THE saga of our days in Montgomery County went into the letters I sent back. Because those friends in State College had taught me to get on the level with myself and think straight, I found that I wanted to go on talking with them, to answer their questions even before I was asked. So it was that I spent long nights when physical work had to stop, typing out pages and pages and sending them off from the mailbox down by the dirt road at the edge of our five acres. I kept copies of everything I wrote because I had acquired the habit of such order in the days when all my letters took the form of business correspondence. Today I am glad I did so, because those letters captured the mood of our life on the farm, and they hold it still.

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Telford, Pennsylvania

December 23, 1940

My dear friends:

According to the dictionary which you gave me, an object is anything that can be touched with three fingers, also anything that can be perceived with the senses. Whatever I see and touch, after one week’s struggle with the hostility of different objects, I also perceive by the sense of pain, such as tools, nails, splinters, fire. But this letter, the first one written in our new home, will show you that neither fatigue nor eight sore fingers can keep me from telling you that it has been a long week since we left Shingletown.

Monday we arrived at Hickling’s home, driving through a terrible rainstorm the whole way (even the heavens cried when we left you), and entered our new house early the next morning with a blue and sunny heaven as our welcome.

A pleasant surprise awaited us. The house had a complete pipeless heating-system in the cellar and it was already warm. Mr. Bergey had found out that without such a furnace the house would be impossible and he made the installation in a single day. At noon the truck arrived, I helped unload, and, we had all our things in the house in two hours. At two in the morning we were sitting in our living room with clean floors and clean windows, all the furniture in place except books, glass and pictures, just as it was in the schoolhouse.

Tuesday we arranged the kitchen, I unpacked the bookcases and cleaned the attic. Thursday we scraped the floor of the dining room and the stairs, in the evening I prepared ninety Christmas cards, and then we painted our postbox with a lot of fun and a fight. It reminded me of our first artistic work in the bathroom of the schoolhouse. Milada insists that there is no doubt about my farmer character, so clumsy are the letters I made. Friday I worked over a huge area of the place so that no single paper or tin can could be found. Now I am sorry that we are not located along some important highway. This Friday everyone would have stopped to ask who lived on such clean land.

This evening Milada arranged our glass in one part of the high bookshelves. Sunday (in all secrecy) I scrubbed the floor of the bedroom and the hall. Milada cleaned the bathroom, and after this work of six hours we arranged our pictures. Today I dislocated every bone in my tired body digging a scientific ditch next to the shed, very complicated and probably wrong, and Milada the angel is preparing tomorrow’s Christmas dinner.

There are a lot of improvements which show the good will of our landlord. New eaves on the house, three workers painting all the buildings white with dark green window and door boards, chicken house roofs repaired and even the beginnings of a new road up to the house. I have not touched the chicken house and have put the date of this work for January first. Droppings bring luck.

As you see from this report, Jan the farmer has proved to be only a good interior decorator and a slow, but efficient floor scrubber, so your congratulations must wait until the first chicken house report. But I forgot . . . also a perfect garbage remover, as my Friday record shows.

The house is beautiful and it seems like a dream to walk down the open stairs or look through our fifteen windows (attic not included) over forests, fields and hills. I can even forget for a moment my uneasiness . . .

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December 29, 1940

. . . You cannot imagine how clearly the spirit of your friendship spoke to us from the lines of your letters. Through your generous gift you have assured yourselves that the New Yorker will prevent any rust in the joints of my brain and will safeguard our future discussions from nothing but chickens, drainage and vegetable troubles.

Seeing a New Yorker lying on the table under our lamp, I am reminded of the way I read copies of the Reader’s Digest so carefully when we first came to America, believing it to be the best possible way of learning what Americans were thinking and saying. I stopped reading it fairly soon. Good books are not written either to be burned or to be presented to the reader in a concentrated teaspoon dose for quick and easy digestion. To read means to check up a writer in his thoughts, arguments and conclusions. And that means training in independent thinking. From such thinking we learn to evaluate human relationships, we gain wisdom, and we are trained in logical reasoning . . . all too important to be left to a book-dietitian’s formula. It is like reading a recipe instead of eating the food that it describes.

You are perfectly right, dear Mrs. Graves, when you say that something is wrong with my Christmas card. Jan is not carrying water to the house in heavy pails, but since Friday he has been digging ditches to draw off water after a heavy rain. Where is Milada? Inside, hoping that Jan may not come back too soon, because the kitchen stove has gone out and she has no breakfast for him. This has happened only three times in twelve days, but why should I drop such a fine opportunity to be a martyr?

Yesterday we went with Mr. and Mrs. French to Norristown to shop. I bought heavy galoshes and water fountains for baby chicks, which are doubtless wrong models for practical use. Milada bought curtains for the windows which she must return tomorrow because they are already wrong. You will ask why I am so nasty to Milada in reporting breakfast-and-curtain troubles with such evident joy. But please, consider what a man can do who is married to a woman of such outstanding qualities as those of my wife? She works day and night as though she were two men, she is handy, she knows everything, even how to fill in holes she has made in the wall, she provides me with delicious dinners (I do not say breakfasts), and takes care of me. She even drives on days when I should desert the car and walk.

