III

THERE had been no sign of coming snow when I put the house to bed, turning down the oil lamps one by one and blowing them out as the flames sank low. Looking forth a moment from the kitchen door, all that I could discover was an overclouded darkness—no wind, no sound, no star. Sometime in the night, however, a howl of wind or sudden and glassy rattle of sleet must have reached me in my dreams for I got up quietly to see how things stood now that a northeast storm had risen in the night.

All winter long a lantern burns at night on the living room table, its wick turned only moderately low. It is a modern lantern, big, strong, and well-made, and I am grateful to it for the quiet and reassuring light it keeps for us through the dark.

The house was full of the sound of the gale. It was a winter northeaster, furious with wind and snow, and driving down against us from the dark and desolate North Atlantic and a thousand miles of whitecaps and slavering foam. Wailings and whistling cries, ghostly sighings under latched doors, fierce pushings and buffetings of the exposed walls—thrusts one could feel as a vibration of the house itself—all these had something of their being in the sheltered and humanly-beautiful room. United with these, tumultuous and incessant, rose the higher aerial cry of the gale in space above the earth.

Our little dog lay in his basket close by the coal fire. Opening his eyes, he looked at me with both recognition and inquiry, and then with a sigh composed himself again to sleep. I found the kitchen growing cold, for the wood fire in the range had died away to a bed of ash and a few sparks. Having plenty of kindling, I soon had a new fire going, and it caught at once for the great chimney was still warm.

A pair of windows over the sink face the east and the pond, and these were under the full attack of the storm. Volleys of sleet were striking against them, wild gust by wild gust, and great flakes were sliding down the panes. Every now and then I could hear, even through the wind, the sound which snow makes against glass—that curious, fleecy pat and delicate whisper of touch which language cannot convey or scarce suggest.

Timber and wall, the old, honest, well-built house resisted with its own defiance. It has closed with such storms for almost one hundred and fifty years, standing in its ancient fields as a fortress of the hopes of man and his will to live. An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.

The lantern, now turned higher, shone peacefully from the kitchen table and the red-check tablecloth. The room was getting very comfortably warm though a blast as from the pole was blowing in under the door leading north into the shed. Picking up an old hooked rug, I blocked the gust as best I could.

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It was five o’clock, and still night, and the tumult unabating. By noon we should be snowed in. Treks to the spring would have to be made on snowshoes for as one flounders about and struggles ahead in deep snow, it is easy to lose one’s footing and sit down in a drift—pail, water, and all. Where, I thought, are the wild creatures in this wilderness of night and flying snow? The deer would be “yarded up” somewhere in the lonelier regions of the big woods, each group making its own “yard” and keeping the snow down by moving round. The great, ungainly moose would shelter somehow in their hiding places. I remembered what strange sheltered vales and hide-ways one can come upon in the forest, and how still they can seem even when the wind is high.

A vagueness of light began to appear. Streaming south across the west field, the snow passed in vast billows and strange, wavering curtains whose heights were concealed in the mystery overhead. It would be a wild day.

FARM DIARY

A pleasant and rosy morning full of the vast silence of the winter countryside and marked by the lowest temperature we have yet had. / Home again from a visit to friends in town, home again, and glad to be back where everything doesn’t come into the house along a wire or down a pipe. What a relief it was to get into my farm clothes and have a reasonable amount of physical work to do! / A friend on the salt water reports that a flight of snowy owls has just passed along the coast. / Snowing hard, and as I carry my pail of spring water across the field, the huge flakes drop in, spreading out grey just within the surface and then vanishing. / My friend Bob Smith tells me that in the old lumbering days there were bells on all the teams to give warning of their coming along the narrow, winding roads. Elizabeth found one of these very bells last summer and gave it to our neighbor Irving for his two big white horses, Major and Prince. They were wearing it today on their double harness, and very pleasant it was to hear the sweet and mellow jingle coming from the woods.

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When the nineteenth century and the industrial era took over our western civilization, why was it that none saw that we should all presently become peoples without a past? Yet this is precisely what has happened and it is only now that the results of the break have become clear.

The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience. Nothing of this sort has ever occurred in history.

I do not feel so bewildered when I return to my own fields. The country cannot avoid being a part of its own era, the abstract world is about us, yet we are not without a past and never shall be. For us the furrow is the furrow since the beginning of the world, and the plough handles are to our hands what they were to those who cleared the land. Linked with this past, moreover, is all the human past of man as a part of Nature, of one living by the sun and the moon, and waiting for the clearing in the west.