Project Gutenberg's The Idyl of Twin Fires, by Walter Prichard Eaton
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Title: The Idyl of Twin Fires
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton
Illustrator: Thomas Fogarty
Release Date: October 31, 2010 [EBook #34177]
Language: English
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THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES
[Illustration: "So that is why you wanted my brook to come from the
spring!"]
THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES
BY
WALTER PRICHARD EATON
Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers : : New York
Copyright, 1914, 1915, by Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
CONTENTS
I. I Buy a Farm on Sight 3
II. My Money Goes and My Farmer Comes 19
III. New Joy in an Old Orchard 34
IV. I Pump up a Ghost 47
V. I Am Humbled by a Drag Scraper 66
VI. The Hermit Sings at Twilight 77
VII. The Ghost of Rome in Roses 88
VIII. I Pick Paint and a Quarrel 102
IX. We Seat Thoreau in the Chimney Nook, and I
Write a Sonnet 113
X. We Climb a Hill Together 130
XI. Actæon and Diana 143
XII. Shopping as a Dissipation 155
XIII. The Advent of the Pilligs 164
XIV. The First Lemon Pie 177
XV. A Pagan Thrush 192
XVI. I Go to New York for a Purpose 204
XVII. I Do Not Return Alone 220
XVIII. We Build a Pool 227
XIX. The Nice Other Things 237
XX. Callers 245
XXI. Autumn in the Garden 252
XXII. In Praise of Country Winter 264
XXIII. Spring in the Garden 275
XXIV. Some Rural Problems 282
XXV. _Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas_ 297
ILLUSTRATIONS
"So that is why you wanted my brook to come from
the spring!" _Frontispiece_
She was sitting with a closed book on her knee,
gazing into the fire 124
"Well, well, you've got yourself a bookay,"
she said 174
"We are your neighbours ... you are very
fortunate to have us for neighbours" 246
THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES
Chapter I
I BUY A FARM ON SIGHT
I was sitting at a late hour in my room above the college Yard,
correcting daily themes. I had sat at a late hour in my room above
the college Yard, correcting daily themes, for it seemed an interminable
number of years--was it six or seven? I had no great love for it,
certainly. Some men who go into teaching, and of course all men who
become great teachers, do have a genuine love for their work. But I am
afraid I was one of those unfortunates who take up teaching as a
stop-gap, a means of livelihood while awaiting "wider opportunities."
These opportunities in my case were to be the authorship of an
epoch-making novel, or a great drama, or some similar masterpiece. I
had been accredited with "brilliant promise" in my undergraduate days,
and the college had taken me into the English department upon graduation.
Well, that was seven years ago. I was still correcting daily themes.
It was a warm night in early April. I had a touch of spring fever, and
wrote vicious, sarcastic comments on the poor undergraduate pages of
unexpressiveness before me, as through my open windows drifted up from
the Yard a snatch of song from some returning theatre party. Most of
these themes were hopeless. Your average man has no sense of literature.
Moreover, by the time he reaches college it is too late to teach him
even common, idiomatic expressiveness. That ought to be done in the
secondary schools--and isn't. I toiled on. Near the bottom of the
pile came the signature, James Robinson. I opened the sheet with relief.
He was one of the few in the class with the real literary instinct--a
lad from some nearby New England village who went home over Sunday and
brought back unconscious records of his changing life there. I enjoyed
the little drama, for I, too, had come from a suburban village, and knew
the first bitter awakening to its narrowness.
I opened the theme, and this is what I read:
"The April sun has come at last, and the first warmth of it
lays a benediction on the spirit, even as it tints the earth
with green. Our barn door, standing open, framed a picture
this morning between walls of golden hay--the soft rolling
fields, the fringe of woodland beyond veiled with a haze of
budding life, and then the far line of the hills. A horse
stamped in the shadows; a hen strolled out upon the floor,
cooting softly; there was a warm, earthy smell in the air, the
distant church bell sounded pleasantly over the fields, and
up the road I heard the rattle of Uncle Amos's carryall,
bearing the family to meeting. The strife of learning, the
pride of the intellect, the academic urge--where were they? I
found myself wandering out from the barnyard into the fields,
filled with a great longing to hold a plow in the furrow till
tired out, and then to lie on my back in the sun and watch
the lazy clouds."
So Robinson had spring fever, too! How it makes us turn back home! I
made some flattering comment or other on the paper (especially, I recall,
starring the verb _coot_ as good hen lore), and put it with the rest.
Then I fell to dreaming. Home! I, John Upton, academic bachelor, had
no home, no parents, no kith nor kin. I had my study lined with books,
my little monastic bedroom behind it, my college position, and a shabby
remnant of my old ambitions. The soft "coot, coot" of a hen picking up
grain on the old barn floor! I closed my eyes in delicious memory--memory
of my grandfather's farm down in Essex County. The sweet call of the
village church bell came back to me, the drone of the preacher, the
smell of lilacs outside, the stamp of an impatient horse in the horse
sheds where liniment for man and beast was advertised on tin posters!
"Why don't I go back to it, and give up this grind?" I thought. Then,
being an English instructor, I added learnedly, "and be a disciple of
Rousseau!"
It was a warm April night, and I was foolish with spring fever. I began
to play with the idea. I got up and opened my tin box, to investigate
the visible paper tokens of my little fortune. There was, in all, about
$30,000, the result of my legacy from my parents and my slender savings
from my slender salary, for I had never had any extravagances except
books and golf balls. I had heard of farms being bought for $1,500. That
would still leave me more than $1,200 a year. Perhaps, with the freedom
from this college grind, I could write some of those masterpieces at
last--even a best seller! I grew as rosy with hope as an undergraduate.
I looked at myself in the glass--not yet bald, face smooth, rather
academic, shoulders good, thanks to daily rowing. Hands hard, too! I
sought for a copy of the _Transcript_, and ran over the real estate
ads. Here was a gentleman's estate, with two butler's pantries and a
concrete garage--_that_ would hardly do! No, I should have to consult
somebody. Besides $1,200 a year would hardly be enough to run even a
$1,500 farm on, not for a year or two, because I should have to hire
help. I must find something practical to do to support myself. What? What
_could_ I do, except put sarcastic comments on the daily themes of
helpless undergraduates? I went to bed with a very poor opinion of
English instructors.
But God, as the hymn remarks, works in a mysterious way His wonders to
perform. Waking with my flicker of resolution quite gone out, I met
my chief in the English department who quite floored me by asking me if
I could find the extra time--"without interfering with my academic
duties"--to be a reader for a certain publishing house which had just
consulted him about filling a vacancy. I told him frankly that if I
got the job I might give up my present post and buy a farm, but as he
didn't think anybody could live on a manuscript reader's salary, he
laughed and didn't believe me, and two days later I had the job. It
would be a secret to disclose my salary, but to a man who had been an
English instructor in an American college for seven years, it looked good
enough. Then came the Easter vacation.
Professor Farnsworth, of the economics department, had invited me on a
motor trip for the holidays. (The professor married a rich widow.)
"As the Cheshire cat said to Alice," he explained, "it doesn't matter
which way you go, if you don't much care where you are going to; and
we don't, do we?"
"Yes," I said, "I want to look at farms."
But he only laughed, too. "Anyhow, we won't look at a single
undergraduate," he said.
In the course of our motor flight from the Eternal Undergraduate, we
reached one night a certain elm-hung New England village noted for its
views and its palatial summer estates, and put up at the hotel there.
The professor, whose hobby is real estate values, fell into a discussion
with the suave landlord on the subject, considered locally. (Being a
state congressman, he was unable to consider anything except locally!)
The landlord, to our astonishment, informed us that building-sites on
the village street and the nearby hills sold as high as $5,000 per acre.
"What does farm land cost?" I inquired sadly.
"As much as the farmer can induce you to pay," he laughed. "But if you
were a farmer, you might get it for $100 an acre."
"I _am_ a farmer," said I. "Where is there a farm for sale?"
The landlord looked at me dubiously. But he volunteered this information:
"When you leave in the morning, take the back road, up the hollow,
toward what we call Slab City. You'll pass a couple of big estates.
About half a mile beyond the second estate, you'll come to a crossroad.
Turn up that a hundred yards or so and ask for Milt Noble at the first
house you come to. Maybe he'll sell."
It was a glorious April morning when we awoke. The roads were dry. Spring
was in the air. The grass had begun to show green on the beautiful lawns
of Bentford Main Street. The great elms drooped their slender, bare
limbs like cathedral arches. We purred softly up the Slab City road,
pleased by the name of it, passed the two estates on the hill outside of
the village, and then dipped into a hollow. As this hollow held no
extended prospect, the summer estates had ceased on its brim. The road
became the narrow dirt track of tradition, bramble-lined. Presently we
reached the crossroad. A groggy sign-board stood in the little delta
of grass and weeds so characteristic of old New England crossroads, and
on it a clumsy hand pointed to "Albany." As Albany was half a day's
run in a motor car, and no intervening towns were mentioned, there was a
fine, roving spirit about this groggy old sign which tickled me.
We ran up the road a hundred yards of the fifty miles to Albany, crossed
a little brook, and stopped the motor at what I instantly knew for my
abode.
I cannot tell you how I knew it. One doesn't reason about such things
any more than one reasons about falling in love. At least, I'm sure
I didn't, nor could I set out in cold blood to seek a residence,
calculating water supply, quality of neighbours, fashionableness of
site, nearness to railroad, number of closets, and all the rest. I
saw the place, and knew it for mine--that's all.
As the motor stopped, I took a long look to left and right, sighed, and
said to the professor: "I hereby resign my position as instructor in
English, to take effect immediately."
The professor laughed. He didn't yet believe I meant it.
My grandfather was an Essex County farmer, and lived in a rectangular,
simple, lovely old house, with woodsheds rambling indefinitely out
behind and a big barn across the road, with a hollow-log watering
trough by a pump in front and a picture of green fields framed by the
little door at the far end. Grandfather's house and grandfather's barn,
visited every summer, were the sweetest recollections of my childhood.
And here they were again--somewhat dilapidated, to be sure, with a
mountain in the barn-door vista instead of the pleasant fields of
Essex--but still true to the old Yankee type, with the same old wooden
pump by the hollow-log trough, green with moss.
I jumped from the motor and started toward the house on the run.
"Whoa!" cried the professor, laughing, "you poor young idiot!" Then,
in a lower tone, he cautioned: "If our friend Milt sees you want this
place so badly, he'll run up the price. Where's your Yankee blood?"
I sobered down to a walk, and together we slipped behind a century-old
lilac bush at the corner of the house, and sought the front of the
dwelling unobserved. The house was set with its side to the road, about
one hundred feet into the lot. A long ell ran out behind, evidently
containing the kitchen and then the sheds and outhouses. The side
door, on a grape-shadowed porch, was in this ell, facing the barn across
the way. The main body of the dwelling was the traditional, simple
block, with a fine old doorway, composed of simple Doric pilasters
supporting a hand-hewn broken pediment--now, alas! broken in more
than an architectural sense. It was a typical house of the splendid
carpenter-and-builder period of a century ago.
This front door faced into an aged and now sadly dilapidated orchard.
Once there had been a path to the road, but this was now overgrown,
and the doorsteps had rotted away. The orchard ran down a slope of
perhaps half an acre to the ferny tangle of the brook bed. Beyond that
was a bordering line of ash-leaf maples, evidently marking the other
road out of which we had turned. The winters had racked the poor old
orchard, and great limbs lay on the ground. What remained were bristling
with suckers. The sills of the house were still hidden under banks
of leaves, held in place by boards, to keep out the winter cold. There
were no curtains in the windows, nor much sign of furniture within.
From this view the old house looked abandoned. It had evidently not
been painted for twenty years.
But, as I stood before the battered doorway and looked down through the
storm-racked orchard to the brook, I had a sudden vision of pink trees
abloom above a lawn, and through them the shimmer of a garden pool and
the gleam of a marble bench or, maybe, a wooden bench painted white. On
the whole, that would be more in keeping. This Thing called gardening
had got hold of me already! I was planning for next year!
"You could make a terrace out here, instead of a veranda," I was saying
to the professor. "White wicker furniture on the grass before this
Colonial doorway! It's ideal!"
He smiled. "How about the plumbing?" he inquired.
I waved away such matters, and we returned around the giant lilac tree
to the side door, searching for Milton Noble. A bent old lady peered
over her spectacles at us, and allowed Milt wuz out tew the barn. He
was, standing in the door contemplating our car.
"Good morning," said I.
"Mornin'," said he, peering sharply at me with gray eyes that twinkled
palely above a great tangle of white whisker.
"A fine old house you have," I continued.
"Hed first-growth timber when 'twas built. Why wouldn't it be?" He
spat lazily, and wiped the back of his hand across his whiskers.
"We hear you want to sell it, though?" My sentence was a question.
"Dunno whar you heerd thet," he replied. "I hain't said I did."
We mentioned the innkeeper's name.
"Humph," said Milt, "Tom knows more about folks sometimes then they
do."
"Don't you want to sell?" said I.
"Wanter buy?" said he.
"I might," said I.
"I might," he answered.
There was not the slightest expression of mirth on his face. The
professor did not know whether to laugh or not. But I laughed. I was born
of Yankee stock.
"How about water?" I asked, becoming very practical.
