Читать книгу The Countryman's Year - Ray Stannard Baker - Страница 9

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May 2. First peach blossoms. It is the time of the year when the apple orchard, not yet in bloom, is a glory of misty grays and greens of the new foliage. I have been going through the remainder of my bee colonies. Three of them are in the strongest condition this spring—in spite of the hard winter—that ever I knew, full of brood, with enough new honey to carry along. I found a few drones already hatched out, but no queen cells. It is a pleasure to see them in such good order.

Our business is profitable this spring, our investments, in spite of unemployment and crashes in the stock market, are highly successful. We have two green cottages with overhanging eaves and fine porches to rest upon, and both are early rented and well occupied by safe and agreeable tenants, one a family of wrens, the other bluebirds.

A sense of limited days comes upon me. I have so much left to see, and hear, and smell, and touch: so much to think and to feel: my days are too few and too short.

May 3. I have been watching my plowman plowing in the cool, sunny, moist spring morning. I have been watching him with admiration and envy. To be out at daybreak with a great farm wagon, a fine team of horses, a plow, a harrow: to be stout, ruddy, forthright! He turns in the green manure (winter rye), kicking aside the furrows that are too stiff to lie down. He pulls his plow out on the grass at the end of the furrow, throwing his shoulder against the reins to bring the team around.

“Get over there: goddam you, Molly!” says he. “You would turn if you didn’t have to, damn you.”

Molly turns obediently. She does not mind being sworn at. It is the common plow language, nor does the plowman know that he is profane, nor is he angry, nor is he even impatient. It is part of the familiar process.

“Fine land,” says he. “She turns over fine. That rye’ll make good corn.”

So he plows the long furrows, the sun rises higher, and the blackbirds, spying the new-turned land, come down on the black earth to look for worms. They waddle as they walk and exchange profane comments and eye the horses and the plowman with suspicion.

I am envious of it all. To turn the earth! To be young and strong! To hold so perfectly in control two great horses! To work to weariness, to go home with an appetite that the gods might envy, to sleep like any child!

It is one of the tragedies of our times that so many of us think our rebellious thoughts in private, leading two lives. If only we could have been disgraced, ostracized, defeated, we might have dared.

How few of us are as brave as our dreams!

May 6. An event! I saw the first brown thrush of the year.

I brought in asparagus and rhubarb, and we had them for supper: nothing choicer than these first flavors of the garden.

In the presence of nature, as of the works of men, many there are who have only statistical wonder: a taller tree, a deeper gorge, a bigger lake, somewhere else.

Reading a life of Goethe. He was a morning worker—“skimming the cream off the day and using the rest of the time for cheese making.” An excellent system.

I stopped today to talk with S——, Polish onion grower, at the edge of his field. He is ignorant and wise. Certain subjects one can talk about with people anywhere upon terms of equality—that is, upon death and birth and love and work, which, after all, are the principal subjects of all conversations upon this planet. S—— said to me that “a man can pay his way out of almost any trouble but death.”

I have had this day a strange sense of unexplained well-being.

May 9. The apple trees are in full bloom: a gorgeous show: a banquet for the bees. Our orchard never looked finer.

An old, deformed, diseased apple tree on the border of a near-by field, which bears in the fall only stunted, wormy, or scabby fruit, yet blossoms as riotously in May as any tree in my groomed orchard. It will have its day of beauty.

Reading as my evening bed book Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago—a rare delight. Why haven’t I had it before? Hudson has the charm of a kind of serene melancholy: of happiness in spite of hopelessness.

“Praised be my Lord for our mother the Earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, and flowers of many colors, and grass.”

Lifting off thought after thought I know well where my joy is: in things still and scenes quiet, in days like these in May in our own valley, in my bees, in my orchard, in the thrushes and catbirds I hear singing, in the flash of a bluebird’s wing. These I love: these quiet my soul.

May 12. I have to confess, with whatever contrition, that often during these May mornings, sitting at my laborious desk, in my stuffy study, I long for an interruption—almost any interruption except the postman—that will take me out of doors. I know the immorality of it: it offends the rule I have solemnly adopted: it wastes my precious and all too limited time for my work in this world, but how I long to be tempted!

This morning I had the most delightful of interruptions. Steve came to the door to tell me that the bees were swarming. I rushed to the doorway, and there, in the sunny air above the hives, I saw a great cloud of bees filling all the garden with the music of their bassoon. The first of the year! Already they were gathering above one of the Baldwin apple trees, and there I knew they were preparing to light.