Today I looked only for a moment in the chicken and brooder houses. They are so dirty my skin went cold and I felt I had to take a bath at once. Now I shall have the task of taking this matter in my hands without delay (and with double gloves) because February first is the latest date for the inauguration of the chicken farm with some speeches, the usual music, and ribbon cutting. One must make concessions to the public, even though we should prefer a more simple ceremony with only champagne and a cold buffet.

The place is still lovely, even with the mud, and we are very happy. On New Year’s Eve, when midnight brings the new 1941, our thoughts and our prayers will include you all . . .

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January 5, 1941

. . . Last week I worked every day in the poultry houses. Sorry to disappoint you, but the present cycle of my mind is not “Broilers—layers—feed and eggs,” as you suggest, but “Garbage—rubbish—dirt and more dirt.” I cleaned the brooder house of a three-year accumulation of old manure, about three inches deep, which stuck to the floor as though it were cement. I carried out the fixtures from the chicken house, where bird cadavers were still lying around. And I regard these unpleasant moments as perfectly right; otherwise our life would be suspiciously lovely. Such work is the ring of Polycrates which I am throwing away as an offering to appease the envying demons.

Our living room windows are covered with beautiful curtains, the stove works fine since my last complaint and the breakfast is late no more. The furnace is wonderful; we are more than ever grateful for it as we listen to the storm that has been blowing around our house since yesterday, shaking the windows in a mad attempt to get in. It will take another couple of weeks before I can order my first baby chicks, because I want to have everything clean and disinfected before I bring my first flock on the place. . . .

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January 12, 1941

. . . In the matter of writing I am, alas, a bachelor, so the stand is five letters for the Shingletown team, four letters for the lonely Telford player.

Monday I started in earnest as a farmer. The stable work was very hard and ugly and I spare you a complete description of the episodes involved in it. They would require a Céline to do them justice. Now a big truckload of manure, with all its horrors, waits to be carried away. Yesterday I tried a cross and ripsaw and a plane for the first time in my life. I put six window glasses in a sash, after having broken them myself the previous week, and now I would not be afraid to build a three-floor house.

While I write, a very charming person sits next to the fire working patiently on her curtains for the staircase and kitchen. She tells no long stories about her own hard work, she does not compare herself with Mrs. Hercules, she does not complain about her own burned hands and arms in keeping the home fires smoothly burning. She gives me all the credit as hard-working superman, because she is Milada, the housewife. She is the permanent sunshine of the Rieger Place, and should my chicks show any weakness in bones or feather growth, I shall use Milada as a good Vitamin D compensation for them, in place of sunshine. No late breakfasts any more, everything is perfect. If she ever finishes her curtains for the windows on the second floor, I shall build a third in order to give her some new windows to decorate. . . .

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January 26, 1941

Writing this letter once again on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I do not know if it will reach you tomorrow or later in the week. It depends upon my ability to walk the four hundred yards from our house along the completely glazed road to our mailbox at the edge of the forest. This is the second time a stormy ice-rain has transformed the whole land around us into an immense skating pond. It has even cut the antenna of our radio and broken many branches on our trees and shrubs.

This time the storm arrived on Friday, when Milada was in Souderton purchasing provisions, and you can imagine how nervous and anxious I was before she reached the house. We could never understand your newsreels when we saw them in Europe, showing blizzards. Now I know what they meant.

. . . Since Christmas our neighbors, the Bergeys, have been asking me each week if my chickens have arrived. There are days when I am equally skeptical about the speed of my work. Mr. Lawless, head of the poultry marketing division of the Agriculture Department in Harrisburg, came to see us one day this week with Mr. French and stayed for dinner. He agreed with me that all danger of disease in and around the houses must be checked before I put the flock in them.

We had a terrible rainstorm the day after he was here and this evening both the brooder and chicken house are showing great water spots coming up through the cement floors which were considered perfect. I now have to face the difficult problem of how to repair or construct a new seventy by forty-foot cement floor.

Sometimes I think that my way of working in this new situation is very consistent with the characteristic habits of my people. Americans like quick work, turning out as fast as possible a great number of results in the shortest time, taking risks and also chances, trying to produce something cheap in large numbers. It makes for many mistakes, but it also makes for much brilliant new work, like modern music and painting and even modern American writing.

We are still strange to this way. We work slowly and carefully, taking no chances, but trying for a result of high quality. Either we will surprise everyone with the quality of our chickens and eggs, and thus demand unusually good prices as compensation for the loss of time in preparation, or we will be failures.

However, the first baby chicks are already ordered, an electric stove is on its way, and the feed is decided. Yesterday I was sitting on the roof of the brooder house, repairing the chimney pipe of the coal stove, and I couldn’t help thinking how many things I have learned to do that I never dreamed I could touch without becoming ridiculous. Moreover, I have learned to say such things as this to you, which is best of all.

. . . I want to visit Philadelphia once again before I become the prisoner of my babies, because I must have a dog and some cats. A dog because I am outside all day long, alone, talking to myself not only because I feel lonely, but because my voice helps to overcome the unpleasant feelings that get hold of me in the barn among mysterious shadows of rat holes and other thrilling secrets. Cats we must have because mice will soon become a menace in the outbuildings where they already hop around me as I work.