"Well," he said, "thet never dried up. Town main comes down the ro'd
yander, from the Slab City reservoar. You kin tap thet if well water
hain't good enough fer ye."
"Bathrooms?" I suggested.
The old man spat again. "Brook makes a pool sometimes down yander," he
replied, jerking his thumb.
"Suppose we take a look into the house?" suggested the professor.
The old man moved languidly from the door. As he stepped, his old black
trouser leg pulled up over his shoe top, and we saw that he wore no
stockings. He paused in front of the motor car. "How much did thet
benzine buggy cost?" he asked.
"Four thousand dollars," said the owner.
The gray eyes darted a look into the professor's face; then they became
enigmatic. "Powerful lot o' money," he mused, moving on. "Whar's
yourn?" he added to me.
"If I had one of those, I couldn't have your farm," said I.
He squinted shrewdly. "Dunno's yer kin, anyway, do ye?" was his reply.
He now led us into the kitchen. We saw the face of the old lady peering
at us from the "butt'ry." A modern range was backed up against a
huge, old-fashioned brick oven, no longer used. A copper pump, with a
brass knob on the curved handle, stood at one end of the sink--"Goes
ter the well," said Milt. The floor was of ancient, hardwood planking,
now worn into polished ridges. A door led up a low step into the main
house, which consisted, downstairs, of two rooms, dusty and disused, to
the left, and two similar rooms, used as bedrooms, to the south (all
four containing fireplaces), and a hall, where a staircase with carved
rail led to the hall above, flanked by four chambers, each with its
fireplace, too. Over the kitchen was a long, unfinished room easily
converted into a servant's quarters. Secretly pleased beyond measure at
the excellent preservation of the interior, I kept a discreet silence,
and with an air of great wisdom began my inspection of the farm.
Twenty acres of the total thirty were on the side of the road with the
house, and the lot was almost square--about three hundred yards to a
side. Down along the brook the land had been considered worthless. South
of the orchard it had grown to sugar maple for a brief space, then to
young pine, evidently seedlings of some big trees now cut down, with a
little tamarack swamp in the far corner. The pines again ran up the
southern boundary from this swamp. The brook flowed cheerily below the
orchard, wound amid the open grove of maples, and went with a little
drop over green stones into the dusk of the pines. The rest of the land,
which lay up a slope to a point a little west of the house and then
extended along a level plateau, was either pasture or good average
tillage, fairly heavy, with subsoil enough to hold the dressing. It had,
however, I fancied, been neglected for many years, like the tumbling
stone walls which bounded it, and which also enclosed a four or five
acre hayfield occupying the entire southwestern corner of the lot, on
the plateau. The professor, who married a summer estate as well as a
motor car, confirmed me in this. Behind the barn, on the other side of
the road, the rectangular ten-acre lot was rough second-growth timber
by the brook, and cow pasture all up the slope and over the plateau.
Returning to the house, we took a sample of the water from the well for
analysis. When I asked the old lady (I made the mistake of calling her
Mrs. Noble) to boil the bottle and the cork first, I think they both
decided I was mad.
"Now," said I, as I put the sample in my pocket, "if this water gets
a clean bill of health, what do you want for the place?"
"What'll you give me?" said Milt.
"Look here," said I, "I'm a Yankee, too, and I can answer one
question with another just as long as you can. What do you expect me to
give you?"
The old man spat meditatively, and wiped his whiskers with the back of
his hand.
"Pitt Perkins got $500 an acre for his place," said he.
"They get $500 a square foot on Wall Street in New York," I replied.
"And 'twon't grow corn, neither," said Milt, with his nearest
approximation to a grin.
"It pastures lambs," put in the professor.
But Milt didn't look at him. He gazed meditatively at the motor. "So
thet contraption cost $4,000, did it?" he mused, as if to himself, "and
'twon't drop a calf, neither. How'd $8,000 strike you?"
I took the bottle of well water from my pocket, and extended it toward
him. "Here," I said, "there's no need for me to have this analyzed."
"Seven?" said he.
"Four!" said I.
"Six?" said he.
"Not a cent over four," said I.
"All right," said he, "didn't much want ter sell anyhow." And he
pocketed the bottle.
I climbed into the car, and the professor walked in front and cranked it.
(It had a self-starter, which was, as they usually appear to be, out of
commission.) The engine began to throb. The professor put on his gloves.
"Five," said Milt, "with the hoss an' two Jerseys an' all the wood
in the shed."
He was standing in the road beside the modern motor car, a pathetic old
figure to me, so like my grandfather in many ways, the last of an ancient
order. Poverty, decay, was written on him, as on his farmstead.
"It's yours!" I cried.
I got out of the car again, and we made arrangements to meet in the
village and put the deal through. Then I asked him the question which
had been pressing from the first. "Why do you sell?"
He pointed toward a distant estate, with great chimneys and gables,
crowning a hill. "This hain't my country no more," he said, with a
kind of mournful dignity. "It's theirs, and theirs, and theirs. I'm
too old ter l'arn ter lick boots an' run a farm fer another feller. I
wuz brought up on corn bread, not shoe polish. I got a daughter out
in York State, an' she'll take me in if I pay my board. I guess $5,000
'll last me 'bout as long as my breath will. Yer got a good farm
here--if yer can afford ter put some money back inter the soil."
He looked out over his fields and we looked mercifully into the motor.
The professor backed the car around, and we said good-bye.
"Hope the bilin' kills all them bugs in the bottle," was the old
man's final parting.
"Well!" I cried, as we spun down over the bridge at my brook, "I've
got a country estate of my own! I've got a home! I've got freedom!"
"You've got stuck," said the professor. "He'd have taken $4,000."
"What's a thousand dollars, more or less?" said I. "Besides, the poor
old fellow needs it worse than I do."
"It's a thousand dollars," replied my companion.
"Yes, to you," I answered. "You are a professor of economics. But to
me it's nothing, for I'm an instructor in English."
"And the point is?"
"That I'm going back home!" I cried. And I took off my hat and let the
April wind rush through my hair.
Chapter II
MY MONEY GOES AND MY FARMER COMES
Three days later I got a report on the water from a chemist in
Springfield; it was pure. Meanwhile, I had decided to tap the town
main, so it didn't make any difference, anyway. We ran the car back to
Bentford, and I closed the deal, took an inventory of the farm
implements and equipment which went with the place, made a few hasty
arrangements for my permanent coming, and hastened back to college. There
I remained only long enough to see that the faculty had a competent
man to fill my unexpired term (so much of conscience remained to
me!), to pack up my books, pictures, and furniture, to purchase a
few necessary household goods, or what I thought were necessary, and to
consult the college botanical department. Professor Grey of the
department assigned his chief assistant at the gardens to my case. He
took me to Boston, and, armed with my inventory, in one day he spent
exactly $641 of my precious savings, while I gasped, helpless in my
ignorance. He bought, it appeared to me, barrels of seeds, tons of
fertilizers, thousands of wheel hoes for horse and man, millions of
pruning saws and spraying machines, hotbed frames and sashes, tomato
trellises, and I knew not what other nameless implements and impedimenta.
"There!" he cried, at 5 P.M. "Now you can make a beginning. You'll
have to find out this summer what else you need. Probably you'll want
to sink another $600 in the fall. I told 'em not to ship your small
fruits--raspberries, etc.--till you ordered 'em to. You won't be
ready for some weeks. The first thing you must do now is to hire a
first-class farmer and call in a tree specialist. Meanwhile, I'll give
you a batch of government bulletins on orchards, field crops, cattle,
and the like. You'd better read 'em up right away."
"You're damn cheerful about it!" I cried. "You talk as if I were a
millionaire, with nothing to do but read bulletins and spend money!"
"That's about all you will do, for the next twelve months," he grinned.
This was rather disconcerting. But the die was cast, and I came to a
sudden realization that seven years of teaching the young idea how to
punctuate isn't the best possible training for running a farm, and if I
were to get out of my experiment with a whole skin I had got to turn to
and be my own chief labourer, and hereafter my own purchaser, as well.
All that night I packed and planned, and the next morning I left
college forever. I slipped away quietly, before the chapel bell had
begun to ring, avoiding all tender good-byes. I had a stack of experiment
station bulletins in my grip, and during the four hours I spent on
the train my eyes never left their pages. Four hours is not enough to
make a man a qualified agriculturist, but it is sufficient to make him
humble. I had left college without any sentimental regrets, my head
being too full of plans and projects. I arrived at Bentford without
any sentimental enthusiasms, my head being too full of rules for
pruning and spraying, for cover crops, for tuberculin tests, for soil
renewal. I'm sorry to confess this, because in all the "back to the
land" books I have read--especially the popular ones, and I want this
one to be popular, for certain very obvious reasons--the hero has landed
on his new-found acres with all kinds of fine emotions and superb
sentiments. The city folks who read his book, sitting by their steam
radiators in their ten by twelve flats, love to fancy these emotions,
glow to these sentiments. But I, alas, for seven long years preached
realism to my classes, and even now the chains are on me; I must tell
the truth. I landed at Bentford station, hired a hack, and drove at once
to my farm, and my first thought on alighting was this: "Good Lord, I
never realized the frightful condition of that orchard! It will take me
a solid week to save any of it, and I suppose I'll have to set out a
lot of new trees besides. More expense!"
"It's a dollar up here," said the driver of the hack, in a mildly
insidious voice.
I paid him brusquely, and he drove away. I stood in the middle of the
road, my suitcase beside me, the long afternoon shadows coming down
through my dilapidated orchard, and surveyed the scene. Milt Noble had
gone. So had my enthusiasm. The house was bare and desolate. It hadn't
been painted for twenty years, at the least, I decided. My trunks,
which I had sent ahead by express, were standing disconsolately on
the kitchen porch. Behind me I heard my horse stamping in the stable,
and saw my two cows feeding in the pasture. A postcard from one Bert
Temple, my nearest neighbour up the Slab City road, had informed me
that he was milking them for me--and, I gathered, for the milk. Well, if
he didn't, goodness knew who would! I never felt so lonely, so helpless,
so hopeless, in my life.
Then an odd fancy struck me. George Meredith made _his_ living, too,
by reading manuscripts for a publisher! The picture of George Meredith
trying to reclaim a New England farm as an avocation restored my spirits,
though just why, perhaps it would be difficult to make any one but a
fellow English instructor understand. I suddenly tossed my suitcase
into the barn, and began a tour of inspection over my thirty acres.
There was tonic in that turn! Twenty of my acres, as I have said, lay on
the south side of the road, surrounding the house. The other ten, behind
the barn, were pasture. The old orchard in front of the house (which
faced the east, instead of the road) led down a slope half an acre in
extent to the brook. That brook ran south close to the road which
formed my eastern boundary, along the entire extent of the farm--some
three hundred yards. At first it flowed through a wild tangle of weeds
and wild flowers, then entered a grove of maples, then a stand of white
pines, and finally burbled out into a swampy little grove of tamaracks.
I walked down through the orchard, seeing again the white bench across
the brook, against the roadside hedge, and seeing now tall iris flowers
besides, and a lily pool--all "the sweetest delight of gardens," as
Sir Thomas Browne mellifluously put it. As I followed the brook into
the maples and then into the sudden hushed quiet of my little stand
of pines, I thought how all this was mine--my own, to play with, to
develop as a sculptor molds his clay, to walk in, to read in, to dream
in. Think of owning even a half acre of pine woods, stillest and coolest
of spots! I planned my path beside the brook as I went along, and my
spirits rose like the songs of the sparrows from the roadside trees
beyond.
The bulk of my farm lay to the south of the house, on a gentle slope
which rose from the brook to a pasture plateau higher than the dwelling.
Most of the slope had been cultivated, and some of it had been ploughed
in the fall. I climbed westward, a hundred yards south of the house,
over the rough ground, looked into the hayfield, and then continued
along the wall of the hayfield, over ground evidently used as pasture,
to my western boundary, where my acres met the cauliflower fields of
my neighbour, Bert Temple.
A single great pine, with wide-spreading, storm-tossed branches, like
a cedar of Lebanon, stood at the stone wall, just inside my land. The
wall, indeed, ran almost over its roots, a pretty, gray, bramble-covered
wall, so old that it looked like a work of nature. Beneath the lower
limbs of the pine, and over the wall, one saw the blue mountains framed
like a Japanese print. Standing off a way, however, the pine stood out
sharply against the hills and the sky, a noble veteran, almost black.
Then and there I saw my book plate--a coloured woodcut, green and blue,
with the pine in black on the key block!
Then I reflected how I stood on soil which must be made to pay me back
in potatoes for the outlay, stood, as it were, on top of my practical
problem--and dreamed of book plates!
"_Somebody_ ought to get amusement out of this!" I said aloud, as I set
off for the barn, gathered up my suitcase, and climbed the road toward
Bert Temple's.
If I live to be a hundred, I can never repay Bert Temple, artist in
cauliflowers and best of friends in my hour of need. Bert and his wife
took me in, treated me as a human, if helpless, fellow being, not as a
"city man" to be fleeced, and gave me the best advice and the best
supper a man ever had, meantime assuring me that my cows had been tested,
and both were sound.
[Illustration:]
The supper came first. I hadn't eaten such a supper since grandmother
died. There were brown bread Joes--only rival of Rhode Island Johnny cake
for the title of the lost ambrosia of Olympus. They were so hot that the
butter melted over them instantly, and crisp outside, with delicious,
runny insides.
