XVIII

A SPELL of cold and rainy weather from the North Atlantic drifts inland across the drenched and cheerless coast; thin fog blurs the distant reaches of the pond, and a light wind which never dies down blows sudden drizzles of rain against the windows to the east. It is a day for a huge, reassuring open fire, but our kitchen fireplace being still blocked with its fire front and the winter stove, we have had to content ourselves with keeping a good fire burning in the range. The successive showers are almost soundless, but I am aware of them as they come because with each arrival the tinkle of the cistern in-flow grows louder under the boards of the kitchen floor. The only other real sound is that of the kettle beginning a humming sigh from the back of the range, a mild, contented, and indoor music very appropriate to the day.

As I write, the kitchen clock tells me that it is the middle of the afternoon, and presently comes rain in a real shower. Though I have been held back all day from various tasks outside, I find my mind content to stay under a roof on so cheerless an afternoon. It is on such a day that one comes to feel and appreciate the personality of one’s house, and that “the house spirit,” as the Chinese say, seems in a mood to tell what it has to tell. If the house is an old one, and has been cherished, a real sense of the past comes to life within the walls and the window panes. A hundred and twenty-five years have passed like cloud shadows over this roof since young men raised the timber above the field stone cellars and the boulders at the corners, for well over a hundred years the touch of human life has smoothed the house as the flowing of a brook wears smooth a pebble in the current of the stream. Every outer threshold, for instance, shows the scooped hollow of the footsteps of those who have come and gone down the archways of the years.

Elizabeth says, “Say of it first that it is a kind house.” There are no places which catch and trip the passerby, no beams or corners which bump unwary heads, no latches or gadgets which pinch the fingers. It has no architectural malices which lie in wait.

*   *   *

It is perhaps in the kitchen that one is most aware of the human past, for the kitchen, even as it is now, was the center of existence of the farm. In this room and before the great fireplace assembled the young married men who cleared the land and the first fields, the men and their sons who cleared the larger fields and the pasture hill, the countrymen who shaped the fine timbers of the barn with the ship builders’ axe, and the women of the farm who did the cooking, the weaving, the knitting, and kept the household together. They must have been a hardy lot to have stood these winters without stoves. Wheat flour was scarce in the frontier north in those ancient days, and neighbors tell me that it was barley bread and rye bread and corn-cake which were baked in the brick ovens and in the iron skillets to one side of the living fire.

I once had a glimpse of the room as it might have been in the early nineteenth century. There had come to work with us a young Passamaquoddy Indian, and it came about that one October night we left the farm in his care and went forth to have supper with friends. The boy could neither read nor write, and when his work was done, he simply relaxed in a rocking chair and took things in a kind of restful blank.

When we returned a little before eleven, I noticed as we drove in that the lamps in the kitchen had all been turned very low. Where was Roland, for that was our Indian’s very un-Indian name? Entering the kitchen quietly, we came upon a scene the farm will long remember. The boy had taken an old blanket from his bed, rolled up in it, stretched himself longwise on the floor before the dying fire, and gone to sleep. Even thus his Indian ancestors had made themselves at home at some colonial neighbor’s. The old Yankee kitchen, the darkness, and the drowsy fire, the tanned out-of-door young face—it was the past and pure romance. I hated to wake him, but I did so, and with the ceremonious politeness which was a part of his spirit, he took his candle, said a proper good night, and went to bed. I wish I knew what has become of him. Wherever he is, the farm wishes him well.

FARM DIARY

May Day, and an icy wind from the north together with a grey drizzle of rain. Not a day for May baskets and merrymaking, but a time for the warm kitchen and the fortifying strength of a good, hot breakfast. / “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” and once again I am setting out a pair of quince trees. The quince does not thrive in our northerly world, though I am told that in the milder climate south of Portland the tree is sometimes seen on old farms. The quince is not rare south of Boston, and it flourishes on Cape Cod. In southern Europe baked quinces are served as we serve baked apples, and they are particularly good. Our word “marmalade” originally meant a quince preserve. / The high prices of things are more than ever forcing the farms back on their own resources. Winter clothes which can be made to go another season will all be neatly and strongly repaired, and I am following suit in having the elbows of my favorite winter jacket patched with pliable leather. / Maurice Day tells me of having recently gone to a “pie supper” served at the close of a Grange entertainment, the tables being spread from end to end with an incomparable variety and splendor of all kinds of pie, nothing but pie. Sounds full of interest. / Fell asleep listening to a murmer of rain, first having put a stick of oak on the bedroom fire.

*   *   *

In spite of rain and cloud, the spring draws near. In the wet and dripping trees, even on these forlorn afternoons, the robins have managed the beginnings of a song. With the change, there comes something particularly needed by the human spirit—an affirmation of that eternal change in nature which rules out stagnancy, and the appearance of the entirely new within the pattern of the old. We are not treated to fantasies and monsters; the world remains the world we have known. I suspect that in human existence our problem is the finding of some like harmony between what is fixed and of the pattern and what is untried and eager to be born.