Speaking of men and mice, not à la Steinbeck, I offer you evidence to prove that I am the worst softy in the U.S.A., Jan the hardy farmer. Yesterday I worked in the barn carrying out manure as I have been doing for days. Fifty wheelbarrows have already gone on the garden plot. Two mice of unattractive appearance got out of my way, and then the sweetest little mouse came out from the pile, hopped away in a corner some ten feet from me, and stopped there. An hour later the creature was still sitting or walking around at the same distance, watching me and following my work with the greatest interest as I talked to her. Now I am afraid the cats of the future will get her.

I was also bad about the sparrows. They were nesting in one of the chicken houses and I knew they were a great danger to poultry because they are disease carriers. So I removed the very inefficient nests they had put under the roof inside the house. I was sorry to do it, but the nest construction was so poor and showed such laziness and carelessness in home culture, it was relatively easy for me to act. Next day I saw the whole clan sitting sadly on the fence. There was still ice all over the ground and nothing for them to feed on, so I begged Milada for some bread crumbs, pretending there were some song birds in the garden. Now the sparrows make so much noise under the window every morning until I have passed out their ration, I see only one way to balance the warning of the poultry textbooks (which say that sparrows will visit faraway farms for food and bring diseases back to the place where they roost). I must feed my sparrows so well they will not visit other places, but live clean and stable lives right here.

Poor Milada, to have such a crazy husband. He’s very little use to her for company these days. After being alone from morning to night, she sees him sit around in the evening too tired to talk, or else reading bulletins to find out how much they contradict each other.

For one whole week we were iced in and lived on our iron food-and-cigarette reserve. (I may change from our current brand soon because we so dislike the radio announcer’s sophisticated and artificial voice on their program.) Now we are rained in, with water all around the house. It will have to be a wonderful spring and summer to compensate for these days, especially . . . when the Riegers receive their four hundred babies in a few weeks by mail.

Forgive the delay in this letter. Last Sunday I could not write at all. After disinfecting the brooder house with a strong acid my eyes were inflamed. But they, as well as my leg and even my fingers, are well again. Our thoughts are always with you . . .

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March 1, 1941

. . . It was very sad news about Mr. Kline’s death. I am always embarrassed when I must write congratulations or condolences, because if they are sincere (and insincere notes I do not write at all) they show my pitiful deficiency in any expression in the English language which is not made of common phrases. To tell of our deep grief about Mr. Kline’s end would need some new and unprofaned words.

Often I had the feeling that he represented an image in one of Balzac’s stories. Another Mr. Kline was the man who stopped me on the way to your garden to ask me with a faint smile in an otherwise motionless face what I thought about the heroic Greeks, and whether or not I agreed with him that Great Britain was a fine nation. He didn’t have what you call a higher education, and he had no place in the world of big shots and the bla-bla-bla of their after-dinner speeches. He was a simple and unpretentious American who liked flowers and birds and people, and so he had a natural instinct for fairness and real freedom.

. . . Your statement about my inconsistency in asking slower business methods but quicker political decisions has perplexed me. I wrote you one fine answer and then tore it up. In it I agreed with you and admitted that I was wrong this time. I beat my chest for a whole page in the courtyard of your rightness, shivering in my mental shirt. And then suddenly in the midst of this confession of my sins against logic I slid back to my former statement. Why, I started to argue, is it extreme of me to complain that you are too sudden in your business enterprises and too slow in your political decisions? I developed a most successful argument to a point where even Jack could not overthrow it, and to a perfection that would have made Barney smile with satisfaction as he filled his empty pipe with new tobacco, and then I tore the letter up. I decided that with your usual kindness you had been trying to appease my bitterness only. So the precious pearls of my arguments went into the wastebasket. In old times, great spirits of my size had an advantage. Their “torn-in-pieces” letters could be put together a thousand years later from broken stones and still be used for the enlightenment of the world!

Since then your second letter has come, telling me of your understanding of my bitterness since reading Maurice Hindus’ fine and true book, We Shall Live Again. Now you know why I am so suspicious, so impatient, so uneasy. . . .

Since yesterday we have been snowed in. Twice I had to shovel snow out of the attic. We do not know where it came from. Milada found a dead woodpecker up there. It was lying under some stovepipes with a wound in the throat. We are very sad about this first death on our place.

This morning one side of our house had a snow wall of about eight feet, covering all the windows of the first floor. The brooder house, chicken house and workshop are completely closed in with snow. So is the car in the shed. When it comes out it will probably be a very old-fashioned model of a Chevrolet.

Fortunately Mrs. Bergey sent a horseman from their place to see if we were still alive, and he was so kind as to ride for some milk and eggs. Later another horseman came with more food. Many weeks ago I suggested that Milada had better keep a kind of iron reserve in the house. So far we have plenty of jam, horse radish, and some boxes of cleaning powder.

Should this letter reach you, there is no danger of starvation. Should it not go forward by mail, it means that we are cut off from the outside world and will be found only when brave men reach this lonely place in the spring, after shoveling out a passage. They will find a very beautiful woman (snow and ice preserve the natural appearance) and an old man (shaved today for such a possibility) arm in arm in the midst of empty boxes and cans of jam and bathroom cleaning powder.

Don’t think I’ve been sitting here without trying to shovel away the wall of snow to meet any possible rescuers halfway. I did try, but when I went two feet forward, new snow came behind me. So I gave up and let nature be nature.

