Thursday, November seventh.
A true winter’s day with the snow deep on the ground and the profound and characteristic winter silence of the out-of-doors to be sensed even in this ever silent place. At earliest daylight began a heavy thunderstorm with lightning all about and a downpour of hail. It occurred intermittently throughout the morning.... I did the washing, using Olson’s washboard and getting the clothes nearly white.
Olson is full of amusing gossip. To the curious in Seward who asked him why I chose to be in this God-forsaken spot he replied: “You damn fools, you don’t understand an artist at all. Do you suppose Shakespeare wrote his plays with a silly crowd of men and women hanging around him? No, sir, an artist has to be left alone.”
“Well, what does he paint?”
“That’s his business. Sometimes I see he has a mountain there on a picture, and next time I see it’s been changed to a lake or something else.”
MEAL TIME
One can imagine Olson with his questioners. The thing he most wants, his ambition, one might say, is to make people sit up and take notice of Fox Island, his homestead. It is in fact one reason why he brought us here to live. Thanks to its amateur detective, Seward had rejoiced for a short time in rumors of a German spy on Fox Island. I told Olson that the authorities might still come and remove me. He flared up, “I’d like to see them try it! We could take to the mountains with guns, and more than one of them would never try the thing again.” And then he went on to tell me how in Idaho he had tracked for days and weeks a notorious gang of outlaws and horse-thieves and at last run them to earth,—one of his most thrilling and, I believe, absolutely true stories of his adventures.
At this moment a steamer is blowing in the bay, navigating by the echo from the mountain faces. She is near to us now but hidden by the snowstorm.
Rockwell has begun to write the story of a long, waking dream of his. It’s a sweet idea and reads most amusingly in his own queer spelling. Now, though it is already late, I must draw a while longer and then, after bathing in the bread pan, sit up in bed and read a chapter of the life of Blake.