts of things go on in this provincial existence. To the north of us, photographers in airplanes have been making a vast aerial picture map of the country, showing every fence and lane. Eventually the whole nation will be so mapped. Individual maps are already available; a farmer can send in to Washington and they will send him a picture showing how his place looks from three miles up.
And I see by the paper that a hundred million parasites have been turned loose in the State this summer, to war on the spruce sawfly—a challenge to the balance of nature that seems rather alarming to a man who hardly dares shoot a crow for fear of upsetting the fine adjustment in the world of birds and insects, predator and prey. How could I become provincial, with parasites being loosed against the foe? I am in the very center of everything.
* * *
There is furthermore slight chance of my becoming provincial this summer, because I am raising a baby seagull and there isn’t time. A young gull eats twice his own weight in food every ten minutes, and if he doesn’t get it he screams.
The gull was a present from Mr. Dameron, who wore an odd look of guilt on his face as he approached, that evening, proffering the chick in a pint ice-cream container as tentatively as though it were a bill for labor. The occupant (about the size of a billiard ball) took one look at me, stretched out his stubby wings, and cried: “Daddy!” I must say I haven’t failed him.
He was so tiny, so recently shell-girt, that I put him with a broody hen, thinking she might adopt him. Nothing ever came of that brief connection. The gull wanted me, not a hen. I imagine the nest seemed stuffy to him after the windblown, fog-drenched island of his nativity. I asked Mr. Dameron what to feed him. “I dunno,” he replied, “but I don’t think you can upset a gull’s stomach.”
I began cautiously with a tiny piece of hamburger. It was the merest beginning. In the last three weeks he has swallowed a mixture of foods that would sicken you to listen to. (His favorite dish is chicken gizzards chopped with clams, angle worms, and laying mash.) He has eaten ten thousand clams—of my own digging—and still screams accusingly every time I go by. He has drained my strength, yet somehow it all seems worth while. A mature gull in flight is simple beauty. Some day this child of mine is going to be stretching his wings and a gentle puff will come along and he will take off. The pleasure of seeing my worms and gizzards translated into perfect flight will be my strange reward. I just hope I live that long.
A note from my garage this morning, saying that my oil was changed at 7839 and that it was time I came in to have the crankcase drained. “You’ve got enough to think about,” the note said, “without trying to remember when your car needs its next Mobilubrication.”
It is true, we all have much to think about. I used to try to remember about the oil, used to try to change it according to mileage on the car, but not any more. Now I change oil ritualistically, four times a year, on the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes. They are the dates I keep with my car. It seems to work all right; yet what a falling off the centuries have seen in men’s customs. The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.