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.When a sudden shower struck the earth the birds burst off the ground, flying in crazy arcs.Minutes later they were pecking in greener grass in a soft rain.Then from nowhere—from its grave—a mournful dark wind arose trailing bleak streamers of snow.Moments later the sun flared in the bright blue sky.Dubin, on Thoreau’s advice, stopped loitering in winter and called the season spring.He felt, oppressively, the need of an action to take.To do something differently—create a change that would lead to others.Why hadn’t he moved beyond the weight of winter? He was bored sick with expecting something to happen.He felt a hungry need to simplify his life, to see what he could do differently.He felt, before long, the need of a new place to be, observe from, reflect in—after the gloom of these past months and his uneasy compromises with Lawrence.Dubin at length decided to move his study from house to small barn, where years ago he had built a room to work in, and for one or another reason never furnished or occupied it.Kitty had liked the idea of his having another place to work nearby.She had foreseen a time when Maud and Gerald would come for summer visits with their children, who would not have to be quiet, because Dubin was out of the house.When the biographer inspected the study in the barn one day in early April it was damp—smelled distantly of silage and manure; and was abuzz with green-bellied flies that had hatched in the walls.The roof had dripped under the stress of heavy snowfalls, and several feet of top bookshelf were discolored.The smell was dank—winter’s corpse.But the electric heat worked and soon baked out dampness and attendant odors.A roofer replaced a section of cracked rotting shingles.Dubin killed off the green flies with a spray gun although Kitty had offered to shoo them with a newspaper.He had bought a rectangular pine table for a desk and transported two chairs from the attic room.Kitty gave him a floor lamp she had got as a wedding present when she married Nathanael; and Dubin bought a sofa that converted into a bed in case he felt like sleeping out in the heat of summer.She suggested putting in a phone but he resisted: “It costs money.”“Suppose I need you in a hurry?”“When have you since the kids grew up?”There was no telephone.Before installing himself Dubin went to the barn in work clothes and galoshes.He swept the study floor and with rags wiped everything within reach.Kitty offered to help but he said he had been wanting for months to do something with his hands.The study was a walled-off quarter of the rear of the barn, a two-windowed room with a long interior wall of shelves halfway to the slanted ceiling.A lavatory with bowl, sink, and a small window had been put in.Dubin lugged boxloads of books across the field in Kitty’s garden wheelbarrow.He enjoyed arranging the books, packets of note cards, folders full of manuscript pages, typed and retyped, on the shelves, carefully putting things in place after the disorder of the winter.He hung his picture of Thoreau on the wall by the window where the pine table stood, and near the picture, his Medal of Freedom.Kitty hoped he wouldn’t think of this room as his permanent place to work, though she conceded a change might be helpful now; and Dubin did not tell her that the move had seemed a little like permanently leaving the house.The morning he tried to work he was assailed by the shrilling of birds in the barn.Dubin knew that a family of starlings had been in the eaves inside the barn but there were no signs of nests.They had got in through a missing windowpane, and when he was cleaning the study he drove them out simply by appearing in the barn.He had opened the double doors and the birds rose with short frantic whistlings and whirring of wings, and flew out into the trees.They sat in the high branches shrilling raucously at him.Dubin replaced the pane and kept the barn doors shut.But the birds slithered in through a two-inch gap under one of the doors; he heard their noisy chirping when he sat down the next morning.He then nailed a long board to the bottom of the barn door.The starlings, after being driven out again, hung around complaining in nearby trees, then, in a week, disappeared.Kitty called him heartless.It had led to an argument about his character, their life together, who had failed whom.Ten days ago they had been to the Wilson farmhouse with Mrs.Meyer, who had come from Milwaukee to clear out her mother’s effects and put the farm up for sale.Mrs.Meyer had seemed stricken at all that had to be done and Kitty did much of it.She had asked Dubin to go along.While Kitty, in head scarf and coat, and Mrs.Meyer, in her black overcoat and brown hat, in the cold farmhouse, were sorting out and packing into small cartons the old woman’s house dresses, faded underwear and worn shoes, Dubin went through the trunks in the attic.In one old trunk he found a half-dozen jars of petrified seed, a shoebox full of family photographs, and two bundles of letters, of James to Myra Wilson, and Myra to James, dated around the First World War.Dubin read several of the letters by candlelight.None could be called a love letter.Through the years of marriage they were pretty much the sparse same; little changed, little grew, little was revealed.Contemplating them Dubin felt tired of marriage, wanted to be alone.Solitude was a clean state of being.He wished he’d had less of it when he was young and more now.He thought Kitty and he would have got along better if they were with each other less often.They were too intent on what each did and said.Even when they spoke lightly each heard more than was said.Even when you were not saying it you were saying it.You sat there with the self your wife saw, not necessarily the self you were into; more comfortable with.He felt the long wear and tear and was glad he had decided to work in the barn, where he was away from her.One thing that wore on Dubin was the eternal domesticity of Lawrence and his wife.They were almost always together unless Frieda went to England to see her children; or detoured to indulge in a short affair.They rarely stopped traveling.Their way was to rent a villa or cottage for a season or two, move in, wash it down, paint where necessary; and live tightly and inseparably together.Lawrence cooked, scrubbed floors, sewed if he had to.Describing his intense domestic life wore on Dubin.He brought the letters downstairs to Mrs.Meyer.Kitty, after reading two, asked if she could have them if Mrs.Meyer didn’t want them; and she, with a little laugh, handed both bundles to Kitty.The visit to the farmhouse, especially packing Myra’s clothes, affected Kitty for days after Mrs.Meyer had gone.She was down again, she confessed.“I still feel bad that I wasn’t able to do more for her when she was dying.” Dubin said, “There are some things one has to forget.”“I can’t forget [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]