The Quiet Day

I

THEY are all gone, and the house is empty and quiet and full of sunlight. No one rushing up and down, no voices, no heels across the floor. All the tenseness dissolved and the air empty of sound. The room is so still you can hear water sucking down in the earth of dry geranium plants, and a mumbling of the first spring fly.

It is good to be alone and quiet at last — to sit still and watch the gold sieve of light through the jasmine leaves and its pattern of shadow on the floor. The sun is warm through the glass, splotched on the boards and across the big empty shoes, gaping like open jails. Lord, how wonderful warmth is! To stretch, unwind oneself without shuddering, and feel no sudden drench of coldness, no chilly draft along the poor bones. It is one of the greatest and simplest pleasures of all life. To sit and stand and move in a river of warm air, no longer screwed tight as a winter wire. And now in the mind too the tight wires loosen; the days of fear and all the jagged rawness — the adjustments, conciliations, concessions — are blotted out, warmth creeping quietly through the hollow bone, dissolving the taut and brittle strings.

The air has a warm and yellowish sweetness from broken corn broad, hot, still, and gold, — a smell good and nourishing enough almost to live on without eating, — and there is the frying smell from one enormous pancake of meal and rice and buttermilk stirred together and round as a cart wheel in the pan.

It is a good pancake, but will not hold together, and no spatula is big enough to flop its great body without breaking, so there is nothing to do but leave one side pale and unfinished and lower it gently down on a plate for the dog, with a sprig of carrot to top its face.

The empty kitchen is a pleasant place now; no sound except a faint wheezing of the kettles — their furious boiling done and the crashing of the pots long past. There is time to look about and see the strange, homely beauty that it has — the high gray jar, wide and gnome-like, with a bar of sun streaked across its barrel and a white tear dried from some plunge of the sour milk. There is a pan of brown blotched eggs and on the top a long giant egg, slim and white and very pure-looking

— the kind of egg from which a white peacock might be born, but which is really only the freak of some frowzy Plymouth with scaly legs.

The pussy-willow shoots in the window box — shoots stolen out of the dump heap behind a very rich house

— have grown tall and the light comes gold behind their greenness. The old buds fell and lie around the pot like mangy kittens, but with still a faint aureole of pollen. Last year’s tulips have an unpleasant slimness and barren look, but the hyacinths are squat and sweet. It is strange about scents, — the hyacinths and the corn bread and the frying pancake, — how they can make one happy without reason. You pass a pot of hyacinths, not seeing or thinking of them, and are suddenly happy even in the middle of noise and confusion and hate, and feel a second of positive joy. I think that in the moment of despair it will not take those Easter voices of Faust, but only the hot gold smell of corn bread to turn one back from death! And now in this peace the good smell is more than a momentary happiness.

II

It is pleasant and a relief to eat alone at times — a peace in being dull, in thinking of nothing to say and saying nothing, and having only the blind white plate with its mound of rice witness to this stupidity. Let the mind stretch, blink torpidly, sink back in its own warm mud. There is only the plate to bear witness, and it is duller even than I. It does not wish to be entertained anyway, and the carrying of endless rice and egg mounds has chastened its spirit, wiping away all ambition long ago.

There is not much mail to open and read between spoonfuls in the place of talk, — only a little catalogue and six packages of seed, — but the heart has been tormented and twisted and gone foolishly happy too often over a letter. It is better to trust the small and not human things for a more enduring happiness, and it almost seems sometimes that the vast and important experiences we go stumbling after will never give as much happiness as the little sound, the streak of color, or the brief taste of something in the mouth. It is not very wise to trust too much in people or expect very much of love or name or place. Perhaps, after all, the meaning of life is written along the margin and not on the page itself. . . .

Anyway, though the catalogue is small and thin, it is great with enormous words and promises, and full of hands holding out giant tomato bodies. There are pictures of monstrous morning-glories, large as dinner plates and not to be sold at any price, but only to be given away free with the purchase of yard-long beans and banana gourds.

