Читать книгу The Countryman's Year - Ray Stannard Baker - Страница 6

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I had some doubt, in beginning this book, where it would be best to break into the magic circle of the seasons, whether at the conventional entrance, in January, or at the first faint intimacies of the awakening of spring. In the old calendars the New Year began with the vernal equinox in March, according to the logic of the sun and the moon and the stars, but restless human beings will be forever trying to vote their own way; and when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in America in the year 1752 New Year’s Day was changed from March 25 to January 1.

As a matter of fact, the year begins for the true countryman at the moment when he puts his foot down into the soil of his own land. Once in my life I began in the heyday of summer, the robust middle age of the year; and once, returning to my own hillside like some lost prodigal from the husks of a far country, I began it at the time of the apple picking and the cider making in October. I cannot see that it was not as good at one time as another: but since this is a narrative of a normal year I shall begin with the first shy touches of spring that come to our New England hills.

April 1. Endless winter, raw and cold. Spring comes reluctantly. Old icy drifts still cling to the hillside, and in our garden there are patches of rotten snow north of the pines. We had a few days of fine weather in March when I was able to finish the pruning of my apple trees, but for the most part now for many days we have been living in a gray and sodden world wherein the key virtue is endurance. I saw today one of my Polish neighbors tramping disconsolately across his field, no doubt wondering when he can get his plow down into the soil and plant his onions.

April 2. Worse and worse. A great snowstorm, a blizzard almost, is raging across the country. The earth looks like the dead of winter, as though the year had lost its way in the storm and turned backward. I have been hard at work all day at my desk. If I have lived in what Emerson calls the “tumultuous privacy of the storm,” at least I have been uninterrupted, which is a blessing in itself.

This evening we had a bright blaze on our hearth and sat near it—with what comfort!—listening to the wind complaining at the windows and rattling at the doorways. I have been reading with keen pleasure—really rereading—a book by John Jay Chapman, wherein there is much pointed criticism of both life and literature. “The closer you examine honesty and intellect,” says he, “the more clearly they appear to be the same thing.”

April 4. A blessed touch of spring in the air. Last night it rained, quietly, softly, all night long, and this morning the earth seems newborn, the landscape wrapped in a soft mist through which the sun comes shyly stealing as though to lift the veil of a virgin earth. There are wide open spaces in the fields, bare, brown, inviting, and subdued bird notes; and in the distance across Farley’s farm, I can hear the cattle calling.

The birds are coming! Besides many that remain here during the winter, a pair of pheasants, a pair of marsh hawks, crows in great numbers, blackbirds and chickadees, I have seen robins, jays and song sparrows. I stood today for a long time watching a bird I think I never saw here before, brown above, with mottled breast and a longish red tail. “It is of the thrushes,” I said, yet it did not look large enough. It seemed too large for a sparrow. It did not sing, but there was a happy little “chip, chip, chip” as it ran along the branch of a maple tree. Coming home I found him in my infallible book—a fox sparrow, not common here. I have also had delight recently in watching the black-capped chickadees—surely among the delightfulest of birds. I wish I had a deeper and more special knowledge of birds and bird life. If only I had time! One life does not begin to satisfy a man’s curiosity: it turns only the first page of the book of wonders. I like to plan what I shall do with my future lives, one after another, if ever I get them. One of the first, after this, I shall devote largely to birds and bees.

On my return across the fields I tested, oddly, the capacities of this town. I met farmer K—— leading his little bright Jersey cow, and fell to talking with him. When I asked him the age of his Jersey he pushed back the hair around its horns and counted the rings and then gave me an eloquent lecture on telling the age of cows and the certainty of it compared with judging the age of horses by their teeth. Teeth could be filed. This brought him to stirring episodes in the life of a black mare named Nancy whose teeth did not exactly meet, and further remarks regarding a former Jersey cow that had five teats, but one would not milk. Coming back I met Professor T——, for I live in the periphery of a college, and found him hot upon the Einstein theory. I told him I had read some chapters of Slosson’s small book on the subject to my complete obfuscation, whereat he was off. He came home with me and sat by my fire while we discussed mighty things, most of which I did not fully understand. I reflected, however, on the resources of a neighborhood that in one afternoon could unfold the lore of Jersey cows and the Einstein theory.