I will not here describe the hiving of the swarm—no one touches my bees but me—but merely emphasize the fact that this was a necessary interruption, and wholly delightful, in spite of the fact that May swarms are often regarded as an evidence of poor beekeeping.

I find keen pleasure in all the minute, careful, deft processes, the infinite problems, presented by the apiary. I lie awake sometimes at night thinking of the unending marvels of the bee civilization—studied by mankind for two thousand years, still not understood. They have secrets, the bees: senses, gifts, we do not know. Among the Quakers there is a spiritual process of coming to communal agreement, after silence, without argument, and without voting on the question involved. (A vote, at best, is a crude confession of inability to reach a decision based upon complete conviction: it is a method of forcing a balance.) Some such secret process of communal decision exists among the bees. One who has handled them long and knows them well comes to sense the moment—and to wait for it as the Quakers wait—but, strain as he will, pry with wonder and thought into the secret of it, he remains baffled by the swift decisiveness with which a swarm of thirty or fifty thousand bees will act as a unit, apparently without consultation or perceptible communication. There is indeed a language of the swarm, the timbre of its humming (perhaps) of which the beeman comes to know a syllable or two, as one traveling in Persia learns the word for “bread.” But how a swarm, like the one I hived this morning, hanging out on the branch of an apple tree, knows when or where to fly for a new home, who can tell? A hundred, perhaps a thousand, scouts have gone out through the wide countryside to look for a suitable place and are constantly returning with their reports. How is the news communicated? How do the fifty thousand bees decide which report to accept, what scout to follow? Answer that, my little wise man! When the swarm rises after hanging for an hour or even a day—unless you yourself, acting the part of demigod, have hived them—they swirl about, a dark, swift, roaring cloud in the air, and then make a “beeline” across the valley or up the hill, straight to the spot chosen. It is true that they sometimes find the place unsuitable and rest again in a tree or on a fence post to send out new scouts (do they in such cases abuse the culprit scout with sarcastic bee editorials, as men might do?), but that in no way alters the marvel.

I like all these quiet, interesting processes. At this time of year one need scarcely wear a veil or gloves if he knows how to go about the delicate business of handling the bees, if he observes, with courtesy and gentleness, and the slow thoroughness which the scientist cultivates, the manners and customs of this ancient democracy of the bee people. I know of no other occupation more soothing to spirits plagued by the problems of living: there is salvation to minds distraught and souls unstrung in these quiet and simple processes of the hands.

And there is another aspect of such employment, of the adventures of which I could write an entire book. Any genuine simple process which a man loves, of which he has made himself a master, inevitably leads to interesting and genuine human contacts. I could tell of many a beekeeper I have met in my travels, sometimes uncultivated men, men not rich in goods, and found them full of curious knowledge, or of true-won wisdom concerning the way to live endurably in a crowded world. A man is best judged not by his ignorance but by his knowledge, and there is almost no man living from whom there is not something to be learned—if we know how to get at it. There are in reality no classes, no human pigeonholes—there are only diverse and strange and incredibly interesting individual human beings, each set like a star in a vast and roomy universe. If only we were willing to handle men with the courtesy of spirit, the respect for variant manners, with which we handle the bees, half the woes of the world, I think, would disappear. But there is so much trampling roughshod through the sensitive world of human personality!

Once I went out, hotly, eagerly, to seek other men, thinking they had things I wanted: now I sit quiet here and men seek me, thinking I have things they want.

May 14. Fine morning, with the clouds high, and a roistering wind from the southwest. Strawberries are in bloom. We put in sweet corn yesterday, and melons.

I shot a woodchuck that has been marauding in our garden.

Two excursions to the hills in the last few days, one to Pelham, one to Belchertown. The woods are full of beauty, the first glories of spring. We are rich, in this valley, in wild flowering shrubs. The shadbush is the commonest, a white mist upon the hillsides, even among the pines. The spicebush, with its gleam of gold, is now passing, but the lovely and fragrant sassafras, especially on southern slopes in the woods, is just at its best. In old fields, along the worn ground of brook bottoms, I saw the ruddy glow of the high-bush huckleberries, and in the hedges and fences the chokecherries, with their neatly rounded blossoms, are coming on. I looked for the shy hobblebush, the finest treasure of the spring woods, but found none at all in blossom, and the dogwood and azaleas are riches yet to come.

The insolence of those who would make over a world which they have never taken the pains to look at, much less to understand! Man will succeed with nature, not by opposition, but as he works with it, as I with my bees. To understand is the first requisite. As for my neighbors, “I never meddle with saying what a man should doe in the world; there are overmany others that doe it; but what myself doe in the world.” This I found the other day in Montaigne.

