XIII
IT HAS always been our custom to take a little stroll before we put the house to bed, merely going to the gate and back when the nights are hostile with a bitterness of cold. Now that nights more mercifully human have come with the slow and dilatory spring, we go beyond the gate for perhaps a quarter or even half a mile, walking with miry feet down the farm road and through a sound of many waters.
Tonight under a faintly hazy sky and through a light wind one can feel but not hear, the winter is flowing downhill towards the still frozen and imprisoned pond. Out of the forests and the uplands a skein of rills is pouring, the small streams now seeking their ancient courses, now following an hour’s new runnel along the darkness of a wall.
So heavy is the hayfield soil, and so matted down with living roots below and thick dead grass above, that little earth seems to be lost anywhere, and for the moment there is no runnel trying to make its way across ploughed land. But I have had my troubles in the past.
* * *
If the opening music of the northern year begins with a first trumpet call of the return of light, and the return of warmth is the second great flourish from the air, the unsealing of the waters of earth is certainly the third. As we walked tonight in a darkness from which a young moon had only just withdrawn, the earth everywhere, like something talking to itself, murmured and even sang with its living waters and its living streams.
Between us and the gate, a torrent as from an overflowing spring, half-blocked by a culvert heaved by frost, chided about our feet, and making another and smaller sound found its way downhill again in the night. Farther on, where woods close in to one side and the ground is stony and uneven, there tinkled out of the tree shapes and the gloom a sound of tiny cascades falling with incessant flow into a pool together with the loud and musical plashing of some newborn and unfamiliar brook.
* * *
Cold and wet, the smell in the spring air was not yet the smell of earth and spring. No fragrance of the soil, no mystery of vernal warmth hung above the farmland, but only a chill of sodden earth, water, and old snow. I knew that if I cared to look, I could find to the north of weathered ledges in the woods such sunken, grey-dirty, and gritty banks of ice as only the spring rains find and harry from the earth.
Yet spring somehow was a part of the night, the miry coldness, and the sound of water, a part of this reluctance of winter to break camp, a part of these skies with Sirius and Orion ready to vanish in the west. The long siege was broken, the great snows were over and gone, the ice was coming down from above tidewater in the current of the great rivers, and the colored twigs of the trees were at last awake.
* * *
Walking homewards towards the farm, now listening to the sound of water, now forgetting it as we talked, we both could see that much of the pond was surfaced with open water above its floor of ice. At the foot of our own hayfields a cove facing south and east showed in liquid and motionless dark, whilst beyond, and again above the ice, lay puddles and seas whose reflected quiet of starshine was a promise of the open water soon to come.
Across the pools, at the great farm on the hill, a light suddenly went out. Our own windows shone nearby, but we did not enter, so haunted were we both by the sense of the change in the year and the continuous sound of waters moving in the earth.
When we at length entered the house, using the side door and its tramped over and muddy step, we found ourselves welcomed by something we are very seldom aware of summer or winter—the country smell of the old house.
All old farms, I imagine, have some such rustic flavor in their walls; country dwellers will recognize what I mean. A hundred and fifty years of barrelled apples, of vegetables stored in a field-stone cellar, of potatoes in the last of the spring, of earth somewhere and never very far, of old and enduring wood and wood-smoke, too, and perhaps the faintest touch of mould from things stored long, long ago in a bin—all these and heaven knows what other farmhouse ghosts were unmistakably present in the neat room with its lamp and books. The cold and humid night had stirred the house as well as ourselves: it had its own rustic memories.
Elizabeth presently brought in two slices of apple pie and two glasses of cold milk, and for a first time I did not bother to build up the fire.
FARM DIARY
My friend Charles Bassett of Buffalo, N. Y., who is a leading authority on Indian corn and is now experimenting with a magnificent “rainbow” strain, tells me that when this particolored corn “is fed to chickens they always pick up the white and yellow kernels first, but when mice get an ear they eat the red kernels first.” / With the warmer weather, the various sleepyheads and genuine hibernators are waking up, and yesterday, in a patch of mud between two patches of snow, I saw the unmistakable track of a woodchuck. Going about looking for a mate, I guess. / Some new species of owl has come to live in the neighborhood; nobody has seen it, but we have all heard the unfamiliar hooting. / The pond has not yet opened, but all along the shore, between the ice floor and the land, lies a quiet width of open water calmly reflecting the spring sky.
* * *
The city has its heat and cold, its hunger and its thirst, but it has lost a great measure of the human birthright of physical sensation. Life there is so protected from Nature, so insulated, so to speak, that it ends up by being only a ghost of the human adventure. I say this because it has always seemed to me that a normal range of physical sensation, a sense, for instance, of the fabric of earth underfoot and the sudden cold of a change of the wind, is not only a part of the discipline of life but also of its reward.