With nothing else to do at the moment, we are trying to decide whether to spend money on the guest room or the kitchen. The idea of buying a refrigerator seems perverse today, and to have a guest room ready but no way of connection with the world is also for the moment uninteresting.

We must be very careful with our money. The farm expenses and the heating costs are very heavy. And I must admit that the nearer I come to the day when the chicks arrive, the less I am able to see how those poor little birds and their future little eggs can balance our investments and our running expenses. I am more and more suspicious that successful poultry farmers are either Five-and-Ten heirs or have in addition to their poultry farm some cute little steel plant or ammunition factory to help them show a profitable chicken business.

It is now March 2 . . .

My letters become less and less satisfactory as answers to yours. Both my mind and my fingers are clumsy after the day’s hard work. What are we really, my fingers say in revolt, farmer hands or those of a writer? They still preserve a nice way of qualifying my typewriting.

I think we shall have to name our place The Dogless Home. It will express a sad fact and will also give uninformed people an opportunity to pronounce it The Douglas Home, which will sound aristocratic and fashionable. According to Pennsylvania’s game law, now old and forgotten, but reviewed in 1939, no foreign-born residents of this state who are not full citizens may possess a gun or a dog. And such a lovely doghouse was already prepared for our future dog, painted green, and placed just in front of the house so that each morning my dog would have been waiting for me at the door, eager for the coming day of work. Finish.

This morning another horseman brought us a bottle of milk and some eggs and now we feel very much in America, the land of cowboys, Indians, pony express and shootings.

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March 26, 1941

. . . Three lovely letters on my desk remind me every night that I have seriously neglected our correspondence. When I tell you the reason, I think you will understand. Our baby chicks arrived on March twelfth, when snow was still on the ground. It was a day of tremendous excitement. The brooder house had been prepared so carefully it looked like a nursery. Milada took them out of the boxes . . . five hundred yellow, feathered creatures, cross Orpington and White Rocks. They filled the brooder house with their chirping and they looked as beautiful and innocent as an Easter card.

All day long Milada sat there on the floor, trying to keep the temperature even in the electric stove. She hasn’t had enough to do, keeping the house in perfect condition, cooking, doing our laundry, and all those other hundreds of things which a perfect housewife finds to occupy each day and which nobody can see when they are done. Since March twelfth she has added to her cares the brooder stove, the drinking water for the chicks, and a lot of other outside chores.

Now that the chicks are here, I see that my instinct for postponing their arrival as long as possible was not wrong. They take one’s entire day, and the whole program for the next period—preparation of the chicken house, summer shelters and sun porches, soon the start of the vegetable garden, care for the neglected orchard, and so on—has yet to begin. We start the day at six-thirty in the morning and when I finish my outside work with the dark (now about seven) I am sometimes so tired that I fall asleep in my chair. Yet I always try to learn some new things from textbooks and bulletins, and I never finish the day before eleven-thirty.

Please do not think that I am complaining about a life which we both chose voluntarily. It is ourselves of which we complain, our own weakness and inability to fulfill the tasks that someone must do. We often remember an article by E. B. White in Harper’s about the endless and goalless work of a farmer. Already we live as its evidence.

I know you are expecting some fancy stories about my personal contact with these sweet little creatures, my reactions to them. I am sorry to disappoint you. I can give you stories about mice, sparrows and even a rabbit that walked round and round the house during the cold wave and showed no fear when we took salad leaves and a carrot to its hole in the snow. I have had new and lovely adventures with a half-wild cat which I am trying to tame. There was an ugly little dog which I found dying in the snow and carried to the next farm, according to the law of Pennsylvania. But do not expect any pleasant stories about chicks.

During the entire first week after they arrived you could have seen me sitting among the babies (no wonder poor Milada has to work so hard if her husband lies around in the brooder house), trying to get acquainted with their manners and habits and ways. They crawled over me, they slept in my hands, they perched on my shoulders and my shoe tips. If someone could have taken a picture of me in such a position, you would have admired it. But no picture would have indicated what that week taught me. Sparrows have plenty of intelligence; a dog has real love in his heart; even a cat has a genuine instinct which makes it pretend affection for the sake of its own comfort. Chickens have nothing. They have neither a heart nor a brain. They are simply stupid. Droppings are their only means of expression.

If a human being will take the trouble, he can learn by what manner different animals communicate with each other. And if he has skill and patience, he can often learn to imitate an animal in such an act, and so establish a closer relationship with his pets. We all know enough to rub the fur of cats, for instance. Chickens, I can report, are unapproachable. These commercialized, artificially raised creatures have no soul whatever, only a stomach and a cruel egoismus which is terrible. There will be no danger whatever of making pets of them. Perhaps it is just as well, since we shall have to sell them eventually. But still I am not happy about my discovery. I am eager to spend my energies once again on spinach, carrots and beans.

Milada informs me that there are blooms all over the orchard, that there are lilacs all around our house, and the meadow across the road is completely covered with violets. I must take her word for these wonders; my days are spent looking down at the litter which I have to turn, on the boards which I am cutting, on the stony ground of my ditches. . . .

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May 6, 1941

. . . It is impossible to conceal from you the great disappointment I felt after you left us, because of the precious hours we had to spend with those stupid and ungrateful birds instead of with you. How many things could have been said, how many thoughts exchanged during your visit, if we had known ahead of time that you were coming and had not been engaged in the silly task of moving those bores from a once perfectly clean house to another clean spot, just to have them dirty the second the way they had done the first.