"Mrs. Temple," said I, "I haven't eaten brown bread Joes since I was
a boy. I didn't know the secret existed any more."
Mrs. Temple beamed over her ample and calico-covered bosom. "You must
hev come from Essex or Middlesex counties," she said, "if you've et
brown bread Joes before."
"Essex," said I.
"Essex!" she cried. "Well, well! I came from Georgetown. Bert, he's
Middlesex. I dunno what we're doing out here in these ungodly, half
York State mountains, but here we be, and the secret's with us."
"Let me have some more of the secret," said I. "I'm growing younger
with every mouthful."
After supper Bert took me in hand. "First thing fer you to do's to git
a farmer _and_ carpenter," he said. "I kin git yer both, if yer want
I should, an' not sting yer. Most noo folks thet come here gits stung.
Seems like Bentford thinks thet's why they come!"
"I'm clay in your hands," said I.
"Wall, yer don't exactly know _me_ intimately," said Bert with a
laugh, "so yer'd better git a bit o' granite into yer system. Neow, ez
to a farmer--there's Mike Finn. He's not French, ez yer might guess,
but he's honest ez the 21st o' June is long, an' he's out of a job on
account of the Sulloways hevin' sold their estate whar he wuz gardener
an' the noo folks bringin' their own, an' he lives 'bout a quarter
of a mile from your corner. He'll come an' his son'll help out with
the heavy work, sech ez ploughin', which you'd better begin termorrer."
"Mike it is," said I. "What will he want for wages?"
"He'll ask yer $60 a month, an' take $45, an' earn it all," Bert
answered. "We'll walk deown an' see him neow, ef yer like."
I liked, and in the soft, spring evening we set off down the road.
"But," I was saying, "$45 a month for skilled labour seems to me a
measly wage. I'm ashamed to offer it. Why, college instructors get as
much as that! I shall offer Mike $50."
"Do yer want ter spile all the hired help in Bentford?" cried Bert.
"No," said I, "but Mike gets $50, and perhaps a raise if he makes
good. I believe in the hire being worth the labourer. That's flat."
"Wal, then, ez to carpenters," Bert switched, seeing that I could not
be budged; "thar's good carpenters, an' bad carpenters, an' Hard
Cider Howard. Hard Cider's fergotten more abeout carpent'rin' then
most o' the rest ever knoo, and he ain't fergot much, neither. But he
ain't handsome, and he looks upon the apple juice when it's yaller.
Maybe yer don't mind looks, an' I kin keep Hard Cider sober while
he's on your job. He'll treat yer fair, an' see thet the plumbers
do, an' fix all them rotten sills ez good ez noo."
"What's that?" said I. "Rotten sills?"
"Sure," Bert answered. "Mean to tell me yer didn't know thet? Yer
can't pack all yer sills with leaves fer a hundred years, an' not take
'em away summers half the time, an' _not_ rot yer sills. I'd say,
treat 'em with cement like they do trees neow."
I began to have visions of my remaining $24,000 melting away in sills.
"I suppose the barn is rotten, too?" said I, faintly, as an
interrogation.
We were then passing the barn. Bert stepped in--the door wasn't
locked--lit a lantern, came out with it, and led me around to one
side. He held the lantern against one of the timbers which formed the
foundation frame. It was a foot in diameter, and made of hand-hewn oak!
Though it had never been guilty of paint, it looked as solid as a rock.
"Barn needs some patchin' and floorin' and a few shingles," said
Bert, "but it ain't doo to fall deown jest yit!"
He put the lantern back, and we walked on, turned the corner at my
brook, and followed the other road along past my pines till we came to a
small settlement of white cottages. At one of these Bert knocked. We were
admitted by a pretty, blue-eyed Irish girl, who had a copy of Cæsar's
Commentaries in her hand, into a tiny parlour where an "airtight"
stove stood below a coloured chromo of the Virgin and Child, and a
middle-aged Irishman sat in his shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe.
"Hello, Mike," said Bert, "this is Mr. John Upton, who's bought Milt
Noble's place, an' wants a farmer _and_ gardener. I told him you wuz
the man."
"Sit down, sor, sit down," said Mike, offering a chair with an
expansive and hospitable gesture. "Sure, let's talk it over."
The pretty daughter had gone back to her Cæsar by the nickel oil lamp,
but she had one ear toward us, and I caught a corner of her eye, too--an
extremely attractive, not to say provocative, eye.
"Well, now," Mike was saying, "sure I can run a farm, but what do I be
gettin' for it?"
"Fifty a month," said I, "which includes milking the cows and tending
furnace in winter."
"Sure, I got more than that on me last place and no cows at all."
"Ye're a liar, Mike," said Bert.
"That's a fightin' word in the ould country," said Mike.
"This ain't the old country, and yer got $45," Bert grinned.
"Besides, yer'll be close to yer work. You wuz a mile an' a half
frum the Sulloways. Thet makes up fer the milkin'."
"True, true," Mike replied, meditatively. "But what be yer runnin'
the place for, Mr. Upton? Is it a real farmer ye'd be?"
"A real farmer," I answered. "Why?"
"Well, I didn't know. Onct I worked fer one o' them literary fellers
that married rich, and he was always fer makin' me try new-fangled
things in the ground instead o' good old cow manure. Begorra, he nigh
drove the life out o' me with his talk o' bac-bac-bac somethin'--some
kind of bugs, if ye can beat that--that he said made nitrogen. I've
heard say yer wuz a literary feller, too, Mr. Upton, and I have me
doubts."
"Well, I am a sort of a literary feller," I confessed, "but I never
married a rich wife."
"Sure, ye're not so old to be past hopin'," Mike replied.
I shook my head, and added, "But it's you I want to be the real
literary feller, Mike. You must write me a poem in potatoes."
Mike put back his head and roared. "It's a pome yer want, is it?" he
cried. "Sure, it's an oration I'll give ye. I'll grow ye the real
home rule pertaters."
"Well," said I, rising, "do you begin to-morrow morning, and will your
son help for a few weeks?"
"The mornin' it is," said Mike, "and Joe along."
I paused by the side of the girl. "All Gaul is divided into three
parts," I laughed.
She looked up with a pretty smile, but Mike spoke: "Sure, but they give
all three parts to Nora," he said, "so what was the use o' dividin'
it? She thinks she's me mither instead o' me daughter!"
"I'll put you to bed in a minute," said Nora, while Mike grinned
proudly at her.
"I'm going to like Mike," said I to Bert, as we walked back up the
road.
"I knoo yer would soon ez I seen yer," Bert replied. "The only folks
thet don't like Mike is the folks thet can't see a joke. Mike has a
tolerable number o' dislikers."
"Well, I've got my farmer," said I, "and now I suppose I've got to
find a housekeeper, as soon as the house is ready to live in. Nora would
suit me."
"I reckon she would," Bert replied, "but she wouldn't soot Bentford."
"In other words, I want an oldish woman, very plain, and preferably a
widow?"
"With a young son old enough ter help on the farm," Bert added with
a grin.
"I don't suppose you know of just that combination?"
"Reckon I dew. You leave it to my old lady."
"Mr. Temple," said I, "seems to me I'm leaving everything to you."
"Wal, neow, yer might do a heap sight worse!" said Bert.
I went up to my chamber when we got back, and sat down beside my little
glass lamp and did some figuring. I had $24,000 of my savings left,
and out of that I subtracted another $2,000 for the carpenters and
plumbers. That left me with an income from my investments of about
$1,000 a year. Added to my alleged salary as a manuscript reader, along
with what I hoped I could pick up writing, I recklessly calculated my
annual income as a possible $3,000. Out of this I subtracted $600 for
Mike's wages, $360 for a housekeeper, $400 for additional labour, $75
for taxes, and $500 for additions to my "plant," as I began to call
my farm. That made a total of $1,935, and left me a margin of about
$1,000 for food, wines, liquors, and cigars, magazines, rare etchings,
first editions, golf club dues, golf balls, caddy hire, an automobile,
some antique mahogany, a few Persian rugs, an Italian marble sundial,
and several other trifles I desired.
I scanned my pad thoughtfully, and finally decided not to join the golf
club till the following year.
Then it occurred to me that I ought, of course, to sell my farm produce
for a handsome profit. Bert had gone to bed, so I couldn't ask him
how much I would be likely to realize. But with all due conservatism I
decided that I could safely rejoin the golf club. So I did, then and
there. Whereupon I felt better, and, picking out the manuscript of a
novel from my bag, I went bravely at the task of earning my living.
Chapter III
NEW JOY IN AN OLD ORCHARD
The following morning was a balmy and exquisite first of May, but realism
again compels me to confess that, having been an English instructor
for seven years, and having read manuscripts the night before till 2
A.M., I did not leap lightly from my couch at the breakfast call, nor did
I sing ecstatically, as I looked from my window:
_"Im wunderschönen Monat Mai."_
What I actually did was to curse to myself at having to clean my teeth
in bitterly cold water, something I have always loathed. Nor was I
greatly cheered by Mrs. Temple's coffee. The New England farmer's wife
can cook everything but coffee. But there seems to be something in
that simple art which completely baffles her. Perhaps the coffee has
something to do with it!
Her cheery face, however, was not long to be resisted, and Bert hustled
me off immediately after the meal to meet Hard Cider Howard, whom, by
some rural wireless, he had already summoned.
As we walked down the road, I glanced toward my lone pine, and saw my
horse and Mike's hitched to the plough, with Joe driving and Mike
holding the handles. Across the green pasture, between the road and
the hayfield, already four rich brown furrows were shining up to the sun.
"Well, Mike didn't wait long!" I exclaimed. "I wonder why he started
in there?"
"I told him to," said Bert. "That's goin' ter be yer pertater crop
this year."
"Is it?" said I. "Why?" I felt a little peeved. After all, this was
_my_ farm.
"Cuz it's pasture land thet's good fer pertaters, an' yer don't need
it fer the cows, an' it kin be worked ter give yer a crop right off,
even though 'twant ploughed under in the fall," Bert answered. "You
trust yer Uncle Hiram fer a bit, sonny."
I blushed at my own peevishness, and thanked him humbly. At the house we
found awaiting a strange-looking man, small, wrinkled, unkempt, with a
discouraged moustache and a nose of a decidedly brighter hue than the
rest of his countenance. He was tapping at the sills of the house.
"How about it, Hard? Cement?" said Bert.
Hard Cider nodded to me, with a keen glance from his little, bloodshot
eyes.
"Yep," he said. "Stucco over it. Brick underpinnin's be ez good ez
noo. Go inside."
We stepped upon the side porch, Bert handing me the key and I opening the
door of my new dwelling with a secret thrill. Hard Cider at once began
on the kitchen floor, ripping up a plank to examine the timbers beneath.
There was no cellar under the kitchen, but the timbers were, like those
of the barn, huge beams of hand-hewn oak, and were sound.
"Plane them planks down and lay a maple floor over 'em," said Hard,
with an air of finality.
"Very well," said I meekly. "But my woodwork has got to be cypress
in the living-room. I insist on cypress."
"New step," he added, as we came to the door up into the main house.
"Hold on!" said I. "This door leads into the front hall. I don't want
that. I want this door closed up and put into the north room, which I'm
going to use for a dining-room."
"Ain't goin' ter eat in the kitchen, eh? Very well," said Hard.
He examined the old door frame carefully, and jotted something in a
dirty notebook, which he drew from his pocket, first wetting his flat
carpenter's pencil on his tongue.
We found that the north room had apparently been used only as a kind of
storage closet, doubtless because there was no heater in the house. It
had never been papered, and the walls, with a little touching up, were
ready for kalsomining. Hard examined the plaster with the loving eye of
a connoisseur.
"Built ter last in them days," I heard him mutter.
The room extended half the depth of the house, which, to be sure, was
not great. Beyond it was a second room, on the northeast corner, of the
same size.
We now crossed the hall to the south side, where there were two
corresponding rooms. Here, as on the other side, the chimney and
fireplaces were on the inside walls, and the mantels were of a simple
but very good colonial pattern, though they had been browned by smoke
and time to dirt colour.
"Now I want these two rooms made into one," said I. "I want one of the
doors into the hall closed up, and a glass door cut out of the south side
to a pergola veranda. Can you do it?"
Hard examined the partition. He climbed on a box which we dragged in,
and ripped away plaster and woodwork ruthlessly, both at the top and at
places on the sides, all without speaking a word.
"Yep," he said finally, "ef yer don't mind a big crossbeam showin'.
She's solid oak. Yer door, though, 'll have to be double, with a beam
in the middle."
"Fine!" I cried. "One to go in by, one to go out. Guests please keep
to the right!"
"Hev ter alter yer chimney," he added, "or yer'll hev two
fireplaces."
"Fine again!" cried I. "A long room with two fireplaces, and a
double-faced bookcase coming out at right angles between them, with
two settles below it, one for each fireplace! Better than I'd dreamed!"
"Suit yerself," said Hard.
We next arranged tentatively for a brick veranda with a pergola top on
the southern end of the house, and then went upstairs. Here the four
small chambers needed little but minor repairs and plaster work, save
that over the dining-room, which was to be converted into the bathroom.
The great space over the kitchen was to be cut into two servants'
bedrooms, with dormer windows. It already had the two windows, one
to the north and one to the south, and had evidently been used as a
drying-room for apples and the like. Hard figured here for some time,
and then led us silently downstairs again, and through the front door.