April 6. A high windy day, with sunshine and the blue jays calling. Snowdrops in bloom, first of all, and the bees active, finding something, I think, among the chickweed buds. But the year has not yet come alive.

Looking over a group of old letters from among the necessary documents of my task, I reflect upon what a world of anxiety and pain there is among human beings over troubles that never happen!

April 12. I grafted one of my huge young Wolf River apple trees to Roxbury Russets on one side and Palmer Greenings on the other. It was cold and misty, and I had trouble with the wax. Spring hesitates.

April 13. Snow is still visible in the hills, but the air is delightfully warm and sunny: my bees are bringing in pollen. The weather being uncertain, I have had a week of more or less uninterrupted labor at my desk.

So now, accept the dull interludes. Know that the spirit also must rest. If one burned constantly, nothing would remain but gray ash. Where goes the creative spark? Yesterday I was master of my world: I rode the wind; I touched the stars; almost I caught the blinding glory of God; but today I am a clod. I am a clod. Well—I accept also my clod-hood. Such days I work in the soil, or tramp in the fields, as I did today: I court weariness of body and patience of spirit.

April 14. Up at six and worked all day in my garden and orchard. In the early morning the ground was crusted with frost, and the air was sharp and cool, though of a crystal brightness. I raised the incense of burning brush to the Most High, and all day long I listened for the undertones of that harmony which must be in this universe, if only a man might tune his soul to the hearing of it. Too short such days as these, and the joy of them.

April 15. Blessed quiet, thinking and working. The yellow lace of the forsythia now ornaments the bosom of spring, and there are pendants, gay blossoms of poplar and coral gems of the soft maple, in her hair, and she sings, a bluebird, at my study window.

The crocuses and snowdrops are in bloom.

I am trying to set up a rule: to work at my desk in the forenoon, in my garden in the afternoon.

April 16. Heavy wet snow, like winter again. All the trees are covered, the hemlock branches borne down by it, fine to see. Our old New Englanders who believe religiously in the law of compensation expected it; we are being paid for the bright warm days of last week. Some kind of misery must of necessity follow every real moment of joy.

I saw a man today who has achieved serenity, and knew he had accepted himself as a failure and gone about his business.

April 18. It is the time of the false spring, the time of the foretokening bloom of the elms, red maples, poplars and willows: blossoms that will soon be falling and give us again a barren remembrance of winter. I love well this moment of the spring: the russets and browns of the marshes, and the new ruddy look of the hillsides. The edges of the fields are coming green: yesterday in the bare soil under the sumacs in our garden I found hyacinths in bloom. The first stirrings of new life! Why is it, as we grow older, that these moments of spring should be, yearly, more wistfully beautiful?

The comfort and beauty of common things: how deep it is in the blood of us! I have been working hard physically in my garden and orchard this spring. What agreeable weariness it brings: what keen-set hunger! What drafts of blessed sleep! How all the senses are sharpened to awareness, especially the sense of smell. I walked up across the fields from Farley’s farm yesterday, just at noon, and had keenly at least twenty different odors of the bare fields, the blossoming hedges, the cattle, the marshy earth, the fertilizer that Steve is spreading on my field—and finally, as I came in at my own doorway, the ambrosia of broiling ham, newly cooked in the kitchen. No one knows who does not know!

It seems to me I never enjoyed all these things more than I have this year.

When I go to Boston or New York I begin to worry about the state of the nation—and civilization generally. So much unrest, such unreason, such violence, such utter folly! But when I come home to my own hills and get down to work among these everyday, normal people, I am reassured. So many millions there are leading their steady quiet lives, absorbed in the common processes of existence: working, eating, sleeping, hoping, struggling, failing, loving. All their thinking seems somehow to have its roots in the soil. What they do and are and feel is rarely reported in any newspaper or set down in any book: so that the world judges its civilization not by its preponderant normality but by its “news,” its sensations and abnormalities. I never come home to my hillside without a renewed sense of the assured soundness and continuity of life. Oh, I know that great changes are certain to come—has there ever yet been anything but change?—but they will be slow, slow. If they are genuine changes, not mere superficial symbols, they will be slow.