God bless you for your lovely letters, even though I can answer them so seldom now. At least your visit has made it easier for me to tell you the things you want to know about our current affairs. It is nearly three weeks since you were here. Since then, I have the affair of the pump to report.

On the eve of my birthday, when I came in from outside dirtier and more tired than I had ever been before, ready to take a bath and dine very late, the electric pump announced with a furious rattle that something was wrong. We were without a drop of water. Milada went in the car to bring some water from the Bergeys, but not enough for a bath . . . only for the chicks and a little for the table.

By the next day the place was crawling with artisans, spoiling the peace and making only temporary arrangements for a small water reserve. Then a firm was sent for, to drill a new well (in the terms of our lease, Fisher is obliged to drill a new one if our old well becomes inadequate) but they refused to do the job. We are looking forward with interest to future complications. Should our reserve supply go before the matter is settled, Fisher will be obliged to carry water to us, a very odd job for him to do.

In the midst of this critical mess, four hundred new chicks arrived three days earlier than I had ordered, with the brooder house still uncleaned and no permanent water supply. Now we have eight hundred birds on the place.

Preliminary calculations indicate that the first flock profit can bring no more than fifty dollars above purchasing price, feed, and fuel for four hundred birds in ten weeks of day and night work. I cannot believe this is possible.

Forgive this letter. As we say in our country, when one’s heart is full, his mouth runs over . . . and my heart is full indeed. Milada reminds me that the birds need feed and water. . . .

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May 12, 1941

. . . Today the feed expert came to see our chicks. He expressed surprise about how well the old flock was doing and how heavy the birds are. He also said that Milada’s baby chicks were exceptionally well feathered. We have had no losses since my last letter. . . .

When we heard the announcement of the landing of Hess and the description of his “flight” I stated at once that the whole thing was a swindle. I believe Hess was invited by the still-existing Munich clique in order to arrange a peace. . . .

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May 28, 1941

. . . Lately we have been entertaining. A couple from Prague; a former employee with her American husband; Mrs. French and her four children. It overwhelms us a little, after the winter of solitude.

The well driller is still on the place, mostly fishing in the well for his tools. It is only fifty-eight feet deep, but he makes a lot of noise as he dynamites and then takes a rest and dynamites again. So far, still no water. The vegetable garden is in pitiful shape . . . too dry and full of buckwheat. Two hundred and sixty square feet are already seeded and today we hope to plant about sixty tomatoes. . . .

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June 20, 1941

. . . I have many good things to report at last. The severe winter is nearly forgotten; the outbuildings and the land look so neat it is difficult to convince a visitor of their former state in the days when the smell of the broken waste pipe nearly poisoned us; we now have the perfume of freshly cut hay all around us; and a hundred-foot-deep artesian well has been giving us clean, cold water for three weeks. The old one went out on my birthday, and the new one came in six weeks later on Milada’s birthday. And the vegetable garden shows straight and stoneless lines of green, in spite of all the morning-glories that fight desperately against my sore fingers.

And yet . . . there is bad news, too. On June third, and again on June twelfth and once again on June nineteenth, the flock of four hundred birds that were ready for marketing showed the first signs of the most mortal—and still in its cause the most mysterious—disease of chickens, coccidiosis.

With great energy and work we have managed to control the disease so far. The advisor who came to help had nothing to add to what we had already done. It is a disease which can kill a whole flock in a few hours, but with us it has taken, in three outbreaks, only five birds. The flock should still give us a sufficient return to cover the purchase price and feed bill of $300. . . . if the birds do not start to be sick again in the very last hour before the auction next Wednesday.

Completely gone for us (not with the wind, but with bloody droppings) is all ambition and all belief in this existence. We are disappointed and disgusted. According to the best experts, coccidiosis strikes some day anyhow, but even if the disease had not appeared this time, the best result we could have managed after two and a half months of back-breaking work would have been only a few dollars above feed and purchasing price, which is poor for so much work and risk. Now even this pitiful sum has gone for medicine and supplement feed to bring the birds back to their former weight. We only hope and pray now that the birds will live until next week.

I have always disliked stupid people, and now it seems that we have joined the group. Only now we are hearing remarks from farm experts to the effect that poultry farming is a gamble. If once you make a profit, the next time a disease will take it away. But we never meant to gamble. Had we done so, we would never have been such fools as to gamble on little, dirty chicks. I understand the stock exchange far better than I do the unclearly written textbooks on poultry farming. Conclusion: if I gamble, I do not work; if I work, I cannot regard this as gambling.

I didn’t think I was a gambler when I started this business, but other people did. All right: a bad gambler is a person who is afraid to throw a bad card away . . . a man who buys stocks or bonds, sees the price drop, but has not the courage to sell with loss in order to be free for another trial. This investment of ours was apparently a mistake, influenced by some idealistic notions of angel songs (see Maurice Hindus’ last book) which have turned out to be not even a dog’s bark.

Perhaps “to be or not to be” is the actual theme, with the important difference that this Hamlet is not an interesting young prince with lightning rapier, but an old and tired pseudo-farmer in dirty overalls with a scraper in his hand. Shakespeare’s immortal question, translated into John Smith American’s “So what?” is still difficult for us to answer.