My front doorway had once been a thing of beauty, with two little panel
windows at the sides, and above all, on the outside, a heavy, hand-carved
broken pediment, like the top of a Governor Winthrop highboy. Hard
looked at it with admiration gleaming in his eyes. "I'd ruther restore
this than all the rest o' the job," he said, and his ugly, rumsoaked
little face positively shone with enthusiasm.
"Go ahead," said I; "only I want the new steps of brick, widely
spaced, with a lot of cement showing between. I'm going to terrace it
here in front, too--a grass terrace for ten feet out."
"Thet's right, thet's right!" he exclaimed. "Now I'll go order the
lumber, an' bring yer the estimate termorrer."
"Seems to me the usual proceeding would be the other way around!" I
gasped.
"Well, yer want me ter do the job, don't yer? Or don't yer?" he said
brusquely.
"Of course, of course!" I amended hastily. "Go ahead!"
Hard climbed into a broken-down wagon, and disappeared. "Don't you
worry," said Bert. "I'll see he treats yer right."
"It isn't that," I said sadly. "It's that I've just remembered I
forgot to include any painters' bills in my own estimate."
Bert looked at me in a kind of speechless pity for a moment. Then he said
slowly: "Wal, I'll be swizzled! Wait till I tell maw! An' her always
stickin' up fer a college education!"
"Just for that, I'll show you!" cried I. "I never trimmed an apple
tree in my life, but I'm going to work on this orchard, and I'm going
to save it, all myself. It will be better than yours in three years."
"Go to it," laughed Bert. "Come back fer dinner, though. Neow I'll
drive over ter the depot an' git yer freight. They telephoned this
mornin' it had come."
"Good!" I cried. "You might bring me a bag of cement, too, and a
gallon of carbolic acid."
"Ye ain't tired o' life so soon, be yer?"
"No," said I, "but I'm going to show you rubes how to treat an
orchard."
Bert went off laughing, and presently I saw him driving toward town with
his heavy wagon. I walked up to the plateau field to greet Mike. As I
crested the ridge the field lay before me, the great, lone pine standing
sentinel at the farther side; and half of it was frail, young green, and
half rich, shining brown.
"She ploughs tough, sor," said Mike, as the panting horses paused for
breath, "but she'll harrer down good. Be the seed pertaters come yit?"
"Bert has gone for them," said I. "Let me hold the plough once."
Mike, I fancied, winked at his son Joe, who was a strong lad of twenty,
with an amiable Irish grin. So everybody was regarding me as a joke!
Well, I was, even then, as strong as Mike, and I'd held a sweep, if
not a plough! I picked up the handles and lifted the plough around,
setting the point to the new furrow. Joe started the horses. The blade
wabbled, took a mad skid for the surface, and the handles hit me a blow
in the ribs which knocked my breath out. Mike grinned. I set my teeth
and the ploughshare, and again Joe started the horses. Putting forth
all my strength I held the plough under the sod this time, but the furrow
I ploughed started merrily away from the straight line, in spite of
all my efforts, and began to run out into the unbroken ground to the
left. I pulled the plough back again to the starting-point, and tried
once more. This trip, when I reached the point where my first furrow had
departed from the straight and narrow way, the cross strip of sod came
over the point like a comber over a boat's bow, and the horses stopped
with a jerk, while the point went down and again the handles smote me in
the ribs.
"It ain't so azy as it looks," said Mike.
"I'll do it if I haven't a rib left," said I grimly.
And I did it. My first full furrow looked like the track of a snake
under the influence of liquor, but I reversed the plough and came back
fairly straight. I was beginning to get the hang of it. My next furrow
was respectable, but not deep. But on the second return trip I ploughed
her straight, and I ploughed her deep, and that without exerting nearly
so much beef as on the first try. Most things are easy when you once know
how.
On this return trip the sweat was starting from my forehead, and the
smell of the horses and of the warm, fresh-turned earth was strong in my
nostrils. I didn't look at my pine, nor think of book plates. I was
proud at what I had done, and my muscles gloried in the toil. Again I
swung the plough around, and drove it across the field, feeling the
reluctant grass roots fighting every muscle of my arms.
"There," said I, triumphantly, "you plough all the rest as deep as
that!"
"Begobs, ye'z all right!" cried Mike.
I went back again down the slope with all the joy of a small boy who has
suddenly made an older boy recognize his importance. I went at once to
the shed, found a rusty saw (for my pruning saws, of course, had not
yet come), and descended upon the orchard. I had a couple of bulletins
on pruning in my pocket, with pictures of old trees remorselessly headed
down. I took a fresh look at the pictures, reread some of the text where
I had marked it, and tackled the first tree, carefully repeating to
myself: "Remove only a third the first year, remove only a third the
first year."
This, I decided, quite naturally did not refer to dead wood. By the
time I had the dead wood cut out of that first old tree, and all the
water spouts removed (as I recalled my grandfather used to call them),
which didn't seem necessary for new bearing wood, the poor thing began
to look naked. On one side an old water spout or sucker had achieved
the dignity of a limb and shot far into the air. I was up in the tree
carefully heading this back and out when Bert came driving by with his
wagon heaped to overflowing.
"Hi!" he called, "yer tryin' ter kill them trees entire!"
I got down and came out to the road. "You're a fine man and a true
friend, Mr. Temple," said I, "but I'm going to be the doctor for this
orchard. A chap's got to have _some_ say for himself, you know."
"Well, they ain't much good, anyhow, them trees," said Bert cheerfully.
We now fell to unloading the wagon. We opened up the woodsheds and
storehouse behind the kitchen, stowed in the barrels of seed potatoes,
the fertilizers, the various other seeds, the farm implements, sprayers,
and so on. The hotbed frames and sashes were put away for future use,
as it was too late to need them now. The horse hoe Bert had not been
able to bring on this trip. Next we got my books and furniture into
the house or shed, and tired, hot, and dirty, we drove on up the road
for dinner. As we passed the upper field, I saw that the ploughing
was nearly done. The brown furrows had already lost their gloss, as my
hands had already lost their whiteness.
"Well, I'm a farmer now!" said I, surveying my soil-caked boots and
grimy clothes.
"Yer on the way, anyhow," said Bert. "But yer'll have ter cultivate
thet field hard, seein's how it oughter hev been ploughed last fall."
That afternoon I went back to my orchard, got out my shiny and sharp new
double-edged pruning saw, and sawed till both arms ached. I sawed
under limbs and over limbs, right-handed and left-handed, standing on my
feet and on my head. I obeyed the first rule, to saw close to the
trunk, so the bark can cover the scar. I obeyed the rule to let light
into the tops. I didn't head my trees down as much as the pictures
indicated, for I wanted my orchard before the house as a decoration
quite as much as a source of fruit supply. One old tree, split by a
winter storm, I decided to chop down entirely. About half-past three,
as I supposed it to be, I went for an axe, and heard Mike putting the
horse into the barn and calling the cows. I looked at my watch. It was
five o'clock! I didn't get the axe, but walked back and surveyed the
havoc I had wrought--dead limbs strewing the ground, bright-barked water
spouts lying among them, tangles of top branches heaped high, and above
this litter three old trees rising, apparently half denuded, with great
white scars all over them where the limbs had been removed. I had gone
that first day across half the top row of the orchard, and I suddenly
realized that during the entire time I had been at work not a thought
had crossed my mind except of apple trees and their culture. I had
been utterly absorbed, joyfully absorbed, in the process of sawing
off limbs! Where, said I to myself, are those poetic reflections,
those delicious day dreams which come, in books, to the workers in
gardens? Can it be that, in reality, the good gardener thinks of his
job? Or am I simply a bad gardener?
I decided to go to the barn and ask Mike. I found him washing his
hands, preparatory to milking, and looking extremely bored. He used
an antiseptic solution which Bert had provided, for Bert was still
buying my milk.
"Sure, it's silly rules they be makin' now about a little thing like
milkin'," he said.
I wasn't ready to argue with him then, but I secretly resolved that I'd
make him wear a milking coat, also. I asked abruptly: "Mike, what do
you think about when you are working in the garden?"
Mike reflected quite seriously for a full moment, while the alternate
ring of the milk streams sang a tune on the bottom of the pail.
"Begobs, Oi niver thought o' that before," he said. "Sure, it's
interestin' to think what ye think about. Oi guess Oi thinks mostly
o' me gardenin'. It ain't till Oi straightens the kink out o' me
back and gits me lunch pail in the shade that Oi begins to wonder if the
Dimicrats 'll carry the country or why we can't go sivin days without a
drink, like the camels."
"You sort of have to keep your mind on your job, to do it right, eh?"
"Sure, if ye've got one to keep," Mike laughed.
The milk streams had ceased to ring. They were sizzling now, for the
bottom of the pail was covered. There was a warm smell of milk in the
stable, and of hay and cattle. Through the little door at the end I saw
framed a pretty landscape of my pasture, then woods rising up a hill,
and then the blue mountains, purpling now with sunset. My arms ached.
My ribs, where the plough handles had hit, were sore. I was sleepily,
deliciously, tired. I had done a real day's work. I was rather proud
of it, too, proud that I could stand so much physical toil. After all, it
is human to glory in your muscles.
"Good night," I called to Mike, as I started for home.
"Good night, sor," he sang cheerily back.
Upon the plateau I saw my rusty old disk harrow--a legacy from
Milt--standing on the brown earth. The furrows had disappeared. The field
was almost ready for planting. I took a bath, rubbing my ribs and
aching shoulders very tenderly, ate my supper hungrily, and settled down
to my manuscripts. In ten minutes I was nodding.
"Good heavens!" said I, "this will never do! I'll have to get up in
the morning and work."
So I bade Mrs. Temple wake me when she got up at five.
"Well," I reflected, as I tumbled into bed, "you can't have
everything and a country estate, too. Fancy _me_ getting up at five
o'clock!"
Chapter IV
I PUMP UP A GHOST
As A matter of fact, I didn't. I went to sleep again at five, and
slept till seven. It's not nearly so easy as it sounds in books to
change all your habits of life. But I resolved to try again the next
morning, and meanwhile to keep awake that night at all costs. Then,
after breakfast, I set out for my farm. Hard Cider would be there with
the estimate. The rest of that row of orchard was waiting for me. Mike
and Joe would finish harrowing the potato field and begin planting. I
almost ran down the road!
What is there about remodelling an old house, renovating an old orchard,
planting a fresh-ploughed field, even building a chicken coop, which
inspires us to such enthusiasm? I have written a few things of which I am
not ashamed, and taken great joy in their creation. But it was not the
same joy as that I take in making even one new garden bed, and not in
the least comparable to the joy of those first glorious days when my
old house was shaping up anew. It has often seemed to me almost
biological, this delight in domestic planning both inside and outside of
the dwelling--as though it were foreordained that man should have each
his own plot of earth, which calls out a primal and instinctive
æstheticism like nothing else, and is coupled with the domestic instinct
to reinforce it. I have known men deaf and blind to every other form of
beauty who clung with a loyal and redeeming love to the flowers in
their dooryard.
As I came into my own dooryard, I found Hard Cider unloading lumber.
He nodded briefly, and handed me a dirty slip of paper--his estimate.
Evidently he, too, had paternally taken me over, for this estimate
included the plumber's bill for a heater, the water connections for
house and barn, a boiler on the kitchen range, and the bathroom. The
bill would come to $3,000. That far exceeded my own estimate, and I
had still the painters to reckon with! However, Hard's bill seemed
fair enough, for Bert had told me the price of lumber, and there was a
lot of digging to connect with the town main. I nodded "Go ahead,"
and opened the door. In three minutes he and his assistant were busily
at work.
In the woodshed I found Mike cutting up the seed potatoes into baskets.
"Good mornin'," he said. "Joe's got the tooth harrer workin', and
we'll be plantin' this afternoon."
I started then toward the orchard, only to meet the boss plumber
arriving. With him I went down cellar to decide on the position for the
heater. "Of course you're going to have hot water?" said the boss.
"Am I?" said I. "I loathe radiators. They spoil the rooms. Wouldn't
you, as a great concession, let me have old-fashioned hot air?"
"You can have anything you want, of course," the plumber replied,
being, like most of his kind, without a sense of humour, "but to get
register pipes upstairs in this old house you'll spoil your rooms more
than with radiators. We have some very ornamental radiators."
"There ain't no such animal," said I.
But I ended with hot water. There were to be four radiators downstairs
and three upstairs, one in the bathroom, one in the hall, and one in a
chamber. The other chambers, having fireplaces, I decided needed no
further heat, though the plumber was mournfully skeptical. That made
seven in all, and did not call for a large heater. After much dickering
and argument, the plumber consented to leave the old copper pump at the
sink, in addition to the faucets. I refused to let that pump go, with
its polished brass knob on the iron handle, even though the sink was to
be replaced by a porcelain one. As the bathroom was almost over the
kitchen, and as the house already had a good cesspool, by some happy
miracle, the work was comparatively simple, and the plumber left to get
his men and supplies.