There in the catalogue too are giant white radishes that look like the beards of ancient gnomes, and long cucumbers to startle your neighbors with their uncanny resemblance to coiling snakes. Page after page of giants, mammoths, exotics, — mysterious, delicious, unparalleled, — until the mind is mazed and intoxicated with ambition, and the heart pounding more dangerously than over any letter of love or praise.

It seems a long and exasperating time to wait for the planting — six packages here in the hand, and one that mysterious peach itself which grows luscious and fragrant on a vine, and the ground warm with a spring smell, dry and sweet on the wind. But it is only the middle of March now, the earth treacherous under its mild and broken clods, and the air still fanged with hidden frost.

There is nothing to do but wait and wander out in the garden, feeling the warm flow of the air in this brief interval, and wonder where in God’s name there will be room for all these strange monsters of the catalogue if they grow to their promised size. How shall we live ourselves and escape them if they come? The racer bean will devour the house in its arms, and the pumpkin field slowly spread and rise like some terrible acre of gold balloons, swelling and expanding one against the other and then outward to the house, till some day we wake up and feel a dull knocking against the walls, and the windows are blotted dark with great yellow bodies, and even the giant tomatoes and the radishes are leveled to earth.

Pondering this nightmare doom, it is not so hard for one to wait and put away the white packages, locking them down with awe and care lest their tremendous vitality cause them to grow regardless of proper time or place. It is so still one could hear even the hopping of prisoned seeds and it is well to put up a package to the ear, listening with apprehension for sounds of overabundant life within. There is, however, no ominous knocking as yet, and it is possible to go in peace — though not without some suspicion.

III

The house has been kind, — quiet and full of sunlight, — but is not wholly safe. It is too known, too treacherous. At any moment there may be voices again, doors opening and shutting, the shrill of a telephone or sound of people one wishes were dead or dumb or a long way out at sea with sharks swarming around their broken raft. It is better to go away quickly while it still holds this blessed quiet and walk very fast out through the orchard, beyond the barren plums and down out of sight in the ghost field of gray milkweeds and the asters’ brittle stems.

Dear God! — one is alone and free and there is nothing to hate and fear, to question or desire, any longer. All these things are less than the dwarf body of some old woman left behind and no longer heard. Returning, she may come out to meet us again and put out her sour old fingers, and her voice like insect shouting be loud in the ears again, but not now, not here in this air and the smoky smell of spring.

We have not answered yet what way life shall take, nor what we shall do next, nor whether to deny the root which is both poison and life. There are poverty and insanity still; every hour is decision, arbitration, denial or acquiescence. . . . We have not answered, and yet in this hour no decision is necessary. Out of confusion and haste how shall anything be born which is untainted? Out of the sick mind only sickness. Leave, then, the old woman utterly behind. She is forgotten; she is nothing. Shadow of rat — ghost of hawk. She no longer concerns us. The mind, which has been mad and tired and full of winter and dusty thoughts, is clean again.

Here at the field’s edge the sun is warm all over the crab trees, turning rose and veined purple now, and some branches have the gray living silver that comes on them before the red. In the spring sun they look like wild old witch heads. It is too early yet for all the overrichness of spring, and the first leaves and color have more meaning than they ever will again. The willow branches are yellow wax, and wound to one twig is an old spider sac with gold threads that glitter like spun wire. It is empty now, the hundred or so little spiders having hatched, devoured each other, and the survivors gone on their way.

There is no rush, no hurry. One can walk slowly and without effort; move like a snail between the ploughed field and the woods. The dry oak leaves smell like honey, and one weak little spider crawls along their edge. All around are the gall-distorted twigs, the oak galls hanging like thin bronze globes, hollow and wind-rattled, and the galls of the goldenrod are hard as wooden balls; but the tortured symbolism of these plants seems only foolish and unimportant here in the sun — cruelty and disease are homely things, not sinister, and their deformity only another shape of life.

The dead grass lies heavy as gray thatching where the fields are left unploughed, and makes warm secret places for the rabbits — or where the rabbits ought to be, for they seem to spring out of chilly hollows instead, or from stony hoofprints in the mud. It is queer how useless it is to suggest comfort to anybody or anything. All the warmest holes are empty, the choicest tree forks unnested, the fattest stumps uninhabited; but it is not for one who has managed his own living with such miserable results to suggest any change. If the rabbit prefers his shallow scoop of mud he is welcome to it. I am through with advice!

It is too early for frog eggs or even for the snails that clung on twigs above the water like colonies of little old men sunning their lichen-covered backs, and the pond is dry where they used to spawn. But the marsh creek trickles still, so narrow that a very big foot might span its banks, and the fairy shrimps are crawling along the bottom, doing nothing that one can understand, but very eager about it. The shadows of the water spiders’ feet are little transparent fans darting around on the stones and then suddenly herded together in a corner while the great human shadow passes. The stream is grooved through a pasture, and there is one great elm alone, brown now with snail-like buds, but the shadow sharp on the grass, still and without the soft blurring of leaves.

It is good to be shut in on every side with hills — to feel for a while out of sight and hearing and protected even from the mild wind. It is cold on high places, and in the great views there is too much that is better left unseen sometimes. . . . The valley mind is sane longer.

It is warm and the leaves dry and there is no confusion of bird voices. Only a bluebird once or twice and a cardinal in the marsh. It is so still when the wind stops that you can hear the small trail of sound that the dry leaves make shifting back into place after feet have passed. There is no reason why one could not lie down in the sun and sleep, face down in the leaves and the light warm as a blanket all over; and suddenly there comes an awful tiredness, not as from hard and recent work, but as though all the days and nights of living were added up and the small too much of everything done accounted for at last.

Time is lost count of and does not matter. For a little while you can hear faint sounds —a fly on the oak bark and the swish of a cardinal, turning in mid-air at sight of this large and lumpy thing sunk in the leaves; then, as you drift down deeper in this warm river of sleep, there is only a great and blessed darkness. The last words conscious to the mind: Your life is your own . . . each of us finds his own healing. . . .

IV

The field carries the walnut shadow like a mirror, long and clean-patterned on the grass, and the shadow stretches slowly, crawling eastward, and lies against the stone wall of the quarry. It does not matter how many hours have passed. There is light still, the sun pale now through a mild and reddish fog, and the colors of the fields seem to dissolve into each other, grayviolet turning into a fog of green, and then to a blue like the smoke of burning leaves.

Only the crows, night gathering, and done with their childish clamor, see the long sack-like thing sit up and stretch and brush off the oak leaves from its face. The squirrels are gone, and the fly hidden under a shred of bark. A red ladybug crawls down a stem and flips away.

This sleep is like the sloughing of an old, too narrow skin. It is to wake up feeling curiously strong and well, as though one could walk out and step from hill to hill or run light as a dog along the hollows, outgalloping every wind. To those who have always known strong blustering health and energy this momentary upspringing of strength means nothing, but in that hour it seemed a strange and wonderful thing — brief, sudden resurrection from a death, so familiar that it had passed as life.

It is not hard to go back now — to turn home through the coming darkness, still warm and moist with the unborn spring, and a mild gray where the weeds are huddled; realizing that the old fears and obsessions and causes still wait there, and that absence has changed nothing behind us, but knowing also that the calm seeing of these things can change them, and that, though the stone of fear and pity will lie unmoved, yet its shape and strength are only made by the seeing eye.

And it is to go back knowing this dwarfed old woman is less than cinder dust or a puff of fog in comparison to the enormous and even yet only halfdiscovered beauty of life, manifest in a thousand quiet ways and times. And if in the corner of hourly living, under the grief and irritation and fear, one can know there will be always these intervals of peace, then there is no reason to desire death. It is enough to wait and be certain of their return.