We have discussed our problems for days, with as much realism as we could bring to them. The disease of our birds is only one phase. The war is no better, but only much worse, and I can close my mind to it no longer. An old Czech saying, poorly translated, goes: “I know that I must die, but please do not push me so rashly.” Perhaps the summer will bring a clearer picture of what we must do next.

After the sale of the four hundred birds, we still have another flock of four hundred. These we intended as part of our first layer flock. Under the present uncertain circumstances, we have altered our plans to put these birds in summer shelters. It would be a terrific task to carry water and feed about four hundred feet to the range, and why should we work ourselves to death for the feed company, with all good faith in them? We have decided to put the birds in the long chicken house and sell them as soon as possible.

I shall work at a slower tempo to keep the vegetable garden, the lawn and the fixtures in shape. I may even clean some of the summer houses on the range, simply to prove that it was not fear of heavy work which changed our intentions. If I were a writer I might try my hand at some short stories . . . Death in the Chicken Pen, or Aphorisms from a Manure Pile. Since, according to the way we read in this age, the headline is more important than the contents beneath, the stories might be considered already seventy-five per cent ready for publication.

It will be a pity if we must liquidate our home. So many fine hopes and plans have gone into it. But our newly acquired experience now makes what seemed to be a promising project only dull and senseless. Our investment lies around us in brooder stoves, drinking fountains, chicken wire and other tools which are only galvanized trash.

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July 3, 1941

. . . Yes, for awhile the blood-diarrhea of our stupid birds stole the show from Hitler and Stalin. Perhaps the confrontation of such a disease with world history has a very sound meaning for us. Now I have regained my proper sense of events and I feel strong enough to face even such problems as the Nazi attack on their friends, the Russians. . . .

My only prejudice against Russia has been one with my personal refusal to accept regimentation in my private life. Another dislike I once harbored against their system—based on cruel persecution of those who held differing opinions from the men in power—I have lost since Munich. Today my thoughts are probably more cruel than those of any Redgărdist when I dream of the day when we can repay every single blow to Nazi criminals and gangsters for the suffering they have caused to millions of people.

There is no doubt now that public opinion in America is on Britain’s side, but there are still a very large number of Nazi admirers in this country. Unfortunately, public memory is the most pitiful part of the people’s mind. Any change of face will be accepted if only the slogans are loud and attractive. Now the friends of Germany in this country will try to tell us that if Russia wins, Stalin will have a natural right to dictate the terms of peace; so who wants the Reds to win? Should Russia lose the war, it would mean not only the most tremendous success for Germany from the standpoint of economics, geography and military glory, but the German sympathizers can then point out that Nazism is the holy savior of the world.

Take the case of Finland. Always more Fascist than democratic, this state has been well advertised, chiefly by men like Mr. Hoover, who need a public pet in order to remind the world that they are still alive. The Finns have fought bravely, even if you deduct sixty per cent of the advertised results which were concocted not for the glory of the Finns but for the shame of the Russians. Soon we will get the first report of the smashing victory of a Finnish patrol (one sergeant and two men) who have annihilated one Red panzer division (in this case they will not be “Russian”), and after a Finnish steam bath at home, have started at once to encircle the whole Red army, already in flight over the Urals.

Radio commentators are now telling us of some shift in the Nazi government from the party to the military clique. What a clever lie this is, but how worn out! It makes it so much easier for the world to forget the godless Nazi and think instead of some fair, tall, blond German officer fighting against the Red Pest.

Let us finish the matter for today. I am too tired to look up new words in the dictionary!

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July 12, 1941

Dear Eddie:

We wait eagerly for definite information about your arrival . . . With the humidity at 92 in New York and heat at 110 in Philadelphia, we will probably have it 90 and 100 here. But we shall do our best to keep you cool. There is one shade tree, the icebox, the bathroom with really cold water, and plenty of discussion about the future of the world . . . a very icy outlook.

In other letters to Shingletown I made the report on our first flock. When the truck with 393 birds left the place, you can imagine how we felt. Even a feeling of sadness about this act of perfidy (raising and nursing for delivery to the butcher) was pushed away by the feeling of relief to be rid of them. Two days later the second flock showed the first symptoms of the same disease, but we checked it once again by inhuman work.

Otherwise we take life a lot easier. It is ironic that nobody could work during this present heat wave, and so our mental picketing of the poultry enterprise by way of two easy garden chairs on the lawn has become a simple and natural escape from the heat. . . .

Funny things happen to people of our kind, those the world calls softies and dreamers. Last night we were both afraid to go to sleep, and so we sat on in the living room without talking but in the sort of mutual understanding that always exists between Milada and me, both feeling that life wasn’t very nice. Suddenly, outside the screen door in the kitchen, we heard a noise, something moving in the dark. It was a dog that had left its home for a reason of its own to come and sit down in front of our door and look with big, sad eyes into our room.

All day long this very nice dog has been around the place, following us wherever we move. He made no inquiry about my citizenship papers; he just came and stayed. It is one of those little things in life that is more impressive than a great miracle. He’s just an ordinary dog, but he has good, human eyes through which the Lord speaks to us at the right moment in our solitude. . . .

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July 29, 1941

Dear Eddie:

There is so much friendship, sympathy and kindness in the words that recount your impressions of our home. Yours is the heart of a true poet who does not need to recite the words of somebody else.