Again I started for the orchard. Already the buds were swelling on the
old trees, and the haze of nascent foliage hung over them. I had four
and a half rows to trim, and then the whole orchard to go over with
paint pot and gouge and cement. I had never trimmed a tree in my life
till the day before, yet I felt that I was doing a better job than
Bert had done on his trees, for Bert's idea of pruning was to cut off
all the limbs he could reach near the trunk, often leaving a stub four
inches long when it didn't happen to be convenient to saw closer. He
made his living, and a good one, selling milk and cauliflowers--he had
thirty acres down to cauliflowers, and shipped them to New York--but,
like so many New England farmers, he couldn't or wouldn't understand
the simple science of tree culture. Anybody can learn tree culture
with a little application to the right books or models and a little
imagination to see into the future. A good tree pruner has to be a bit
of an architect. I thought so then in my pride, at any rate, and it
turned out I was right. Right or wrong, however, I went at my job that
morning with a mighty zest, and soon had a second barrier of dead wood
heaped upon the ground.
As I worked, I thought how this orchard must be trimmed and cleaned
up first, but how the fine planting weather was upon us, too, and I ought
to be getting my garden seeds in, if I was to have any flowers. I
thought, also, of all my manuscripts to be read. A nervous fit seized
me, and I worked frantically. "How on earth shall I ever find time for
all I've got to do?" I said to myself, sending the saw into a dead
limb with a vicious jab. But I soon discovered that nervous haste
wasn't helping any. In my excitement, I cleaned off all the suckers on
a limb, and suddenly realized that I should have left two or three of
the strongest to make new wood, as the limb itself was past bearing.
I thought of Mike's reflection, that he kept his thoughts on his
gardening. So I calmed down, and gave my whole attention to my work,
making a little study of each limb, deciding what I wished to leave for
future development, and what would give the best decorative effect to my
slope as well. You can really trim an old apple tree into a thing of
gnarled power and quaint charm by a little care.
Tap, tap, tap, came the sound of hammers from my house. The plumbers
had returned, and I could hear them rattling pipes. The water company
was digging for the connections. Now and then a shout from Joe to the
horses was wafted down from the plateau. A pair of persistent song
sparrows, building in an evergreen by the brook, kept up a steady song. A
robin sang in the next tree to me. The sun beat warmly on my neck. And I
sawed and pruned, keeping steadily to my job, treating each tree and
limb as a separate and important problem, till I heard the hammers
cease at noon.
I had almost completed my first row!
As I returned from dinner, Joe was walking the drills in the potato
field, dropping the fertilizer, and the bent form of Mike followed
immediately behind him, dropping the seed from a basket. Joe walked
with a fine, free stride, and dropped the fertilizer from his hand
with a perfectly rhythmic gesture. The father's bent back behind him
was an added touch from Millet. But the lone pine and the blue mountains
gave a bright, sharp quality to the landscape which was quite unlike
Millet. The picture held me, however, as do the Frenchman's canvases.
Even my knowledge of Mike's comfortable home and happy disposition did
not rob it of that subtle pathos of agricultural toil. Why the pathos, I
asked myself? Mike is healthy and happy. No toil is more healthful.
I'm working as hard as Mike, and having a glorious time! To be sure,
I'm working my own land, but Mike, too, has a garden of his own, yet
doubtless looks as pathetic in it. I could find no solution, unless it
be that instinctive belief of a city-bred civilization that all joys
are urban. Just then, however, Mike straightened up with a laugh, and
the pathos vanished.
"So the pathos," thought I, as I caught myself instinctively
straightening, too, "is a matter of spinal sympathy!"
This was a most comforting reflection, and I hastened to investigate Hard
Cider's morning work. The kitchen floor was ready to relay. Over the
old planking he had spread tar paper, then carefully adjusted a light,
half-inch framework, and on top of this was laying the new floor.
"Thet'll keep out the cold," he said briefly, carefully lifting the
lid of the stove and spitting into the fire pot.
I examined the framework on which he was laying the new floor. It was
as carefully jointed as if it were the floor itself.
"Why so much pains with this?" I asked, pointing with my toe.
"Why not?" Hard Cider replied, as the March Hare replied to Alice.
I was braver than Alice. "But it doesn't show," I said.
"Somebody might take the floor up," he retorted, with some scorn.
"Hard Cider, after all, is an artist," I thought. "He has the artistic
conscience--and, being a Yankee, he won't admit it."
I went back to my orchard, working with a greater confidence and
speed now, born of practice; and I had begun on the second row by five
o'clock. Then I walked up to the plateau. Joe was working overtime,
covering the drills, while his father was doing the stable work. I staked
the three sections of the field containing Early Rose, Dibble's
Russet, and Irish Cobbler respectively, and entered in my notebook the
date of planting. It occurred to me then and there to keep a diary of
all seeds, soils, fertilizers, and plantings, noting weather conditions
and pests during the growing season, and the time, quality, and
quantity of harvest. That diary I began the same evening; I have kept
it religiously ever since, and I have learned more about agriculture
from its pages than from any other book--something I don't say
vainly at all, because it is but the careful tabulation of practical
experience, and that is any man's best teacher.
I picked up a hoe and helped Joe cover drills for half an hour. Thanks
to golf and rowing, my hands were already calloused, or I don't know
what would have happened to them in those first days!
Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I
walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned
out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the
dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm
was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be
easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a grass terrace,
with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in
the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the
orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the
farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered
south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks
running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog
some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my
pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the
other into the grassy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of
the glass door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench
against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and
thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled,
also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at
the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a
long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs.
Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.
That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done.
I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked
another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily
stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all
day. I must give up my mornings to my manuscript reading.
"Well," thought I, "I'll do it--as soon as the orchard is finished."
As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made
on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary trimming
of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a
half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they
were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to
be painted, and cement work to be done.
"Good gracious!" thought I, "if I do all that, when will I plant, when
will I make my lawn?"
Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire
to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid
sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That
is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn't afford to employ
more labour. Besides, I didn't want to. I wanted to do the work myself.
But there was so much to do!
I stood stock still and pulled myself together. "Rome was not built in
a day," I told myself. "You just take out the worst of the dead wood
in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else
at odd times during the summer."
Then one of those things called a still, small voice whispered in my ear:
"But you should never begin a new job till you have finished the old.
Hoe out your row, my son!"
I recognized the latter words as the catch phrase of a moral story in
an ancient reader used in my boyhood school days. Oh, these blighting
dogmas taught us in our youth! I resisted the still, small voice, but
I felt secretly ashamed. That day I finished the orchard by merely taking
out unsightly dead wood and a few of the worst suckers; so that one
half of it looked naked and one half bearded, even as the half-shaved
hunchback in the "Arabian Nights." I knew I was doing right, yet I
felt I was doing wrong, and in my heart of hearts I was never quite happy
for a year, till I had that orchard finished.
Meanwhile, Hard Cider had finished the kitchen floor and cut out the new
door frame into the dining-room, while the plumbers had mounted the
boiler by the range and begun on the piping. Mike and Joe had been
busy on the slope to the south, ploughing the most distant portion
for the fodder crops and harrowing in load after load of old stable
manure from the barn. The next day would bring them into the garden
area, so I staked out my contemplated sundial lawn, allowing a liberal
250 feet, and ran the line westward till it came a trifle beyond the
last woodshed, whence I ran it north to the shed for the grape arbour.
West of the arbour, on the half acre of slope remaining before the
plateau was reached, I planned to set out a new orchard--some day. That
same night I filled out an order for fifty rambler roses! "I'll grow
'em on poles, till I can build the trellises," said I. Then I sat
down to my manuscripts.
The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and
found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in
the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification
of a hoary superstition. Personally, I like best to work at night, and
some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But
you cannot drive your brain at night when you've been driving your
body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming.
Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden
and Mike sowing peas.
"Can I have the horse to-morrow?" said I.
"Yez cannot," said Mike. "Sure, we'll be another day at the least
gettin' the garden ready."
"But I want to grade my lawn," I said. "The day after, then?"
"Maybe," said Mike. "Yez must make lawns when there's nothin' else
at all to do."
"Yes, sir," I replied, and he grinned.
That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers
fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope
as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at
each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room
for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider
to order the trellis lumber for me.
Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of
cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of
carbolic solution, I gouged out a few--only a few--of the worst cavities
in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a
slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none
too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I
will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my
experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily
interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of
the work to a dentist's filling teeth. If every tree died, I told
myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job
myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs
had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean
up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So
for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed,
carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed,
and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden.
Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled grass (for the
orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the
barrow back for it.
When six o'clock came I was still carting from the top of the orchard,
and for an hour past I had been working with that grim automatism
which characterizes the last lap of a two-mile race. There is no joy
of creation in clearing up! It is just a grind. And yet it is a part
of creation, too, the final stage in the achievement of garden beauty.
I wonder if any gardener exists, though, with the imagination so to
regard it while he cleans? Certainly I am not the man. I then and there
resolved to finish the job by installments, from day to day. Perhaps,
taken a little at a time, it would not seem so boresome!
The next morning the smoke of my burning brush pile was coming over the
hill as I drew near my farm. The harrow was at work in the garden.
Hard's hammer was ringing from the chamber over the dining-room, which
he was converting into a bathroom so that the plumbers could get to work
in it. The old orchard trees held up their cropped and denuded tops
with a brave show of buds, and I debated with myself what I should
do. "Spray!" I decided. So I got a hoe, and started to scrape the
trees mildly on the trunks and large lower limbs, while my lime-sulphur
mixture was boiling on the stove. I soon found that here, again, I
had tackled a job which would require a day, not an hour, so I gave
it up, and put the solution in my spraying barrel, summoned Joe to the
pump, and sprayed for scale on the unscraped bark. I was by this time
getting used to half measures. You have to, when you try to bring up a
farm with limited labour!
The wiseacre has now, of course, foreseen that I killed all the young
buds. Alas! I am again compelled to spoil a good story, and confess
that I didn't kill any of them. I mixed the lime-sulphur one part to
sixty, for I carefully read the warning in my spraying bulletin. I have
my doubts whether it was strong enough to kill the scale, certainly
not with the bark left on, but at least it was weak enough not to kill
the buds, and it was fun applying it.
"There," I cried, as noon came, "the orchard may rest for the present!
Now for the next thing!"
Have you ever watched a small boy picking berries? He never picks a
bush clean, but rushes after this or that big cluster of fruit which
strikes his eye, covering half an acre of ground while you, perhaps,
are stripping a single clump of bushes. And he is usually amazed when
your pail fills quicker than his. Alas! I fear I was much like that small
boy during my first season on the farm, or at any rate during the first
month or two. There was little "efficiency" in my methods--but, oh,
much delight!
I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me.
Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden
coldframes along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my
temporary seed beds there. Mike assented to the plan as a good one,
and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the
nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden
earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and
finally with my hands.
Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for
planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves.
Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves.
Surely, thought I, they miss something--the cool, moist feel of the
loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o'clock
I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin
tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with
scrupulous care always said, "press the earth down firmly with a
board." I was working with a flat mason's trowel, so I got up and
found a board. It wasn't half so easy to work with, but I was taking
no chances!
"There must," I grinned, "be some magic efficacy in that board."
The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by
Professor Grey's assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure.
Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving
those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues--like a second
marriage, alas! too often "the triumph of hope over experience"--or
else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.
But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun,
beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy
fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put
the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to;
very often I didn't know whether they could be transplanted. (As it
turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait.
As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a
marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors' buttons,
love-in-a-mist, Drummond's phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual
larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well
as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the
soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense
enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put
in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I
got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently
watered the hopeful earth.
Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The
great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house
toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was
my farm, thence would come my profits--if profits there should be. But
just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was
more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to
paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my
dwelling a dream of gardens.
"After all," I thought, "a country place is but half realized without
its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of
country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with
shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps
I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in
colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that.
I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a
gardener--an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within;
I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!"
I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old
wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands
and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.
"What are yez doin' that for?" he asked.
I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. "Just to be a kid,
I guess," I laughed.
There are some things Mike couldn't understand. Perhaps I did not
clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and
the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy
memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had
waked the echo of their mood.
But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those
memories came back with haunting clearness--a summer day, a long tramp,
the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden passion,
the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken
words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!
The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far
blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit,
too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the
face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was
dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a manuscript by a
rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was
the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.
Chapter V
I AM HUMBLED BY A DRAG SCRAPER
One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or
restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the
garden. I am by nature a trusting soul anyway (which no woman and
possibly no wise man ever is where carpenters, builders, and plumbers are
concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. He told me the plumbers
were "doin' all right," and I believed him. That he himself was doing
all right my own eyes told me, for he had by now reached the south
rooms, removed the dividing partition, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak
beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the centre on
either side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn.
I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with
their plain-panelled old mantels.
"Mr. Howard," said I, "those mantels are about as plain as you could
make 'em, and yet they are very handsome, somehow, dingy as they are."
"It's the lines," said Hard Cider. "Jest the right lines. Lower 'em
six inches, and whar'd they be?"
"Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from
one to the other and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room
from the centre, making it the back of a double settle?" I asked.
"I'm a carpenter," Hard replied laconically.
"Could you draw me what it would look like first?"
"I ain't said I wuz an artist," he answered. "Draw it yerself."
I took his proffered pencil, and sketched what I wanted on a clean board.
"Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o' them settles," he said
judicially. "Ain't no curves in your mantels. You want 'em square,
with a panel like them over your fireplaces."
He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick, neat, accurate sketch
of just what I instantly saw I did want.
[Illustration:]
I shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead!" said I. "What did you ask me to
draw it for in the first place?"
"Folks likes to think they hev their own idees," he answered.
I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The
pergola was not commenced. In fact, I had decided not to build it till
the following spring. Those beastly painters whom I had forgotten were
going to eat up too much of my slender capital. Before me stretched the
250 feet of ploughed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of
it was my line of stakes where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that
was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and
Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a
row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last,
to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, clumsily put on
his harness, for I was not used to horses, led him to the shed where my
tools were stored, hitched him to my new drag scraper, and drove him to
the slope.
As I have said, the ground here sloped down eastward toward the brook,
and if I was to have a level lawn south of my house, I should have to
remove at least two feet of soil from the western end and deposit it on
the eastern end. I wisely decided to start close to the house. Hauling at
the handles of the heavy scraper and yelling "Back up, there!" at the
horse, I got the steel scoop into the ground at the line of my proposed
grape arbour, tipped down the blade, and cried, "Giddup!" I hung to
the reins as best I could, twisting them about my wrist, and the horse
started obediently forward. The scoop did its work very nicely. In
fact, it was quite full after we had gone six feet, and I had only to
let the horse drag it the remaining ninety-four feet of the proposed
width of the lawn, and empty it. Then I went back, and repeated the
process. After five repetitions of the same process, the perspicacious
reader will have reckoned that I had shaved off something less than
half the width of my lawn, on one furrow, and was still a long, long
way from being down to the required depth of two feet at the higher
end. My arms already ached. As the scraper covered a furrow but two feet
wide, that meant 125 furrows to scrape my entire lawn as planned, and
at least twenty trips to the furrow. I did some rapid multiplication as
I paused to wipe my brow. "Twenty times 125 is 2,500," thought I. I
dropped the reins and moved toward my stakes. I saw that Joe and Mike
were looking at me.
"I think," said I, with some dignity, as I began to pull the stakes
up, "that this lawn will look better square. As it's a hundred feet
broad, a hundred feet will be far enough to extend it from the house."
"Sure," said Mike, "the big road scraper 'll be over here to-morrow,
scrapin' the road, and it do be easier an' quicker to borry that."
In some ways, I consider this remark of Mike's, under the circumstances,
one of the most gentlemanly I ever heard! And I jumped at his suggestion.
"Mike," said I, "I'll admit this job is bigger than I thought. How
can I borrow the road scraper?"
"Sure, ain't me frind Dan Morrissy one o' the selictmen?" said Mike,
"and ain't he the road boss, and ain't he willin' to earn an extra
penny for--for the town?"
"H'm," said I; "for the town! Well, I've got to have this lawn! You
get your friend Dan in the morning. Just the same, I don't love the town
so much that I want a 250-foot lawn."
I took my line of stakes back 150 feet, and replanted them. That gave me
a more intimate lawn, like a large outdoor south room, I thought. It
also increased my vegetable garden acreage. I returned to the scraper
and the patient horse with a new humbleness, a new realization of what
one man cannot do in a day. That, perhaps, is one of the first and
most important lessons of farming and gardening. Once you have learned
it, you are either discouraged or fired anew with the persistence of
patience. I was not discouraged. Besides, I had Mike's friend Dan, the
selectman, to fall back on! It is always well to be friends with Tammany
Hall. First, I decided not to grade even my smaller lawn to a dead
level, but merely to smooth it off, letting that process counteract the
slope as much as it would. Then I started to scoop again, bringing
down the soil from the higher western side directly to the south face
of my house and dumping it there, to be packed into a terrace which next
season should be the floor of my pergola.
Did you ever try to handle a drag scraper and drive the horse at the
same time, dear reader? It requires more muscle and as much patience as
golf. Joe offered to come and drive for me, but I preferred him to
plant, and kept on by myself. It is amazing how much dirt you can dump in
one place without increasing the pile perceptibly. The only thing more
amazing is the amount of dirt you can take out of one place without
perceptibly increasing the depth of your hole. I ran the scoop along
the edge of my proposed grape arbour time after time, dumping the
contents in front of my new south door, but still that first furrow
didn't sink more than six inches, and still the sills of my house
rose above the piles. Noon came and found me with aching arms and
strained shoulder sockets. I had brought some lunch, to save the walk
back to Mrs. Temple's, and I took it into my big south room to eat it.
Hard was in there eating his. The plumbers were eating theirs in the
new kitchen, already completed.
Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, which was just the height of the
mantels. He had been preparing the top moulding with his universal plane
when noon came, and the sweet shavings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed
my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while
Hard Cider regarded me scornfully.
"I'm going to have great times in this room!" I exclaimed. "Books
between the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures,
including my Hiroshiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window,
and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty
good in this room, eh?"
Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. "I don't know nothin' about
writin'," he said, "but it 'pears to me a feller could write most
anywhar pervided he had somethin' ter say."
Whereupon Hard concluded by biting into a large piece of prune pie.
The Yankee temperament is occasionally depressing! I went outdoors again,
eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden
to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went
down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool hush of
them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed in the bath of their peace, and
for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just
blissfully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, marvellously rested.
I scooped till three o'clock, led the horse back to the barn, got a
shovel and rake, and began to spread my terrace. As this south end of my
house (and accordingly my big south room) was but thirty-three feet long,
the task was not very severe, particularly as the upper, or western, end,
did not require much grading. I built the terrace out about twelve feet
from the wall, stamped up and down on it to pack it, and raked it
smooth. I realized that it would settle, of course, and I should need
more earth yet upon it before it was sown down to grass, or, if I could
afford it, bricked; but in order to hold the bank, I got some grass
seed and planted the edge, and also got a couple of planks to stretch
from the south door across the terrace and down to the lawn, until I
could build my proposed brick path and steps. It was six o'clock when I
had finished. Palm-sore and weary, I drank a great tin dipperful of
water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard's
bookcase, which had already been built out the required five feet into
the room along the line of the old partition, fourteen inches wide to
hold books on both sides, tried the doors to see that they were locked,
and tramped up the dusty road to supper.
Mrs. Temple was beaming when I came down from my bath.
"Why so happy?" said I.
"Well," said she, "in the first place, I've got you the housekeeper I
want."
"By which I infer that she's the one _I_ want, too?" I asked.
"Of course," said Mrs. Temple, on whom irony had no effect. "She's
Mrs. Pillig, from Slab City, and she's an artist in pies."
"Go on; you interest me strangely!" I cried. "Is her husband dead,
and has she got a small boy?" (Here I winked at Bert.)
"Pillig ain't dead, worse luck," said Mrs. Temple, "but he's whar
he won't trouble you. I guess Peter won't trouble you none, neither.
He's a nice boy, and he'll be awful handy round the place."
"Peter Pillig!" I exclaimed. "There ain't no such animal! If there
is, Dickens was his grandfather. How old is Peter?"
"Peter's eleven," Mrs. Bert replied. "He's real nice and bright.
His mother's brought him up fine. Anyhow, she was a Corliss."
"But, eugenically speaking, Peter may have a predisposition to follow in
father's footsteps, which I infer led toward the little green swinging
doors," I protested.
"Speakin' U. S. A., tommyrot!" said Mrs. Temple. "Anyhow, it's the
door o' the drugstore in this town. They sell more'n sody water down
to Danforth's."
"What am I to pay the author of Peter and the pies?" I asked.
"Well, seein's how you keep Peter, as it were, and Mrs. Pillig
calc'lates she can rent her house up to Slab City, she's goin' to
come to you for $20 a month. She's wuth it, too. You'll have the best
kept and cleanest house in Bentford."
I rose from the table solemnly. "Mrs. Temple," said I, "I accept Mrs.
Pillig, Peter, and the pies at these terms, but only on one condition:
_She is never to clean my study!_"
"Why?" asked Mrs. Temple.
"Because," said I, "you can never tell where an orderly woman will put
things."
Bert chuckled as he filled his pipe. Mrs. Temple grinned herself. I was
about to make a triumphant exit, when these words from Mrs. Temple's
lips arrested me:
"Bert," she said, "did you clean the buggy to-day? You know you gotter
go over ter the deepot to-morrow an' git that boarder."
"That _what?_" I cried.
Mrs. Bert's eyes half closed with a purely feminine delight. "Oh,
ain't I told you?" she said innocently. "We're goin' ter hev another
boarder, a young lady. From Noo York, too. Her health's broke down,
she says, only that's not the way she said it, and somehow she heard
of us. We ain't never taken many boarders, but I guess our name's in
that old railroad advertisin' book. I wouldn't hev took her, only I
thought maybe you wuz kind o' lonesome here with jest us."
"Mrs. Temple," said I, "your solicitude quite overwhelms me. Comfort
me with petticoats! Good Lord! And an anæmic, too! I'll bet she has
nerves! When can Mrs. Pillig come to me, woman?"
Mrs. Bert's eyes closed still farther. "Oh, your house ain't near
ready yet," she said. "Why, the painters ain't even began."
I fled to my chamber, and hauled forth a manuscript. A female boarder! No
doubt she'd expect me to shave every day and change my working clothes
for the noonday dinner! Heavens! probably she'd come down and advise
me how to lay out my garden! So far, I had been blissfully free from
advice. I had gone to the village just once--to open my account at the
bank. I had not met a soul in the town. One or two of the early arrivals
on the estates had driven by in their cars and stared curiously, but I
had ignored them. I didn't want advice. I was having fun in my own way.
"Hang Mrs. Temple!" I muttered, reading a whole paragraph of manuscript
without taking in a word of it. In fact, I gave up all attempt to work,
and crossly and wearily went to bed, where I lay on one of my strained
shoulders and dreamed that a sick female with spectacles was hauling at
my arm and begging me to come and rescue her sciatic nerve, which had
fallen into my not-yet-built garden pool and was being swallowed by a
gold fish.
Chapter VI
THE HERMIT SINGS AT TWILIGHT
The next morning I demanded that Mrs. Temple again put me up some lunch.
"For," said I, "I'm going to postpone meeting this broken-down wreck
of a perhaps once proud female as long as possible."
"Maybe when you see her drive by you'll be sorry," Mrs. Bert smiled.
"I shall be working on the south side of the house," I retorted.
I had not been long at my place, indeed, I had scarcely finished watering
my seed bed and carting out my daily stint of two barrow loads of slash
from the orchard, when I heard the road scraper rattling over the
bridge by the brook. Mike came from the vegetable garden and met his
"frind Morrissy," to whom I was ceremoniously presented.
The scraper was a large affair with flat-tired iron wheels and a blade
eight feet long. It was drawn by four horses, and Mr. Morrissy himself
was driving, while a younger man manipulated the levers. We drove in
behind the woodshed to the proposed lawn, I explained what I wanted
done, and the scraper went to work, with me trotting anxiously alongside,
quite useless but convinced that I was helping, like Marceline at the
Hippodrome. The way that eight-foot blade, with four horses hauling
it, peeled off the old furrows and brought the top soil down from the
high side to the low made my poor efforts with the scoop look puny
enough. After a few trips it began to look as if my lawn could be fairly
level after all. Where I had worked an hour to lower the ground six
inches, the scraper accomplished the same result in five minutes and on
four times as wide a strip. I soon saw, too, that Mike and Joe were
useless in the garden, so long as "frind Morrissy" and his helper
were here on the lawn, so I set them to spreading the loose dirt at
the lower end, as fast as the scraper brought it down, taking a hand
myself. The lawn was shaping up so fast that I began once more to
grow expansive.
"It really won't be square," thought I, "because my pergola will cut
off twelve feet of the length, and if I have flower beds by the roses,
they'll cut off some more. I guess those roses ought to be 112 feet from
the house."
I threw down my shovel, went over to the row of stakes, and moved them
south again, twenty-five feet, having added thirteen feet as I walked;
then I called out to "frind Morrissy" to bring his scraper.
"Sure," said Mike, "you'll get it right yet. But I was goin' to put
me cauliflowers there."
The scraper went at the new twenty-five foot strip, and in an hour that,
too, was down eight inches at the west end and up as much at the east.
The lawn still sloped, and though an afternoon with the scraper could
probably have put it nearly level, and I was tempted to have it done,
Mike pointed out that we were already getting perilously close to the
subsoil, and if we went deeper we'd get into tough sledding, and I'd
end, besides, by getting a surface which wouldn't grow grass. So I
took his advice, paid "frind Morrissy"--for the town!--as the far-off
noon whistle at Slab City blew, and took my lunch down to the brook
while the scraper rattled off down the road.
The brook reminded me of the pool I was going to build, and the pool of
my dream, and my dream of the new boarder, and then with the patness of a
"well-made" play the boarder herself entered, as it were. That is, I
heard the buggy coming, and the voice of Bert. I lay down flat behind
the tall weeds and grasses, and remained hidden till the buggy had passed.
"Confounded petticoats!" thought I. "Well, if she tries to advise me,
I'll snub her so she won't try a second time!"
Then I finished my lunch, and lay for a quarter of an hour lazily
regarding the sky, a great blue sky with cloud ships floating at anchor
in its depths, while the indescribable fragrance of May in moist places
filled my nostrils and a song sparrow practised in the alders. As I got
up to return to my work, I saw suddenly that the old apple trees in my
orchard were showing pink--just a frail hint of it in the veil of young
green. A great cumulus cloud piled up like a Himalayan peak in the
west beyond my mouse-gray dwelling. To the left, the new lawn was shiny
brown, and as I climbed the slopes the smell of it came to me. Out
still farther to the left my land was already staked in rows of packed
earth, neatly. The scene was beautiful to my eyes, and the imagined
beauty of to-morrow made me almost run through the orchard to leave
my lunch basket in the kitchen and get my tools for the afternoon's work.
I had, unfortunately, no roller, but I found in the shed an old piece of
tattered carpet, which I tacked on a ten-foot beam, tied a rope to each
end, united the two ropes around a stick for a handle, and dragged
this improvised smoother back and forth over my lawn, as I had seen
the keepers of the dirt tennis courts at college do. It was really
surprising how well this smoothed the surface, especially at the
lower end where the dirt was loose. It had much less effect on the
ground where the scraper had taken off the top soil. After the lawn
looked tolerably level to the eye, I brought three loads of manure
from the barn, scattered them lightly, and went over the surface with a
light tooth harrow. I saw I was not going to get the lawn done that
afternoon, for it would have to be "rolled" again. I further realized,
as the horse sank into the loose soil at the lower side, that I should
have to wait till a rain had settled the earth before I resmoothed it,
and could sow my grass seed. At five o'clock, as Joe was leaving the
garden, and Mike had gone to the barn to milk the cows, I, too, put up
my tools, resolved to enjoy an hour's loaf--my first since I bought
the farm!
I scrubbed my hands and face at the kitchen sink in a tin basin which
recalled my childhood, took a long draught from the tin dipper, filled my
pipe, and strolled down through the budding orchard toward the brook. The
song sparrow was still singing. The cloud ships were still riding at
anchor. Even with my pipe in my mouth I could smell the odour of moist
places in May. Walking beside the brook, I suddenly found the green
spears of an iris plant amid the grasses. A few steps farther on, under
the maples, the ground was blue and white with violets and anemones.
Then the brook entered the pines, lisping a secret as it went, and I
followed it into their cool hush.
I had gone scarcely six paces when I heard the crackle of footsteps on
dead twigs somewhere ahead of me, and a moment later the vague form of
a woman was visible making her way amid the impeding dead branches.
I stood still. She did not see me till she was close up. Then she
gave a slight start and said, "I beg your pardon. I trust I am not
trespassing."
I looked at her, while my pipe bowl was hot in my calloused hand. She
was scarce more than a girl, I fancied, pale and unmistakably not of this
country world. I cannot say how she was dressed, save that she wore
no hat and looked white and cool. But I saw that she had very blue eyes
on each side of a decidedly tilted nose, and these eyes were unmistakably
the kind which twinkle.
"Trespassing is a relative term," said I, after this, I fear, rather
rudely prolonged scrutiny.
"You talk like 'Hill's Rhetoric,'" she smiled, with a quick glance
at the incongruity of my clothes.
"Naturally," I replied. "It was the text-book I formerly used with
my classes."
There was a little upward gurgle of laughter from the girl. "Clearness,
force, and elegance, wasn't that the great triumvirate?" she said.
"Something like that, I believe," said I. "I am trying to forget."
"And are these pines yours to forget in? It should be easy. I was
walking out there in the road, and I spied the brook over the wall and
climbed through the briers to walk beside it, because it was trying so
hard to talk to me. That was wrong of me, perhaps, but I never could
resist a brook--nor pine trees. They are such nice old men."
"Why, then," I asked, "are the little virgin birches always running
away from them?"
Her eyes contracted a second, and then twinkled. "The birches _plague_
them," she replied.
"How do they plague them?" I demanded.
"Pull their pine needles when they are asleep, of course," she
answered. "Thank you for letting me walk here."
"Not at all," said I, "it is always a pleasure to entertain a true
naturalist."
She smiled, and made to pass on. I stood a little aside, in silence.
And in that moment of silence suddenly, from near at hand, from somewhere
in these very pines, there rang out the golden throb of a hermit thrush
so close that the grace notes of his song were audible, cool and liquid
and lovely. The suddenness, the nearness, the wildness of this song
made it indescribably thrilling, and the girl and I both stood rigid,
breathless, peering into the gloom of the pines. Again the call rang out,
but a little farther away this time, more plaintive, more fairylike
with distance. She took a step as if to follow, and instinctively I
put out my hand, grasping her arm to restrain her. So we stood and
waited, while from farther still, evidently from the tamaracks in the
corner of my lot, came the elfin clarion. The singer was a good one;
his attack was flawless, and he scattered his triplets with Mozartian
ease and precision. Still we waited, in silence, but he did not sing
again. Then in a kind of wonder the girl turned her face to mine, and
in a kind of wonder I realized that I was still holding her arm. She
appeared as unconscious of it as I, till I let my hand fall. Then she
coloured a little, smiled a little, and said, "What was it? I never
heard anything so beautiful."
"A hermit thrush," I answered. "Thoreau once described his song as
'cool bars of melody from the everlasting morning or evening.' I think
that expresses it as well as words can."
"I have always wanted to hear a hermit," she said wistfully. "And, oh,
it is lovelier than I dreamed! I am going now before I get too jealous
of you for having one all your own."
"Don't go!" I said impulsively. "The hermit has never sung for me.
That song must have been in your honour."
The moment when I stood holding her arm, the moment when she had turned
her wondering, eager face to mine, had been very pleasant. It was dusk
now in the pines, and, looking westward, the low sun was making daggers
of light between the trees. My ghost that I had brought up from the
pump suddenly walked again, but walked in flesh and blood, with blue
eyes and tilted nose. I was undeniably affected. My voice must have
betrayed it as I repeated, "Don't go!"
"But I fear it is time for my supper," she said, with a little nervous
laugh. "The thrush has evidently gone for his."
"Birds eat early," said I. "They have to, because they get up so
early, after that worm."
Her laugh was once more an up-gushing gurgle. The tenseness was broken.
I found myself walking by her side through the maples, and pointing out
my house.
She clapped her hands ecstatically. "Oh," she cried, "they made the
front door out of a highboy! How jolly! Is it as nice inside?"
"It's going to be nicer," said I. "Come and see."
"I'll peep through the windows," she smiled.
I led her to my new south door, proudly showing my new lawn and the
terrace, and telling her where the roses were to be, and the sundial,
and dilating on the work my own hands had done. With a silly, boyish
enthusiasm, I even displayed the callouses and invited her to feel of
them, which she did as one humours a child, while I thrilled quite
unchildishly at the touch of her finger tips. Then we peeped through the
glass doors. The low sun was streaming in through the west window and
disclosed the old oak beam across the ceiling. Hard Cider had erected the
frame of the bookcase and double settle, which would perfectly match the
mantels as soon as the molding was on. One side of the settle faced
toward one smoky old fireplace, the other toward the second.
"Two fireplaces! What luxury!" she exclaimed.
"You see," said I, "when I get tired of reading philosophy at the
east fireplace, I'll just come around the corner and read 'Alice in
Wonderland' at the west chimney nook."
"Double fireplaces--twin fireplaces--twin fires! That's it, Twin Fires!
That ought to be the name of your house."
"You're right!" I cried, delighted. "I've never been able to think
of a name. That's the inevitable one--that's Flaubert's one right
word. You must come to my christening party and break a bottle of wine
on the hearth."
She smiled wistfully, as she turned away from the window. "I must surely
go to supper," she said. "Good-bye, and thank you for your wonderful
concert."
We walked to the road, but to my surprise she did not turn toward the
village but toward Bert's. A sudden light came.
"Are you the broken-down boarder?" I cried.
The gurgle welled up, and the blue eyes twinkled, but she made no reply.
"Just for that," said I, "I won't carry back Mrs. Bert's basket."
As we entered the Temple's yard, Mrs. Bert stood in the kitchen door.
"Well, you two seem to have got acquainted," she remarked in a
matter-of-fact tone. "Miss Goodwin, this is Mr. Upton I told you
about. Mr. Upton, this is Miss Goodwin I told you about."
"Mrs. Temple," said I, "you are another. You didn't tell me."
"Young man," she retorted, "where's my basket?"
"I left it behind--on purpose," said I.
"Then you'll hev ter come home to yer dinner to-morrow," she said.
"Well, I'm willing," I answered.
"I guess you be," said she.
At supper she returned to the theme, which appeared to amuse her
endlessly. "Miss Goodwin," she said, "I want ter warn you thet Mr.
Upton's terrible afraid somebody's goin' ter advise him how ter
build his garden. He's a regular man."
I replied quickly: "Your warning is too late," said I; "Miss Goodwin
has already begun by naming my place."
"You can change the name, you know," the girl smiled.
"How can I?" I answered, with great sternness. "It's the right one."
Whereupon I went up to my work, and listened to the sounds of soft
singing in the room across the hall.
Chapter VII
THE GHOST OF ROME IN ROSES
"Stella Goodwin." "It's rather a pretty name," I thought, as I read
it on the flyleaf of a volume she had left in Mrs. Bert's sitting-room.
The volume itself amused me--Chamberlain's "Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century." Fancy coming to the country for a rest, and
reading Chamberlain, most restless because most provocative of books!
I was waiting for breakfast, impatiently, having been at work on my
manuscripts since five. Mrs. Bert was in the kitchen; Bert was at the
barn. The hour was seven-thirty. I was idly turning the leaves of
Chamberlain when there was a rustle on the stairs, and Miss Stella
Goodwin entered with a cheerful "Good morning."
"See here," said I, "what are you doing with this book, if you are off
for a rest? This is no book for a nervous wreck to be reading."
"Who said I was a nervous wreck?" she answered. "I'm just tired,
that's all. I guess it's really spring fever. I saw a spear of real
grass in Central Park, and ran away."
"From what?" I asked.
"From the dictionary," she replied.
"The _which?_" said I.
"The dictionary. Would you like me to sing you a song of the things that
begin with 'hy'?"
She laughed again, and began to chant in burlesque Gregorian,
"Hyopotamus, hyoscapular, hyoscine, Hyoscyameæ, hyoscyamine,
Hyoscyamus-----"
"Stop!" I cried. "You will have me hypnotized. See, I'm on the
'hy's' myself! Please explain--not sing."
"Well," she laughed, "you see it's this way. I have to eat, drink,
and try to be merry, or to-morrow I die, so to postpone to-morrow I am
working on a new dictionary. _Somebody_ has to work on dictionaries, you
know, and justify the pronunciation of America to man. I'm sort of
learned, in a mild, harmless, anti-militant way. It isn't fair to
keep the truth from you--_I have a degree in philology!_ My doctor's
thesis was published by the press of my kind University, at $1.50
per copy, of which as many as seventeen were sold, and I'm still
paying up the money I borrowed while preparing it. I stood the dictionary
pretty well down to the 'hy's,' and then one day something snapped
inside of me, and I began to cry. That wouldn't have been so bad, if I
hadn't made the mistake of crying on a sheet of manuscript by a
learned professor, about Hyoscyamus (which is a genus of dicotyledonous
gamopetalous plants), and the ink ran. Then I knew I should have to
take a rest in the cause of English, pure and well defined. So here I
am. The doctor tells me I must live out of doors and saw wood."
"Madam," I cried, "God has sent you! I shall get my orchard cleaned
up at last!"
"Breakfast!" called Mrs. Bert.
"Miss Goodwin," I announced at that meal, "is going to saw up the dead
wood in my orchard this morning."
"No, she ain't. The idee!" cried Mrs. Bert. "She's jest goin' ter
rest up for the next four weeks, an' grow fat."
"You are both wrong," laughed the young lady. "I'm not going to begin
on Mr. Upton's wood pile this morning, but I expect to finish it before
I go away."
"If thet's how you feel, _I_ got a wood pile," said Bert.
She refused to come down to Twin Fires with me that morning, so I toiled
alone, getting out more of the brush from the orchard--all of the small
stuff, in fact, which wasn't fit to save for fuel. In the afternoon
she consented to come. As I looked at her hands and then at mine, I
realized how pale she was.
"It's wrong for anybody to be so pale as that," I thought, "to _have_
to be so pale as that!"
I was beginning to pity her.
When we reached the farm, I took her around under the kitchen window and
showed her my seed beds, where the asters were already growing madly,
some other varieties were up, and the weeds were busy, too; but in the
present uncertainty of my horticultural knowledge I didn't dare pull up
anything. I hadn't realized till that moment that half the fun of having
a new place is showing it to somebody else and telling how grand it is
going to be.
"And where are you going to put these babies when you set them out?"
she asked.
"That's just the point," I cried. "I don't know. I want you to help
me."
"After Mrs. Bert's warning, I shouldn't dare advise you," she smiled.
"Well, let's ask Hiroshige," said I. "Come on."
"Is he your gardener? The name sounds quite un-Hibernian."
I scorned a reply, and we went around to the shed where all my
belongings were stored, still unpacked. I got a hammer and opened the
box containing pictures, drawing forth my two precious Japanese
prints. Then I led Miss Goodwin through the kitchen in spite of her
protests of propriety, through the fragrance of new flooring, into
the big south room, where Hard had nearly completed his main work and was
getting in the new door frames while his assistants were patching up
the floor. She sat down on the new settle, while I climbed on a box
and hung the pictures, one over each mantel. Instantly the room assumed
to my imagination something of its coming charm. Those two spots of
colour against the dingy wood panels dressed up the desolation
wonderfully. I hastily kicked some shavings and chips into the
fireplaces and applied a match.