I have had working here this spring a plowman named W——. He is about thirty-five years old, and has a fine big team of horses, a roan and a black. He has had a common school education, is married, and has two bright children in our school. Just as a human being, he is well worth looking at, not tall or large, but robust, with tremendous muscular shoulders. He can plow steadily all day in heavy land and whistle as he goes up the hill on his way home at night. He has a “side-hill” or swivel plow of the largest size. A side-hill plow is set on a hinge and is thrown over at the end of each furrow so that the earth is all turned in one direction and the plowing is straight back and forth across the field: a practice especially adapted to these uneven and hilly New England farms. But the labor required, especially in sod land, is prodigious. The entire plow has to be lifted out of the earth with any moist soil that clings to it, the share has to be swung or kicked over until it catches on the other side, and then the whole plow has to be pulled backward for the start of a new furrow. I have tried it myself and know what a cruel backbreaker it is.

W—— wears a blue denim shirt and stout suspenders with the word “Police” on the buckle, and smokes a short pipe of strong tobacco. He is proud of his big team: has the harness straps trimmed up with colored rings, and there are little rosettes on the bridles, and all the harness gleams with recent rubbing. He knows to the uttermost the peculiarities of each animal, what he will do in emergencies, how much he will stand, and his full history and value. I like to go out at the nooning when he is sitting with his back against the cart seat on the shady side of the wagon, legs spread out, and dinner pail between his knees, and talk with him. He likes plowing and is proud of his prowess. He has the true satisfaction in what he is doing that makes for human happiness. I have probed him for discontents. Yes, he is discontented, if you probe him for it—what human being is not, especially what farmer?—but usually he is too busy: and certainly too little self-conscious.

Judgments upon “society” are so often passed by writers who do not really know or feel normal people. They judge neighbors like mine as though each were a self-conscious, self-analyzing, egotistical human being like themselves. They are dependent for sensation upon the abnormalities, the tragedies, the ignorances—all of which are there, as everywhere—but they do not see the man in proportion: his normal life as a worker, the simple interests and joys, the consoling vanity he has in the thing he is doing. We commonly underestimate the immense and solid satisfaction, the comfort, countrymen get out of the homeliest facts of life: eating, sleeping, working, resting, playing, loving—smoking! Currying horses, discussing cows, dogs, fertilizers, seeds; driving automobiles, tinkering farm machinery, spraying trees, building a new back porch, planting a vine, putting up a trellis; reading the newspaper, listening to the radio. I could name a thousand things more!

April 20. My work hangs heavy. My mind will not stay in my study but will be flying away to the fields and the hills. In the midst of the dry documents of my daily labor I think suddenly, and with a wave of longing, of my garden starting into life, the buds swelling on the orchard trees, the bees flying—and I not there to see. I am a sad weakling who would yield to what he loves. My little walks these mornings before I sit down to work are a pure delight.

Let them have their California. I choose my own hillside here in New England. Their own flamboyant California: my own reticent New England: no beauty wholesale!

By writing I enjoy life twice: and that is necessary, since life is so short. I do not bother at all to write of anything that does not interest me. I wait until my curiosity or my fondness boils up to the writing point. The other day I chanced upon one of Arthur Waley’s collections of old Chinese poems wherein I found one by Po Chü-i, written over a thousand years ago, which seems to me to express exactly the mood I mean:

“Each time that I look at a fine landscape:

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.”

April 22. After three warm days everything is starting at once. In the garden the forsythia is coming into glowing bloom: and the daffodils: it is the yellow of the year. Steve has been spreading manure: also getting a small plot of land ready for the early vegetables.