May 15. I started a glass observation hive in my study window. It has room for only one brood frame with glass on both sides, so that I can watch every movement of the bees. I brought in a frame from one of the colonies with worker and drone brood, considerable honey and pollen, but no queen or queen cells. I have bored a hole through the window frame so that they can have easy access to the open air. What I want to study especially this year is the building of queen cells, and the raising, in a colony without a queen, of a new queen. I plan to make careful daily notes.

In the hills the dogwood is just beginning to bloom. I am hard at work.

I have moments, in these days of national gloom, financial depression, “hard times,” when I feel it my duty to be sad, or at least cynical—but cannot be—not in spring. I am like that chap in Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, mourning the fact that he could not be a philosopher, because “cheerfulness was always breaking through.” So much is wrong, but not my hills.

May 17. Today I traveled to our nearest city, and as I stood there in the moving street, my heart went out with new warmth to all the people going by. All kinds, poor, rich, ugly, beautiful, sad, sick, sunburned, happy, robust, cheap, silly, old, young, lame. Nevertheless, I thought, they are the best we have in this world. They are all we have: everything goes back to these strange, moving people; everything comes out of them; we must, after all, make up our world of them. We must fashion our government out of them. Revolt as we may, there is no other or better material. And when all is said, how extraordinarily interesting they are! What possibilities are tied up within them. Every last soul of them, I thought, has a story in him—maybe even a poem. No, one cannot throw humanity overboard without throwing himself overboard. And if one would escape, he merely changes one group for another: nothing is different or better.

May 18. I am delighted with my new glass hive. I can get my nose down to within an inch or two of the bees, and with my magnifying glass and a strong light watch them as I never did before. I spent all of last evening at it. I want to know every process in the life of the bee. It is the time of the early honey flow, and my colonies in the orchard, to which I have just added extracting supers, do not belong to the unemployed. Everything depends upon building up strong colonies for the clover season, next month.

If a man would be purged of his egotism and come all sweet and humble, let him read that poem which is the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Job, let him nevermore make assertions, but be willing to ask, see, think, and be quiet. This is the poem for the scientist.

May 19. I spent last evening again watching the bees in my glass hive finish the first queen cell and start another. They are beginning now to be active during the day, bringing in nectar and pollen. I have already seen several curious and amusing things that, in all my twenty years of beekeeping, I never saw before.

Everything is in anything: be still, then, sit where you are: beauty and wisdom are here. Serenity is not intellectual: it is centered emotion.

Man, as contrasted with the bees, has unsharable experiences. The bee has none. It is by these unsharable experiences that man has progressed.

I read of Franz Daniel Pastorius, who led the Germans to Pennsylvania in 1683, that “he was a lover of gardens and of bees.” So many good, quiet men have loved bees.

I know no more of God than my honeybees of me, and yet I know—

If I cannot grasp God myself, I can look at some of His works, touch thus the hem of His garment.

May 20. This day positively hot and sultry. Hard at my desk in the forenoon. First orioles and goldfinches seen today. Also the bobolinks are here. There is no depression on this hillside!

I saw Hamlet played this evening by amateurs. I have seen Hamlet in my lifetime I think some fifteen or twenty times, played by several of the greatest players known to our stage, and some, certainly, of the worst. It is one play that no actors can wholly spoil.

As I grow older I enjoy Hamlet less and The Tempest more. Hamlet is too young: too full of the fevers, the doubts, the extremes of youth. He has not yet decided whether it is better to be or not to be. One tires of him.

But Prospero knows that life is good: he is wise with experience and with thought. He has stilled his beating mind, conquered his Caliban, and set free his Ariel. He has come to love his fellow men: “Please you, draw near.” Turning now to Shakespeare, I turn oftenest to The Tempest.

May 22. Behold in me a miserable sinner. When I should be hard at work in my study I walk out into my garden to watch the young bees playing in front of their hives, and the catbirds singing like angels in the apple trees—and stealing the bees—and the tall tulips all in bloom, and the new corn pushing up through the brown earth, and the grassland I sowed a fortnight ago now coming green with clover and redtop and herd’s-grass. It is deliciously sunny and warm this morning—and all still and sweet—to those who follow the paths of iniquity.

After having considered all the problems of the earth—with such absurd seriousness, such comic importance!—I may, next year, or the year after that, stop a moment and be happy. As if peace conferences ever made peace! Or wars made friendly nations! Or money won joy! Or fame satisfied the spirit of man! So absurd, so serious, so irresistibly comic! Next year, then, or the year after that, I shall stop and be happy.

