Chapter 2

No matter how centered and serene I start from Hingham, a little way into Boston and I am lost. First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessary in Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then I must get somewhere; everybody else is getting somewhere, getting everywhere. For see them in front of me and behind me, getting there ahead of me and coming after me to leave no room for me when I shall arrive! But when shall I and where shall I arrive? And what shall I arrive for? And who am I that I would arrive? I look around for the encircling horizon, and up for the overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; but instead of a purpose I am hustled forward by a crowd, and at the bottom of a street far down beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but a slit of smoky sky. I am in the hands of a force mightier than I, in the hands of the police force at the street corners, and am carried across to the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in front of me again at the next crossing. So I move on, by external compulsion, knowing, as I move, by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort of proxy, and putting my trust everywhere in advertising and the police.

Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Library, "where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording,"--where Shakespeare and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and as readable as the card catalogues, or the boy attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac in the vestibule floor.

Who can read all these books? Who wishes to read any of these books? They are too many--more books in here than men on the street outside! And how dead they are in here, wedged side by side in this vast sepulcher of human thought!

I move among them dully, the stir of the streets coming to me as the soughing of wind on the desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore. Here I find a book of my own among the dead. I read its inscription curiously. I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and far from here. But why did I? For see the unread, the shelved, the numbered, the buried books!

Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not books, and unto dust, good fertile soil, not paper and ink, we shall return. No more writing for me--but breathing and eating and jostling with the good earthy people outside, laughing and loving and dying with them!

The sweet wind in Copley Square! The sweet smell of gasoline! The sweet scream of electric horns!

And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hack driver, standing there by the stone post! He has a number on his cap; he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the library. Thank heaven he is no book, but just a good black human being. I rush up and shake hands with him. He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I must get hold of life again, and he looks so real and removed from letters!

"Uncle!" I whisper, close in his ear, "have ye got it? Quick--

"'Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's steppin' at de doo'! Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's creakin' on de floo'!'"

He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston Street, a living thing once more with face toward--the hills of Hingham.

It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and all the street pours forth to meet me--some of them coming with me bound for Hingham, surely, as all of them are bound for a hill somewhere and a home.

I love the city at this winter hour. This home-hurrying crowd--its excitement of escape! its eagerness and expectancy! its camaraderie! The arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy they see on the faces beneath them.

It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter Street. Now the very stores are closing. Work has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone. The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his stand at the Subway entrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women, young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, more joyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street. They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any one particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understand as we cross and dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through this deep narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush at the station, that nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plunge into the crowd and are carried through the gates and into our train--which is speeding far out through the dark before I begin to come to myself--find myself leaving the others, separating, individualizing, taking on definite shape and my own being. The train is grinding in at my station, and I drop out along the track in the dark alone.

I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread and bananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down the track. Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road lie before me. I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, and very close about me the deep darkness of the woods--and silence and space and shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to my city-dinned ears and staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin to see and hear.

And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank; that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees shines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the dog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching stars.

How the car takes the hill--as if up were down, and wheels were wings, and just as if the boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire were all waiting for _it_! As they are, of course, it and me. I open up the throttle, I jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in the middle of the hill,--puppy yelping down to meet me. The noise we make as the lights flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come to our nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn! They drag me from the wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon my bundles; they hustle me toward the house, where, in the lighted doorway more welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppy joining the attack!

Who would have believed I had seen and done all this,--had any such adventurous trip,--lived any such significant day,--catching my regular 8.35 train as I did!

But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the children in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.

How the night has deepened since my return! No wind stirs. The hill-crest blazes with the light of the stars. Such an earth and sky! I lock the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge to the stump. The bare woods are dark with shadow and deep with the silence of the night. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence and space reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down the hillside; and the stars gather in the tops of the trees.

II

THE OPEN FIRE

It is a January night.

". . . . . . . Enclosed From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,"

we sit with our book before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are in bed. She is reading aloud to me:

"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which, I am sure, we were a great deal happier.'"

Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.

"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I asked.

The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she answered,

"We began on four hundred and fifty a year; and we were perfectly--"

"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was rent free!"

"Four hundred and fifty with rent free--and we had everything we could--"

"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."

Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening an hour before.

"If you had allowed me," she went on, "I was going to say how glad we ought to be that we are not quite so rich as--"

"We should like to be?" I questioned.

"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. Do you not remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'

"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for no other purpose than to prolong the passage she was reading.

"Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note of eagerness in my voice, for I had kept my battery masked these many months, "only Lamb wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. I have driven that old machine for five years and it was second-hand to begin with."

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got the range, for she was saying.

"Is there a sweeter bit in all of 'Elia' than this, do you think"?

"'--And when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome--'"

She had paused again. To know when to pause! how to make the most of your author! to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to its longest--there reads your loving reader!

"You see," laying her hand on mine, "old books and old friends are best, and I should think you had really rather have a nice safe old car than any new one. Thieves don't take old cars, as you know. And you can't insure them, that's a comfort! And cars don't skid and collide just because they are _old_, do they? And you never have to scold the children about the paint and--and the old thing _does_ go--what do you think Lamb would say about old cars?"

"Lamb be hanged on old cars!" and I sent the sparks flying with a fresh stick.

"Well, then let's hear the rest of him on 'Old _China_.'" And so she read, while the fire burned, and outside swept the winter storm.

I have a weakness for out-loud reading and Lamb, and a peculiar joy in wood fires when the nights are dark and snowy. My mind is not, after all, _much_ set on automobiles then; there is such a difference between a wild January night on Mullein Hill and an automobile show--or any other show. If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an American and not a monk, I think Jerusalem the Golden might very likely have been a quiet little town like Hingham, all black with a winter night and lighted for the Saint with a single open fire. Anyhow I cannot imagine the mansions of the Celestial City without fireplaces. I don't know how the equatorial people do; I have never lived on the equator, and I have no desire to--nor in any other place where it is too hot for a fireplace, or where wood is so scarce that one is obliged to substitute a gas-log. I wish I could build an open hearth into every lowly home and give every man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb and sticks enough for a fire. I wish--is it futile to wish that besides the fireplace and the sticks I might add a great many more winter evenings to the round of the year? I would leave the days as they are in their beautiful and endless variety, but the long, shut-in winter evenings

"When young and old in circle About the firebrands close--"

these I would multiply, taking them away from June to give to January, could I supply the fire and the boys and the books and the reader to go with them.

And I often wonder if more men might not supply these things for themselves? There are January nights for all, and space enough outside of city and suburb for simple firesides; books enough also; yes, and readers-aloud if they are given the chance. But the boys are hard to get. They might even come girls. Well, what is the difference, anyway? Suppose mine had been dear things with ribbons in their hair--not these four, but four more? Then all the glowing circle about the fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, a link of fine gold for every link of steel! Ah! the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologus saith; but a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with two lives besides for every daughter. So it must always seem to me when I remember the precious thing that vanished from me before I could even lay her in her mother's arms. She would have been, I think, a full head taller than the oldest boy, and wiser than all four of the boys, being a girl.

The real needs of life are few, and to be had by most men, even though they include children and an automobile. Second-hand cars are very cheap, and the world seems full of orphans--how many orphans now! It is n't a question of getting the things; the question is, What are the necessary things?

First, I say, a fireplace. A man does well to build his fireplace first instead of the garage. Better than a roof over one's head is a fire at one's feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill of a fireless house? The fireplace first, unless indeed he have the chance, as I had when a boy, to get him a pair of tongs.

The first piece of household furniture I ever purchased was a pair of old tongs. I was a lad in my teens. "Five--five--five--five--v-v-v-ve _will_ you make it ten?" I heard the auctioneer cry as I passed the front gate. He held a pair of brass-headed hearth tongs above his head, waving them wildly at the unresponsive bidders.

"Will _you_ make it ten?" he yelled at me as the last comer.

"Ten," I answered, a need for fire tongs, that blistering July day, suddenly overcoming me.

"And sold for ten cents to the boy in the gate," shouted the auctioneer. "Will somebody throw in the fireplace to go with them!"

I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, rather helplessly, and got back through the gate, for I was on foot and several miles from home. I trudged on for home carrying those tongs with me all the way, not knowing why, not wishing to throw them into the briers for they were very old and full of story, and I--was very young and full of--I cannot tell, remembering what little _boys_ are made of. And now here they lean against the hearth, that very pair. I packed them in the bottom of my trunk when I started for college; I saved them through the years when our open fire was a "base-burner," and then a gas-radiator in a city flat. Moved, preserved, "married" these many years, they stand at last where the boy must have dreamed them standing--that hot July day, how long, long ago!