I have been taking a number of colonies of my bees out of their winter boxes. I have had them safe packed in shavings and old leaves, and they have wintered perfectly. Every colony is alive and vigorous. I put on my veil and gloves and went through Number 5 as a test and found it in excellent condition, full of bees, new worker brood and eggs, and as yet no queen cells and no drones. Plenty of old honey is left over, and some new is being brought in, from what source it is difficult to say. It is a pleasure to be handling the bees again. I have been at it now every spring for more than twenty years and find my interest unabated.

I was rereading this evening Masefield’s invaluable little book on Shakespeare: “The great poets have agreed that anything that distorts the mental vision, anything thought of too much, is a danger to us.... Reality, however obtained, is the only cure for obsession.”

And here he strikes a note of deep penetration: “One of the truths of the play [Richard the Third] is a very sad one, that being certain is in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life.”

April 23. I drove to the mill at North Amherst with a small load of corn to grind. The plowman is abroad in all the land, and I saw several farmers setting up their tobacco frames.

The old mill stands at the edge of a little valley, the stream from which has been led around the hillside in a canal so ancient that the banks are grown up to sturdy trees. I like to watch the clear water, coming from the haunts of trout and of deer, plunging into the penstock above the water wheel. The old gray millstones, shipped from France a century or more ago and brought overland by ox teams all of a hundred and fifty miles from New London, are still in good condition. The grandfather of the present owner built the canal and the sluice and the wooden mill, which is now old and gray, with green wet moss covering all the north side where the spray wets it. When the valley was still new and wild, and George III was King of England, the virgin soil grew wheat, which the miller ground into coarse gray flour. Today not a bushel of wheat is grown in all our valley, but the farmers still bring in their rye for the miller to grind, and they themselves afterwards sift it. And I bring my corn. Most of the business is now corn meal, ground for poultry feed.

We emptied the bags into the iron crushing mill, cogged with great blunt teeth, which tore the corn, cobs and all, into bits. It was then conveyed through the chute to the stones beyond, and the miller and I stood with hands in the down-falling meal to make sure that the appropriate fineness had been reached.

Looking about, I liked the ancient dusty look of the old rafters, I liked the odor of the grinding meal, I liked to hear the rush of water in the penstock, the jar of the wheel, the busy whir of the stones.

The miller hooked my bags one after another to the chute and, as they were filled, busily shook them down, deftly folded in the top, tied them up, and set them on the scales.

Your miller is a true talking worker: the kind I enjoy. He can watch his mill, tend the flow of the grist, and yet find time for the great and good talk of the neighborhood—the problems of the onion growers, the tobacco acreage, the earliness of the spring, the perennial talk among the old Yankee stock of the invasion of Polish farmers.

“Did ye hear that a Pole has come into the street and bought the old H—— farm? What do ye think o’ that! Next thing ye know, they’ll have all the valley.”

April 24. Everywhere I go I hear people groaning over the hard times—financial loss, profitless business, falling wages. But when I walk down through my meadow and along the old road into the woods and by the brook, I find no depression. The brown fields lie there waiting, expectant; the sun shines; the water glistens; the birds sing.

I was reminded today, as so often before, of the continuity and permanence of nature. All the sights I saw, the sounds I heard, came in upon me as in every spring I ever knew before. And in every spring of future years, whether I am here or not, there will be the same glow of red maples in the marsh, the same rusty mist of elms, the same blooming daffodils, the same robins in wide, green meadows, and flashing bluebirds in old fence corners. All the sweet repetition of the symphony of spring.

Life is brief, and times, they say, are hard: a nation anxious and alarmed: all men fearful of disaster—this they say—and yet all these things I saw this morning, as I walked, and returned newly assured.

And yet what a time it truly is—with so many people leaning on the town, so many towns leaning on the state, so many states leaning on the nation—and the nation leaning on the President! Let the people stand on their own legs, let the towns stand, and the states stand, and the nation stand. The President is a weak reed. How long can the President stand up, with all the people leaning on him?

“A man,” says Marcus Aurelius, “must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.”