Milada is still remembering the old-barn event, when you walked with her over the meadows to get a new view of something we had not appreciated. Through you, she discovered beauty in those ruins, but I can’t agree with either of you this time. I avoid my own image in a mirror and I have the same aversion for rotten barns, those dumping places for junk. They remind me too much of myself, except for what you call their preserved beauty “in abstract.”

When Milada reads this, as she always does my letters to you, I shall observe her reaction with interest. I know in advance that she will come to my chair, caress my hair, and say that I am a fool. And I shall enjoy the moment in the same way, grievous and grateful, as the old, useless barn probably felt when Milada came across the fields to admire it. . . .

Now that we have no real task in the country we miss more than ever the mental and spiritual contact with friends. When we went to New York last Thursday I promised myself and Milada to get good and drunk. All the way in I repeated my intention. The result: three ice-cream sodas, vanilla with strawberry. I haven’t the energy even for such a resolution.

And New York? It’s always the same story. Far away from the big town, we think about all the opportunities we are missing in this boom period. Then we go through the Hudson Tunnel and arrive on the island of prosperity; we see first a hundred and later thousands of people walking, running or simply standing on the avenues; and they look exactly the same as they always did. They are still unable to find any meaning in their lives.

The women on Fifth Avenue are more beautiful than ever (or is it only an illusion caused by absence?). There are the same types of successful men: the one who is just off a luxury liner from Bermuda; the well-dressed young fellow who, thanks to his shaving cream, has become an executive in his firm; the serious, older man who prides himself on the huge life insurance policies he carries. They are all old acquaintances through the pages of advertisements in America’s magazines.

We saw some of our refugee friends. Even those who appeared to be most successful spent a considerable amount of time asking us how much it would take to establish themselves as farmers. That surprised us. We tried to be honest with them, but it is obvious that they have all been putting on a front for so long they are now unable to accept the simplest facts in a straightforward manner without searching out a hidden meaning, and not believing it when no such ulterior meaning is to be found.

We also had lunch with our Czech consul general and his wife in their home, and an interesting meeting with the Czech military attaché. There is still nothing definite so far as my being able to take part in a Czech military formation, though I have not yet lost hope. . . .

The dog who came to us, and liked us enough to stay, has gone again. I was sitting beside him on the lawn, telling him a lot of things that human beings wouldn’t understand. A farmer came along the road, carrying a gun under his arm. He saw the dog, stopped, and then shouted at me: “That dog is a bad one. He chases rabbits and kills them. I’ve reported him to the game warden. He’s gotta be killed. We need them rabbits ourselves . . . for food.”

The farmer went on and the dog put his head in my lap and looked up at me, because he had understood what the farmer meant, if not his words. We got in touch with Bill Hickling and he suggested a dog farm as the place to take him, but they had a hundred dogs already and would promise only to shoot him for us. So we took the poor creature to Harmonville to the S.P.C.A. All the way the dog was happy, enjoying the view of the country as though he were a child. When I took him to the pen and the attendant closed the door of his cell he looked at me as though I were a friend who had betrayed him. And then he stopped looking at me. I put my hand through the wire and touched his nose, but he made no response. He just hung his head and looked in the vicinity of my legs. He was alone before I left him. After all the love he had given us in our unhappy days, he didn’t deserve such an end.

When I went out I felt ashamed for the whole human race, for the whole world, and especially for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

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August 27, 1941

. . . It was not so long ago that we felt extremely sorry for people who wouldn’t keep their places in good shape. With a kind of petit-bourgeois indignation, we considered their idleness wrong. “Look at the weeds in their garden, look at their broken fence,” we would say in our own worthiness. “How can they sit in rocking chairs instead of doing their work?”

During this whole last month we are showing suspicious symptoms ourselves of white-trash disease. Every day I announce loudly and decisively that tomorrow I shall work in the garden, clean out all the wood, dig some ditches along the road, clean the chicken houses of the last reminders of my successful chicken venture. Every day I say it, sitting in an easy chair with some uninteresting book or magazine. But the garden remains untouched. Except for some seventy tomato plants and an enormous crop of self-sufficient cucumbers and carrots, the whole thing is a mess.

I make myself think of the man in the New Yorker cartoon who is trying to fight the morning-glories. His wife yells from the window “There it comes again!” as a branch jerks up from behind the corner of the house ready to strangle him. Or if you prefer Esquire cartoons, we are two of their bill-hillies in the flesh. When I planted last spring, I doubled the amounts of every vegetable we would need . . . fifty feet for ourselves, fifty feet for the rabbits. But they have been greedy and eaten more than their share. These charming creatures have taken advantage of me as a free dinner ticket.

I know it is uncertainty about the future, as well as deep disappointment with the past, which lays this physical and mental fatigue over me. But knowing it is no help in overcoming it.

. . . Your description of the state of mind in the Middle West this summer is something which I can understand, even if I do not agree with it. Out there, they think they have a right to live their own life without paying attention to the troubles of a world which seems very far away. Shall I recall all the names of those once independent states in Europe who considered their safety in relation to their distance from the zone of danger? You know them all. When Chamberlain remarked in 1938 that Czechoslovakia was a country “about which we do not know much,” America was amazed at such stupidity. When Belgium and Holland insisted to the last day that they had nothing to do with this struggle, they made on you in America the impression of fools.

And yet now, when finally it looks as though America would realize that no distance can save any state from this danger, when the old silly story of three thousand miles has been dropped and the U.S.A. could reach out and stop this avalanche . . . the Middle West laughs and says, “Yes, they’re scared to death of the Nazis on the east coast and on the west coast they’re jittery about the Japs. That’s what they get for not living where we do . . . safe in the middle.”

For us it has become each day clearer that America will never join this war. The point has been reached at which too much talk about one and the same matter has made it lose its meaning. I should have preferred a plain statement of nonparticipation to all these endless discussions. The whole situation has become ridiculous.

I am growing less and less able to stand this waiting and uncertainty. Last week we went to New York again. The Czech consulate has received no instruction with regard to the many Czechoslovak volunteers in this country. Yet I know that I must find a way to fight the Nazis. I do not care who is fighting next to me if only he fights right. I want to see my native country free, and if I do not fight now I shall have no right to help correct the wrongs which a peace conference may bring. I want to fight for the ideals without which our individual lives are without sense. I don’t need a flag, or a war song, or a famous general, or a slogan to fight for . . . I can fight my battle, my own war, under my own flag . . . my conscience.

After I left the Czech consulate I went straight to the Canadian office of the British consul general, and there I was told that they take volunteers from nineteen to forty-five years of age without regard to whether or not the volunteer is married. We went to Ellis Island and I received permission to cross the Canadian border and return to the United States from Canada. So I shall go to Montreal and ask for a physical examination. Should this be all right, I shall return to settle our affairs and then enter the Canadian army.

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September 16, 1941

Yesterday I passed the medical examination of the Canadian army with a rating in Category A. Having said that, which is most important, I can go back to give you lesser details.

Two days ago, Milada and I arrived here in Montreal. We were stopped at the border and questioned for several hours and for some time I thought they would not let us across, for they went back in my history to Grandfather, and always stuck when they reached the information that I had only my first citizenship papers for naturalization in the United States. Finally they thought to ask if we knew anyone in Canada. I said no, and then I remembered Arthur Randles. You may remember having heard me speak of him as an old friend in Prague.

They knew his name and let us go at once. As soon as we reached Montreal I called him by phone in Ottawa, where he is now high in whatever department governs the merchant marine. It was good to hear his voice. He told me to go to Major Scott in charge of recruiting in this district.

I left Milada in a small French restaurant on Ste. Catherine Street and presented myself at the recruiting office on St. James Street. To the general question of “What do you want?” I replied that I wanted to join the Canadian army if I could be assured of going overseas. They asked me the usual questions, and when they heard my record in the last war they said, “Do you want a commission?” “No,” I said. “I want to go over at once.”

So I was given the medical examination, and when I was found to be fit I was assigned to a bridge company in the Army Service Corps of the Royal Canadian army, given four weeks leave, and told to report to the barracks at Longueuil at the end of that time. I will be sworn in (without having to pledge allegiance to the King) and I expect to be on the other side of the Atlantic in a very short while.

There is no need to try to tell you what a load is off my heart and my mind. I have no taste for army life, and the prospect of the future gives me no joy. Yet I know that I am alive again, and I am grateful to Canada for having given me this opportunity to fight . . .

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September 22, 1941

. . . We returned last Friday from Montreal and immediately undertook to liquidate our farm. Milada made a great house-cleaning after our absence of eleven days, and I am putting the cellar in shape, the last one of my neglected duties on this place. Today our home looks as clean as though we intended to live here for many happy years.

Mr. Fisher has been good to us. He released us from our lease the moment Milada explained my decision to him. But there is still the problem of our furniture and farm fixtures. We must realize as much as possible on them because Milada will need every cent we can get out of the place. Perhaps it is good that there is so much work to do that we will have no time to think about the coming separation. Milada is brave and wonderful, and I have a strong feeling of certainty that she can make a career for herself without me.

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October 3, 1941

Now it comes, the matter for which you have all emphasized there can be no excuse. We will be unable to visit you before my departure.

Since our return from Canada I have been working day and night together with Milada in packing our belongings, separating them in different boxes for storage and for Milada’s immediate use, putting together the inventories for her insurance, arranging our documents, writing to many persons to introduce her in her future search for an existence . . . in short, doing as much as possible to make her life for the next period at least a little easier. It will be hard enough for her anyhow.

After this practical explanation, which I know you will understand, let me give you another reason which only now, when I see that our trip to Shingletown cannot be effected, can be considered, too. I am afraid of such a moment as it would be for me. It would be a long farewell, and if any leave-taking occupies more than five minutes one must either cry or yell . . . if you insist upon being genuine to the last minute.

People of our kind do not need to say special farewells to each other. No words are necessary to prove the true friendship you have shown us during nearly two and a half years. We have said and we have written what we feel for one another, but even with conversations and correspondence, our true feelings are deep in our hearts, and we know it. It would be good to see you once again. But do you think my remembrance needs it? Your faces will always be in my memory and your voices will be around me for a lifetime. No last meeting could make this limit longer.

This is not my farewell. It is only one of a long series of future letters I shall write from Canada and from abroad. Consider it simply the last one from America. Before long I hope to welcome you in Prague. . . .