But why should a boy have dreamed such dreams? And what was it in a married old pair of brass-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his teens should have bought them at auction and then have carried them to college with him, rattling about on the bottom of his trunk? For it was not an over-packed trunk. There were the tongs on the bottom and a thirty-cent edition of "The Natural History of Selborne" on the top--that is all. That is all the boy remembers. These two things, at least, are all that now remain out of the trunkful he started with from home--the tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book.

"Are you listening?" she asks, looking up to see if I have gone to sleep.

"Yes, I 'm listening."

"And dreaming?"

"Yes, dreaming a little, too,--of you, dear, and the tongs there, and the boys upstairs, and the storm outside, and the fire, and of this sweet room,--an old, old dream that I had years and years ago,--all come true, and more than true."

She slipped her hand into mine.

"Shall I go on?"

"Yes, go on, please, and I will listen--and, if you don't mind, dream a little, too, perhaps."

There is something in the fire and the rise and fall of her voice, something so infinitely soothing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in such a night as this--so vast and fearful, but so futile in its bitter sweep about the fire--that while one listens one must really dream too.

III

THE ICE CROP

The ice-cart with its weighty tongs never climbs our Hill, yet the icechest does not lack its clear blue cake of frozen February. We gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and apples. The small ice-house under the trees has just been packed with eighteen tons of "black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, the harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled with crops made in the summer's curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and run together! So do they complement and multiply each other! Like the star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of twelve shining circles running round the year--the tinkling ice of February in the goblet of October!--the apples of October red and ripe on what might have been April's empty platter!

He who sows the seasons and gathers the months into ice-house and barn lives not from sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of the clock, but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit clear around the sun--the smell of mint in the hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle warning of night coming on. Twelve times one are twelve--by so many times are months and meanings and values multiplied for him whose fourteen acres bring forth abundantly--provided that the barns on the place be kept safely small.

Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, and without place on a wise man's estate. As birds have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have a place to lay his head, with a _mansion_ prepared in the sky for his soul.

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns of an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat, drink, and be merry among the cakes"--and when the autumn comes he still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out! No soul can be merry long on ice--nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks, nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities. He who builds great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice must never become a man's only crop; for then winter means nothing but ice; and the year nothing but winter; for the year's never at the spring for him, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercury is down to zero.

As I have already intimated, a safe kind of ice-house is one like mine, that cannot hold more than eighteen tons--a year's supply (shrinkage and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for). Such an ice-house is not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal of confidence in the stability of the frame of things, and in their orderly continuance. Another winter will come, it proclaims, when the ponds will be pretty sure to freeze. If they don't freeze, and never do again--well, who has an ice-house big enough in that event?

My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions; not architecturally, of course, for there has been no great development yet in ice-house lines, and this one was home-done; it is a satisfaction morally, being one thing I have done that is neither more nor less. I have the big-barn weakness--the desire for ice--for ice to melt--as if I were no wiser than the ice-man! I builded bigger than I knew when I put the stone porches about the dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the architect first instead of the town assessors. I took no counsel of pride in building the ice-house, nor of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said: "I will build me a house to carry a year's supply of ice and no more, however the price of ice may rise, and even with the risk of facing seven hot and iceless years. I have laid up enough things among the moths and rust. Ice against the rainy day I will provide, but ice for my children and my children's children, ice for a possible cosmic reversal that might twist the equator over the poles, I will not provide for. Nor will I go into the ice business."

Nor did I! And I say the building of that ice-house has been an immense satisfaction to me. I entertain my due share of

"Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire";

but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned above would as likely as not bring on another Ice Age, or indeed--

". . . run back and fetch the Age of Gold."

To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold storage--that seems to me the thing.

I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; or is it not rather that I crowd a year into a day? Such days are possible. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. Ice-day is a chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day of First Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay is made when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but ice of the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right for harvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult as to make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June. June! why, June knows no such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of the ice.

This year it fell early in February--rather late in the season; so late, in fact, that, in spite of my faith in winter, I began to grow anxious--something no one on a hill in Hingham need ever do. Since New Year's Day unseasonable weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain skies, rain and snow and sleet--that soft, spongy weather when the ice soaks and grows soggy. By the middle of January what little ice there had been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house was still empty.

Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the wind settled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen over the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear the close-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars. Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of the garden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillside pines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle silence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the taut boreal night you could hear a hollow rumbling running down the length of the pond--the ice being split with the wide iron wedge of the cold.

Down and down for three days slipped the silver column in the thermometer until at eight o'clock on the fourth day it stood just above zero. Cold? It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice on the little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked across it, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of the wind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow. Another day and night like this and the solid square-edged blocks could come in.