VIII

SUPPER had been cleared away, the dishes done, and the peaceful, lamplit kitchen restored to its evening simplicity. Because the night was cold, we lingered by the cosier fire, Elizabeth deep in a book, and I going through those agricultural papers and magazines which had arrived for me since the beginning of the month. I am rather given to letting such mail accumulate, and saving the reading for a quiet night. Just as I was in the middle of an article, I remembered something I had forgotten in the barn. As there was nothing to do but go out and see to it, I shouldered into my blue reefer, picked up my lantern and turned to the door. And closing it behind me, I walked out into another world.

It was a night such as one sees perhaps half a dozen times a winter. The sky was less a sky of earth than interstellar space itself revealed in its pure and overarching height, an abyss timeless and remote and sown with an immense glittering of stars in their luminous rivers and pale mists, in their solitary and unneighbored splendors, in their ordered figures, and dark, half-empty fields. It was the middle of the evening and in the north over a lonely farm, a great darkness of the forest, and one distant light, the Dipper, stood on its handle, each star radiant in the blue and empty space about the pole.

These are the seven stars which come and go through the ages and the religions. Collectively known to the medieval past by the fine name of “The Plough,” the configuration is today the Great Dipper to beholders, and gathered thus into a household and utilitarian shape, places something of our small humanity in the shoreless oceans of the sky.

The greater splendor burned white and blue above the south. There exalted and assembled in one immense principality of the skies, the shining press of the greater winter constellations glittered above the little cold and dark of earth. Orion, most beautiful of all the stellar figures, shone beyond the meridian, the timeless hunter of the timeless sky, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix burning on his shoulders and the triad of the belt about his waist. Sirius, lord of the ancient Nile and brightest of the stars, hung in his glorious and solitary place, the Bull with the reddened eye of Aldebaran charged some invader of his field of suns, and the matched stars of Gemini together with the planets Mars and Saturn formed themselves into a figure which astrologers might have watched and questioned through the night.

One stares awhile and then looks to earth for the reassurance which comes with the earthly and the near. What was left of a light snow lay starlit and pale, the vague and ragged regions of uncovered earth starlit too, yet half-lost in the dark. Fixed in such a starlit gloom, the barn raised its shadowy bulk to the light and the mystery overhead. In the more empty sky below Sirius, scattered stars shone through the branches of trees beside the road.

It was as I came from the barn that I saw agriculture standing like a good omen above the fields. The starry plough had vanished from the imagination and the common language of man, but the remembered sickle stood high in the south and east and moved towards the meridian. Rolling on with all celestial space, the Lion of the zodiac followed great Orion, the fine if albeit left-handled sickle which the stars form glittering in the abyss, and at the base of the handle the great star Regulus, white, splendid, and serene.

Lower still, a new light trembled on the wooded ridge. It was Arcturus bringing with him that assurance of the spring and dedication of time for which the ancients used to wait in their warmer lands, Arcturus the great, the yellow star, loved of so many generations of men who live by bread.

FARM DIARY

Another snowfall and a fairly heavy one but the snow is going fast. / It is my impression that weekday radio programs are much less listened to here than they used to be. The farms tune in for the weather reports and the news and then switch off. / The neighbors wonder if an incident similar to one described in Bambi may not have taken place in our woods. Last autumn we frequently saw a doe and her twin fawns. This doe was shot at the end of the hunting season, the fawns escaping. Some think that like Bambi these younglings rejoined their father for a fine buck has been seen several times in the woods, and on various occasions his tracks have been accompanied by the tracks of smaller deer. No one has actually seen the buck and the fawns together. / When the ice melts from the gutters and the snow from the valleys of the roofs, we hear the water flowing into the winter cistern under a corner of the kitchen. On quiet nights of warmish weather, it sounds like a little tinkling fountain hidden away beneath the floor.

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How wise were the ancients who never lost sight of the religious significance of the earth! They used the land to the full, draining, ploughing, and manuring every inch, but their use was not an attack on its nature, nor was the ancient motherhood of earth ever forgotten in the breaking and preparing of the soil.

They knew, as all honest people know in their bones, that in any true sense there is no such thing as ownership of the earth and that the shadow of any man is but for a time cast upon the grass of any field. What remains is the earth, the mother of life as the ancients personified the mystery, the ancient mother in her robes of green or harvest gold and the sickle in her hand.

When farming becomes purely utilitarian, something perishes. Sometimes it is the earth life which dies under this “stand and deliver” policy; sometimes it is the human beings who practice this economy, and oftenest of all it is a destruction of both land and man. If we are to live and have something to live for, let us remember, all of us, that we are the servants as well as the masters of our fields.