VII
AMONG the various things which vanish into the vast emptiness of winter, the countryman counts the presence of water as a living and flowing power of the earth. The waters of earth which began flowing in the cold northern spring, making each greater gully of the woods the bed of a small brook and turning regions of the fields to sodden mires—where are they now in this temperature? Where is their sound in this great silence of the cold?
There are no rills flowing anywhere about, and what puddles may have come into being from some midday warmth are mere hollows and kettle-holes of solid ice. Water thrown out at the barn freezes before the eyes. The earth and the fountains of earth are sealed in iron.
All, I shall have to say, save one living voice—that of the overflowing well-spring of the farm. Those of the past who found it came upon no visible rill but only upon a small depression in which water-loving grasses grew comfortably in the hottest summers, surrounded by brown and thirsty hay.
Digging down some ten feet, they came upon a granite ledge, over whose muddy top flowed from within a small but living stream. Some sixteen years ago, I had the reservoir enlarged and walled about to make a roofed pit some ten feet square, the overflow outlet opening towards the pond.
I know no other such living rill in the nearer countryside. Huge storms bury the outlet under their deeps and masses of snow, new snows and the alternate warmth and cold of day and night cover it with a pebbled roof of ice a foot thick, low temperatures beard the oak pipe with gigantic icicles, and still the water flows. I have never known the winter rill to fail.
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Every morning I go to it for a fresh pail of drinking water. The spring is only a comfortable minute’s walk north into the fields. I use a white enamel pail, and save time by lifting off the hatchway of the spring-house and taking the water directly from the pit.
So radiant pure it comes, so much like a welling of light, that there are times—as indeed this morning—when the filled pail, nested in the snow, might be empty as when I carried it from the door.
How cold it was on the slope! The great pond is a pond no more, but a level of deep snow traced by strange, wavering paths of the wind. Months will pass before I hear again the familiar murmur from the rocky shore. Only the small tinkle of the living spring, seemingly without companion in the earth, remains of all the sound of waters, the treble music mingling unchanged with the lonely crying of the wind.
FARM DIARY
After a great snow storm, three pairs of snowshoes stand in a drift outside a friend’s kitchen door; the neighbors have dropped in for a call. / On a morning bright with a glassy wind and full of whirled-up dust of snow, the welcome snow plough comes in sight, everybody aboard the truck bundled up in heavy clothes like winter bears, the hardy, outdoor faces glowing with the cold. A youngster home from Iceland walks behind, a shovel over the shoulder of his Navy pea-jacket, and bright red “protectors” on his ears. / To town on a cold day, finding various cars frozen up and snorting steam like dragons, the smell of radiator alcohol strong along the sidewalk. One car radiator is covered over with quite a good patchwork quilt. / How pleasant it is to get home from such a trip, and find the house warm, sunlit, and at peace, the last of a great stick of wood still glowing in the kitchen stove! Standing beside the range, Elizabeth meditatively warms her hands.
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The chromium millenium ahead of us, I gather, is going to be an age whose ideal is a fantastically unnatural human passivity. We are to spend our lives in cushioned easy chairs, growing indolent and heavy while intricate slave mechanisms do practically everything for us as we loll.
What a really appalling future! What normal human being would choose it, and what twist of the spirit has created this sluggish paradise? No, I do not mean that we should take the hardest way. Compromises are natural and right. But a human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive.