Monday, December thirtieth.
Yesterday it rained gently, to-day it pours. I sit here with the door open and the stove slumbering—such weather in this country that the world believes to be an iceberg! But in Seward and on the mountains no doubt it is snowing enough. To-day I made so good a drawing that I’m sitting up as if the flight of time and the coming of morning were no concern of mine. It is half-past twelve!
New Year’s Eve! Tuesday. This is the tenth anniversary of Rockwell’s parents and I have kept it as well as I could, working all day upon a drawing for his mother and to-night holding a kind of song service with Rockwell. Rockwell, who at nine years has every reason to celebrate to-day, however he may feel at twenty-nine, has written his mother a sweet little letter. I’m terribly homesick to-night and don’t know what to say about it in these genial pages. It has been a solemn day.
When Olson was here to-night I began from playing the flute to sing. He was delighted and I continued. What a strange performance here in the wilderness, a little boy, an old man, listening as I sing loudly and solemnly to them without accompaniment. Olson brought us a pan of goat’s milk to-day, as he often does. I make junket of it and it is a truly delicious dish, ever so much better than when made of cow’s milk. It resembles a jelly of pure cream.
THE NORTH WIND
It has rained hard most of the day. At times a mist has hung in a band halfway up the mountain’s height across the bay. It is a remarkable sight. To-night is as warm as any night in spring or autumn. It thaws continually and even the ice that once covered the ground beneath the snow is fast disappearing. The year goes out without a steamer having been seen to come with the Christmas mail.
It is close to midnight. I have one secret resolution to make for the new year and, that I may make it as earnestly and as truly as possible, the stars and the black sky shall be my witness. And so with the year nineteen hundred and eighteen I end this page.
CHAPTER IX
NEW YEAR
To Rockwell who asked what happened on the New Year that everybody sat up to see it come we tried hard to tell all sorts of yarns about explosions and rumblings, but he wouldn’t believe a bit of it. He might have said, “How can anything like that happen here where nothing ever comes from the sky except rain?”
So far the new year is just exactly like the old’s latter end but that it is more joyous. And the joy came at eleven-thirty P.M. of January first, gliding by about two miles out in the bay, a dazzle of lights like a fairy citadel, the STEAMER! At my cry Rockwell sat up in bed and gazed too. Olson unfortunately was in bed and we did not call him. So I set at once to work writing, tying up parcels, making lists, until two o’clock of this morning.
At eight we had Olson out of bed. I hung about there threatening him, ordering him, begging him to hurry. Old men are hard to move fast. He shaved standing up there in his cabin with the door wide open and the goats playing about him. I let him have a bite of breakfast, but not much. The dory had to be unbound—for we tie them to the ground—and turned right-side up, and loaded and launched,—but all that only after half an hour’s cranking of the engine, the infernal things! It would look like snow one minute and be fair the next; but it held fair enough finally for Olson to get off and disappear—to our immense joy. He laughs at our eagerness to get him off for the mail.
Yesterday was Olson’s day for celebrating and many times we drank to the New Year together. But I would work, to his disgust. Still he understands pretty well the strange madness that possesses me, and is not at all unsympathetic. I explained to him one day the difference between working to suit yourself and working to suit other people. He’d defy the world at any time he chose no matter how poor his fortunes.
Well, now we wait for mail. Already I’m impatient for Olson’s return and that cannot well be before the day after to-morrow. Rockwell and I walked around the bay in the afternoon more to have a look toward Seward where our mail comes from than for anything else. But Seward was hidden in falling snow. All the bay was shrouded in mist and snow. But our own cove was beautiful to look back upon with its white peaks and dark forest, and far down at the water’s edge our tiny cabins from one of which the thick smoke of the smoldering fire curled upwards.