XLV

BEHIND the panelled door with its yellow paint and old-fashioned iron latch, the farm and its guests have gone to bed, and I am staying up late to write in the kitchen by lamplight and the open fire. A bitterly cold northwest wind, which the coming of night has increased rather than subdued, is howling by outside, driving before it and across the moon a torn and immense floor of rushing cloud, and the whine and wintry cry of the high wind sounds for the first time this year about the house.

Our guests are a young lieutenant of Marines and his wife who were married only this summer, he the son of an old friend whom we watched grow up from a small boy to one of those tall young men who set the pattern of a tall generation. For years a fighter-pilot in the Pacific, he is now a “GI” student at a not-too-distant college, following some course he hopes will get him somewhere, and, like a boy again, taking his text books and manuals to class. To us, he is “Sonny,” his family nickname, and his charming lady, to whom I have taken a particular liking, is Ethel. Earlier in the evening, I built a comfortable fire for them in their room on the upper floor, and now they have said “good night.” Elizabeth too has taken her book and retired.

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A mood coming over me to take a solitary walk, I have been out for a stroll under the high wind and the moon. The length of the road I followed leads like a cart track through the level land of our own higher fields, having our pasture woods to one side, and to the other the farm itself, with a wide glimpse of the slopes below it and the pond. Overhead streamed the great earth ceiling of broken shapes, and torn islands and huge continents of vapor, now dimming and obscuring a moon almost at the full, now surrounding it with an opalescence and a bronzy and dissolving glow, with a wild halo at once vaporous and metallic and full of the vast torment and rushing of the air.

Beneath this sky and its wilderness of ever-changing, darkening, and reappearing light, the chilled earth lay leafless and open to the onslaught of the wind. The new grass of the earlier autumn, already blanched by the frosts, though seeming at first almost without motion, was nevertheless wanly astir, trembling a little and lifelessly on the road’s edge; the pines beyond tossing their higher branches and filling the moonlit air and the shrieking wind with the thin undertone of a green, incessant sigh. From the red oaks, which had kept some of their leaves, came another sound, a wild, dry, and melancholy shrilling, and every now and then I could see the huge oak leaves in the lower air, blowing down the wind in furious gyrations soon hidden by a dimming of the moon.

Now it is the farm again, the quiet table, and the fire. Not only is the small dog asleep in his basket, but I take it that sleep fills the whole house, for there is not a ghost of sound. Only the wind is awake, and even as I write these lines, I can hear a gust of leaves from the lawn blown with a kind of fierce whisper against the wall.

FARM DIARY

Two wood fires, one in the kitchen range, one in the great fireplace, burn all day long, and smoulder away to nothing in the night. The stove in the center of the house, however, now using coal, keeps a steady core of comfortable warmth in the heart of our winter fortress. / Our neighbor Mildred Ricker comes over to help us put up some jars of winter pears. / First ice in the rainbarrel, and no mere glaze but a solid lid about two inches thick, a night of bitter cold having begun before sundown at the cheerless close of a cheerless day. / Contrasted with the sounds of animal unrest one hears from the woods at night in spring, the farm woods of early winter seem strangely silent. Looking towards them from the house door on a moonlit night, I hear only silence itself across the silent fields. / When I face a winterish day warmly dressed from high boots to woolen cap, the woolen clothes give me a sense of protection and stout well-being. Yesterday, looking at my cotton overalls hanging in the washroom, I wondered when such things were worn and why.

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At a little concert in a country hall, there is singing by a young people’s choir and a number of what we call here “instrumental selections.” Presently a woman of middle age whom I have never heard before rises and sings beautifully a lovely song of the great Elizabethan heritage, and there comes over me a sense of the poignancy and dignity to which the human spirit can rise, and I realize again that one of the great functions of any art is the constantly renewed revelation of the possible greatness of the human spirit.