April 26. This contrary New England spring! Hard frost last night: glorious clear summer sunshine this morning. I am busy all my spare time in the garden and with the bees. Setting out a number of new peach trees to replace weakened old ones. Trying to raise peaches in this northern climate is a perfect example of the way in which hope springs eternal in the human breast: or else it is the kind of sanguine madness that attacks the countryman in spring. I have been trying to raise peaches on this hillside for twenty-three years and have not had more than three or four respectable crops. Twice mature trees have been killed by frosts, and often all the buds have been blasted. And yet we go on year after year! I am also preparing for a new asparagus bed to take the place of one long ago worn out. Steve and I gave the apple trees the delayed dormant spray.

“I think,” says Thoreau (in the second chapter of Walden, I was reading today), “that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts.”

It is true: people do not change essentially—except in learning to let out all they have. There is an immense opportunity, even for the old, to be more of what they are. What most human beings lack is not endowment, but intensity of endowment.

April 28. Spring is here with a rush after two fine warm days. It was with difficulty I lived up to my rule and remained at my desk all the forenoon. We finished spraying the apple orchard, and in a warm spot south of the pines I put in a few rows of early garden: smooth peas, spinach, lettuce, carrots. I have been going through the bee colonies to make sure of their condition, especially the vigor of the queens. I have begun my yearly card record of the colonies in which I keep a careful report, with dates, of each examination. Some beekeepers I know, who delight in thinking of themselves as “practical,” laugh at my “bookkeeping,” but I find it the only satisfactory method. I know of no other way to be sure of controlled swarming: and unless swarming is controlled, there is likely to be little surplus honey to reward the keeper for his pains.

I was not here at the naming of the birds, or the flowers, or the hills. I wish I had been. Naming beautiful things—is that not the true office, as it is the joy, of the poet? And there has been so much naming when poets were not there, when dull souls could find no word to describe a flame of a bird except to say that it was red. Or to traduce one of the loveliest of our songsters, a bird, moreover, of rare charm of personality, by fastening upon it a name which suggests only its resemblance to a cat. “Catbird!” Heaven-sent warbler! First cousin to the mockingbird and quite as fine a singer. And why all the dull catalogue—“bluebird,” “blackbird,” “cowbird”?

But if dull souls were there at the naming, so, also, were the poets. What could be finer than “bobolink,” “oriole,” “flicker”? “Robin” and “lark” are well enough, but the names take their beauty from the birds and do not in themselves glorify the birds or interpret them. “Crow” is good, and especially “hawk.” I think the name “hawk” whenever I see the swift, the bold, the predatory bird.

I do not like locality names: “Maryland yellow-throat” for a bird whose “witchery, witchery” is as bewitching on my hillside as ever it was in Maryland. And so “Kentucky cardinal” for a flame of life and a joy of song known throughout half the continent—known even here in these northern places. “Whippoorwill,” perfect! “Sparrow,” a name I love, whether the word or the bird, or both, I cannot say. It may be that I am moved by those lines I heard so often when as a shy boy I sat on the hard wooden bench of the hard, hard church of my youth and listened to the rolling words of the Scotch preacher:

“I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

“I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.”

“A sparrow alone upon the housetop.” I shall never forget the feeling of those words, hearing in afteryears the sparrow at noon, singing. I shall be homesick for it to the time of the dimness of my eyes and the dullness of my ears, when names no longer thrill me, nor the birds that flash in the sunshine and fill my world with song.

“What’s doing, that has life: what’s done is dead.”

What a blessed anodyne these days is work—hard physical work. I came in last night after having planted potatoes and set out strawberry plants until my legs ached. I came in so tired that I stumbled into bed and fell at once into a deep sleep—a deep, blessed sleep—and awakened this morning with the sound of rain in the gutters and a vast sense of renewal.