May 26. This is a memorable day for the bee people. I saw the first blossoms of the white clover, but the honey flow from that source—the best we have—will not begin for a week or ten days. (It did not really begin for a month—June 27th.)

The first new queen was born today in my glass hive. Two queen cells remain unopened—and will probably now be destroyed. I spent a long time this evening, with my magnifying glass and a strong light, watching the little new virgin and her worshipful subjects.

This is the month of the year when “longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.” I too! To walk straight away from work and home, to the hills and the open country roads, and new thoughts—

“With a new-coined day to fling away,

And all the stars to spend.”

“Let ’im work at it,” says Knox of the Hill Farm, when he sees a man trying to do a fool thing. “Let ’im work at it,” says he cheerfully, knowing well that he will soon work himself out of it, or through it. Or, if it happens by long chance not to be a fool thing, why it is work that will prove it and establish it. “Let ’im work at it.” Is there a better motto, more tolerant, wiser?

“Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself.” Do I make rash statements—mistakes? Well, then, I make rash statements and mistakes.

May 29. My glass hive grows more fascinating. On Saturday the 27th the workers, assisted by the jealous young queen, pulled down one of the two remaining queen cells by gnawing through it at the rear and yesterday, the 28th, the queen herself aiding with ferocity, destroyed the second, and killed the feeble occupant, which leaves her, still a virgin, in lonely majesty. She marches proudly across the comb, attended by her courtiers. It seems a cruel business, but Queen Elizabeth beheaded Mary Queen of Scots—and a good job, too.

I am absorbed every moment of these gorgeous spring days: at my desk in the mornings, in the garden or fields in the afternoons.

Sunday. I spent a considerable part of this sleepy Sunday afternoon trying to get a really good look at a pair of Maryland yellow-throats which have recently arrived in our neighborhood and seem likely to take up lodgings near us. They are easy to hear, often hard to see. Their often-repeated cry, “chu-weechy, chu-weechy, chu-weechy,” is so loud and plain that it suggests a much larger bird than this warbler really is. One can see the very tree or bush from whence the sound comes and never get a good look at the bird itself. I heard one calling to me this afternoon as plainly as could be:

“I beseech you, I beseech you.”

Not being able to resist such a plaint, I ran for my field glasses and followed cautiously down the hill. No sooner had I come near the hiding place than all was still, and presently from a more distant spot in the tangle I again heard the call:

“I beseech you, beseech you.”

So I followed again, fairly creeping along. A flash of wings, a gleam of color and I was again disappointed. So I sat there on the hillside and waited. So many times in my life I have had things I desired not by seeking but by waiting. Presently I heard the shy singer again in a kind of wild mockery; not “I beseech you,” but “witchery, witchery, witchery.”

“Witchery it is,” I said aloud and turned homeward.

But later, as if regretful of such coyness toward a friend, I came abruptly upon the shy singer herself. She was sitting quite fearlessly in a clump of forsythia, a delightful and beautiful little charmer.

It is pleasant enough to have these warblers here again, though later in the season their unchanging note grows strident and hard, lacking the variety and interest of such birds as the song sparrow.

If one feels lonely, how reassuring the thought of friends never yet met.

Today on the hill road toward Belchertown I came across an old farmhouse in an old field with stone walls all about it and a great elm above it, and lilacs at the doorway. I stopped for a long time to look at it. In some other time, some other life than this, I shall choose me just such a small place as this, a small quiet place. There will be trees in it, and little fields, and hills not far away, and bees and honeysuckles and lilacs in the dooryard—and I shall have One Book to write all my life long and no one shall know anything about it, or about me—I shall not try to do anything Great, or Important, but only what I love most.

May 31. We put in a third planting of sweet corn, for a succession: the other plantings are well up. We applied the calyx spray to the apple trees. The irises are now blooming profusely in the new bed we set out a year ago: Lent Williamson especially fine, also the dependable Pallada.

Much rain has turned all the meadows into green. I think of Walt Whitman’s description of the grass:

“The handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners.”

I seem to be doing nothing of any account these days—except to enjoy.

I had great pleasure today reading a list of old bee books, in which for several years I have been much interested, just received from Colonel W—— of Devon, England. It contains the most interesting notes. I wish I could walk down into Devon, such a morning as this, where I tramped with a pack on my back so many years ago. I remember the low hills of Devon and at evening the odor of burning peat moss—and the plovers whistling. How I should like to talk with this man about his bees at Westholm Maines, ten miles from Exeter. I should find him, I think, a kindred spirit!