Sunday. In the woods. How pleasant this Sunday morning to sit in the sun. I have worked hard all the week: and have now a blessed moment of rest. I left the wind on the shoulder of Mount Warner and came here to a little valley I know among the trees: and sit now with my back to the master pine of them all. I can hear the wind, like distant surf, rolling in the forest tops, but where I sit it is still and warm: and all the air pungent with the smell of pine needles. The crows are nesting in their rookery. I can hear their intimate conversation, for I came so quietly through the wood that I did not set them, as usual, to clanging with alarm. Some lesser bird notes are audible, and afar off in the fields, the strident whistling of a woodchuck. How still it all is. Spring seems truly here at last. As I came by the brook and across the marshes I saw that the willows were yellow with bloom and full of bees.

I have been wondering how much of my deep feeling for this moment of the spring is due to the experiences of my boyhood in the North, and the Indian guides and woodsmen I sometimes cruised or camped with: who taught me a respect which grew into deep love for such wilderness places. I had a rich youth! Would I love it all so much if it were new and strange to me? Would it seem so much like home? For almost all the common things here about me, plant and animal and insect, I know familiarly by name, something of the why and how of them, something of the uses for them. They are like old friends, always the same, without fickleness. Every sound, sight, odor comes in upon me this morning with new-old intimacy, blessing the soul.

Or am I wrong? Is this thrill of familiarity older far than the Indians and the woodsmen of my youth? Is it not deep-tinctured in the very blood of me, out of generations of pioneering ancestors, always marching westward toward the setting sun, always breaking the virgin soil, always rejoicing when, in that cold land, spring at last unlocked the fastnesses of winter and gave them again the freedom of the hills? For there is something deep in our race that turns us to the wilderness in spring, seeking new things, a new life, a new home.

Or am I still wrong? Is this love of wide fields, woods, and the secret hills in the spring deeper even than the blood of my pioneering ancestors? Deep, deep, in the race it seems to stir: deeper than civilization, deeper far than any superficial memory or experience. During what endless generations, thousands of years, before man was really man, has our stock crept out of the miserable caves and hovels of winter to rest and sweeten themselves in just such warm and sunny hollows of the hills as this in which I am now resting—and with what nameless joy! The same birches and hemlocks were growing here: the same soothing wind surf moved in their tops: the same birds were in the branches—this million years. Oh, it is deep in us, this love of the open air and the trees and the marshes in spring. It is native to our breed: congenial to the blood of us.

—Well, I have somehow aroused the rookery. An old watchful crow, looking down into the depths of the wood where I sit, as into the luminous water of some subtler ocean, thinks he has spied an enemy (little he knows!), and with three startled cries he has set the entire army of crows to clanging. I shall move on and let the people of the woods enjoy their Sunday quiet—

“The dear lone lands, untroubled of men,

Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green

The little things of the woodland live unseen.”

April 30. I bought several dozen cabbage plants from Johnson, and we set them in the open garden. It is early yet, but cabbages will stand a considerable frost. We have planted four long rows of Cobbler potatoes. I am so much interested in the garden and orchard these days—to say nothing of my bees—that I find it difficult to keep at my desk, according to my rule, for the entire forenoon.

I am firmly convinced that the happiest men I know have their feet—or at least one foot—in the soil. I read the other day an article on the “back-to-the-land” movement which was far too sanguine. Country life is not to be taken by storm: nor happiness acquired by moving into a farmhouse. And yet I know many instances in which the world has been changed for human beings by going to live in a garden, or by cultivating a few rods or acres of land as a part of a life occupied with other things. I have in mind a spinster saved by three flowerpots—but that is a story I shall tell some other time.

—Just after writing these comments I ran across a delicious passage in Montaigne which points what I have said. Even an emperor could find enlargement in a garden! When Diocletian, after resigning his crown, was called back by the “urgent necessitie of publike affaires,” he said—according to Montaigne:

“You would never undertake to perswade me to that [to return] had you but scene the goodly rankes of trees which myselfe have planted in mine Orchard, or the faire muske-melons I have set in my garden.”

Once a man, even an emperor, has felt the lure, he never quite recovers from it. The “goodly rankes of trees in mine Orchard,” the “faire muske-melons in my garden”—how well I know such delights!