"The first fires on the twin hearths!" I cried. "In your honour!"
The girl smiled into my face, and did not joke. "That is very nice,"
she said. Then she rose and put out her hand. "Let me wish Twin Fires
always plenty of wood and the happiness which goes with it."
We shook hands, while the fire crackled, and already the spot seemed
to me like home. Then she looked up at the prints. "Now," she cried,
"how is honourable Hiroshige going to advise you? Here is a blue canal
and a lavender sky in the west, and bright scarlet temple doors--and all
the rest snow. Lavender and bright scarlet is rather a daring colour
scheme, isn't it?"
"Not if it's the right scarlet," I replied. "But it's not the colour
I'm going to copy. Neither is it the moon bridges in this other temple
garden. It's the simplicity. Out here south of this room is my lawn
and garden. Now I want it to be a real garden, but I don't want it
to dwarf the landscape. I don't want it to look as if I'd bought a
half acre of Italy and deposited it in the middle of Massachusetts,
either. I've never seen a picture of a real Japanese garden yet that
didn't look as much like a natural Japanese landscape as a garden. I
want my garden to be an extension of my south room which will somehow
frame the real landscape beyond."
We went through the glass door, and I showed her where the grape arbour
was to be, at the western side of the lawn, and how a lane of hollyhocks
would lead to it from the pergola end, screening the kitchen windows and
the yet-to-be-built hotbeds.
"Now," said I, "I'm going to build a rambler rose trellis along the
south; there's your red against the lavender of the far hills at sunset!
But how shall the trellis be designed, and where shall the sundial be,
and where the flower beds?"
The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, the fun of planning it all out from
the beginning!" she cried. "My, but I envy you."
"Please don't envy; advise," said I.
"Oh, I can't. I don't know anything about gardens."
"But you know what you like! People always say that when they are
ignorant, don't they?"
"Don't be nasty," she replied, running down the plank from the terrace
to the lawn, and walking out to the centre. "I'd have the sundial
right in the middle, where it gets all the sun," she said, "because
it seems to me a dial ought to be in the natural focus point of the
light. Then I'd ring it with flowers, some low, a few fairly tall, all
bright colours, or maybe white, and the beds not too regular. Then,
right in line with the door, I'd have an arch in the trellis so you
could see through into the farm. Oh, I know! I'd have the trellis all
arches, with a bigger one in the centre, and it would look like a Roman
aqueduct of roses!"
"A Roman aqueduct of roses," I repeated, my imagination fired by the
picture, "walking across the end of my green lawn, with the farm and the
far hills glimpsed beneath! 'Rome's ghost since her decease.' Miss
Goodwin, you are a wonder! But can you build it?"
"No," she sighed, "I can only give you the derivation of 'aqueduct'
and 'rose'."
"Come," said I, "we will consult Hard Cider."
"Heavens!" she laughed. "Is that anything like Dutch courage?"
Hard grunted, and came with us to the line of stakes where the rose
trellis was to be. I sketched roughly the idea I wanted--a reproduction
in simple trellis work, as it were, of High Bridge, New York.
Hard pondered a moment, and then departed for the shed. He returned
with several pieces of trellis lumber, a spade, some tools, a small
roll of chicken wire, and a step-ladder, all on a wheelbarrow. At his
direction, I dug a post-hole at the extreme east end of the lawn, another
two feet away, a third four feet beyond that, and a fourth again two
feet to the west. Hard then mounted the 3 x 3 chestnut joists, levelled
them as I set them, and connected the tops, leaving a space for the
next connection on the final post to the west.
"But where is the arch?" I cried.
Hard climbed down from the wheelbarrow in silence, cut off something
over four feet from the three-foot wide chicken wire, and then cut a
circumference into this wire which, in the centre, came within a foot of
the top. He twisted the loose ends back and tacked the flat arch thus
made to the top and inner posts of the trellis. Then he connected the
two posts on each side with stripping. Thus I had the first arch of my
aqueduct, nine feet high, with two-foot piers of trellis work and a
four-foot arch with eight feet clear space under the centre.
[Illustration:]
"It ain't pretty," said Hard, "but when it's painted green and
covered with vines it won't show. Guess most of your roses will bloom
on the south side of it, though, away from the house."
My face fell. "Golly, I hadn't thought of that!" said I.
"Oh, they'll peep over and all around it," said Miss Goodwin
cheerfully.
"What could I have done else?" said I.
"Nothin', 'cept turned your house around," Hard replied. "You can
buy wire arches so's you could plant your roses east and west, but
that wouldn't give you no level top like a bridge. You could set those
boughten arches on the south side of this trellis, though, so's you'd
get the effect of something solid, lookin' through, without losin'
your top."
"Guess I'll get you paid first," I laughed, as Hard went back to his
work.
"And now," I added to the girl at my side, "shall we see if _we_ can
build the next arch?"
Again she clapped her hands delightedly, and ran with me around the house
for the tools and lumber.
I let her dig the first post-hole, though it was evident that the effort
tired her, and then I took the spade away, while she marked off the
trellis strips into the proper lengths, and sawed them up, placing each
strip across the wheelbarrow and holding it in place first with a hand
which looked quite inadequate even for that small task, and, when the
hand failed, with her foot.
She laughed as she put her foot on the wheelbarrow, hitching her skirt up
where it bound her knee. "The new skirts weren't made for carpenters,"
she said, as she jabbed away with the saw. I darted a glance at the
display of trim ankles, and resumed my digging in the post-holes. This
was a new and disturbing distraction in agricultural toil!
The post-holes were soon dug, and while I held the posts, she adjusted
the level against them, our hands and faces close together, and we
both kicked the dirt in with our feet. Then I climbed on the step-ladder
and levelled the top piece, which I nailed down. Then, while I was
cutting a semicircle out of the wire, for the arch, she nailed the
trellis strips across the piers, grasping the hammer halfway up to the
head, and frowning earnestly as she tapped with little, short, jablike
blows. She was so intent on this task that I laughed aloud.
"What are you laughing at?" said she.
"You," said I. "You drive a nail as if it were an abstruse problem
in differential calculus."
"It is, for me," she answered, quite soberly. "I don't suppose
I've driven a dozen nails in my life--only tacks in the plaster to hang
pictures on. And it's very important to drive them right, because this
is a rose trellis."
"When I first came here," said I, "I was pretty clumsy with my hands,
too. I'd lost my technique, as you might say. I remember one afternoon
when I was trimming the orchard that I didn't think a single thought
beyond the immediate problem each branch presented. And yet it was
immensely stimulating. Personally, I believe that the educational value
of manual dexterity has only begun to be appreciated."
Miss Goodwin marked off the place for the next strip, and started
nailing. At the last blow she relaxed her frown.
"Maybe," she said. "No, probably. But the manual work, it seems
to me, has got to be connected up in some way with--well, with higher
things. I can't think of a word to fit, because my head is so full of
the 'hy' group. You, for instance, were sawing your _own_ orchard,
and you were working for better fruit, and more beautiful trees, and a
lovely home. You saw the work in its higher relations, its relations
to the beauty of living."
"And your nails?" I asked.
"I see the aqueduct of roses," she smiled.
"You will see them, I trust," said I. "You _shall_ see them. You must
stay till they bloom."
Her brow suddenly clouded, and she shook her head. "I--I shall have to
go back to the 'I's,'" she said. "But I shall know the roses are
here. You must send me a picture of them."
Somehow I was less enthusiastic over the next arch, but her spirits
soon came back, and she sawed the next batch of stripping with greater
precision and skill in the use of the saw--and a more reckless show
of stocking. "See!" she cried, "how much I'm improving! I didn't
splinter any of the ends this time!"
"Fine," said I. "You can tackle the firewood in the orchard soon!"
We got up two more arches, working close together, intent upon our task.
As each arch, with its piers, took up eight feet, and the central arch
would take up twelve, we should need exactly a dozen arches to complete
the trellis. Here were four of them done!
"Hooray!" cried the girl, as the fourth was finished. "How we are
getting on!"
"I could never have done it alone," said I. "You have really been a
great help."
"Oh, I hope so!" she exclaimed. "I haven't had so much fun in years."
We looked into the vegetable garden, and saw that Mike had gone, and Joe,
too. My watch and the lengthening shadows warned me it was approaching
six. Hot and pleasantly tired, we packed up the tools on the barrow,
and wheeled them to the shed.
"Now shall we go and hear the hermit?" I asked.
She nodded, and we went down through the orchard, past the pool where the
iris buds were already showing a spike of greenish white, through the
maples, and into the pines. There we stood, side by side, in the quiet
hush of coming sunset, and waited for the fairy horn. A song sparrow
was singing out by the road, and the thin, sweet flutings of a Peabody
came from the pasture. But the thrush was silent.
"Please sing, Mr. Thrush!" she pleaded, looking at me after she spoke,
with a wistful little smile of apology for her foolishness. "I want so
to hear him again," she said. "We don't hear thrushes in New York,
nor smell pine trees, nor feel this sweet, cool silence. Oh, the good
pines!"
"He will sing to-morrow," said I. "There is no opera on Thursdays."
Her eyes twinkled once more. "Perhaps he has that terrible disease,
'sudden indisposition'," she laughed. "Come, we must go home to
supper. It will take me hours to get clean."
Out in the open, she looked at her hands. "See, I've begun to get
callouses, too!" she exclaimed, holding out her palms proudly.
"You've got blisters," said I. "No work for you to-morrow! Let me
see."
I touched her hand, as we paused beneath a blossoming apple tree, with
the fragrance shedding about us. Our eyes met, too, as I did so. She
drew her hand back gently, as the colour came to her cheeks. We walked
on in silence, as far as the pump. Mike had finished milking, and had
gone home. The stable was closed. Inside, we could hear the animals
stamp. Suddenly I put my head under the pump spout, and asked her to
work the handle. Laughing, she did so, and as I raised my dripping head,
I saw her standing with the low western sun full upon her, her eyes
laughing into mine, her nose and lips provocative, her plain blouse
waist open at the throat so that I could see the gurgle of laughter rise.
"Why did you do that?" she asked, arrested, perhaps, by something in my
gaze.
"Because," I answered, "there's a ghost lives in this well, and maybe
with your aid I shall pump it out."
"Don't you like the ghost?" she said.
"Very much," said I, as we climbed the slope to Bert's.
That evening Mrs. Bert sent her off to bed, and I toiled cheerfully at
my manuscripts till the unholy hour of eleven.
Chapter VIII
I PICK PAINT AND A QUARREL
The next morning at breakfast a burned nose confronted me across the
table, and the possessor ruefully regarded her sore palms.
"No work for you to-day," said I. "You will just have to pick out
colours for me. The painters are coming."
I spoke as if we were old friends. I spoke as if it were the most natural
thing in the world for a young woman to accompany a young man to his
house and pick out paint for him. I spoke, also, as if I had never
cursed the prospect of petticoats that advise. So soon can one pair of
eyes undo our prejudices, and so easily are the conventions forgotten,
in the natural life of the country--at least by such persons as never
were much bothered by them, anyhow!
Evidently they had never greatly troubled Miss Goodwin, or she was not
disposed to let them trouble her now, for ten minutes later we went
down the road together, and found the painters already unloading their
wagon. The reliable Hard Cider, true to his word, had procured them
for me, which, as I afterward have discovered, was something of a feat in
Bentford, where promises are more common than fulfilment.
"It seems a pity to paint the outside of the house," said Miss Goodwin;
"it's such a lovely weathered gray now. What colour is it going to be?"
"No colour," said I. "White, with green blinds, of course. But the
inside will be done first."
We entered, with the boss painter, and went into the south room, which
had already become the natural centre of the house.
"Now," said I, "I'm not going to paper any rooms if I can help it. I
want the walls calcimined. They look pretty sound to me, barring some
places where you'll have to patch the plaster. Can it be done?"
The painter walked about the room carefully, then examined the hall, the
north room, and the dining-room, while the girl and I followed him.
"Sure," he said.
"All right; then I want this room done first, as I'm anxious to get
my books unpacked and my desk set up. Now, what colour shall it be?" I
turned toward Miss Goodwin as I spoke.
She shook her head. "I'm not going to say a word," she answered.
"This is your room."
"I suppose you want the woodwork white?" the painter suggested. "Those
old mantels, for instance."
"Cream white, not dead white," said I. "Wait a minute." I ran to
the shed and brought back two more of my pictures, an etching by Cameron
which our professor of fine arts had once given me, and an oil painting
acquired in a moment of rash expenditure several years before--the long
line of Beacon Street houses across the Charles with the church spires
rising here and there, and to the left Beacon Hill piling up to the
golden dome of the State House.
"Now," said I, "the walls have got to set off both these pictures, and
books besides. They've got to be neutral. I want a greenish, brownish,
yellowish olive, with the old beam in the centre of the ceiling in the
same key, only a bit darker."
The girl and the painter both laughed.
"You are so definite," said she.
"But I want an indefinite tint," I replied.
Again she laughed, though the painter looked puzzled.
"I'll get my colours," he said.
He mixed what he considered an olive tint, and laid a streak of it on
the plaster.
"Too green," said I.
He added something and tried again.
"Too gray," said Miss Goodwin, forgetful, and then quickly
supplemented, "isn't it?"
He added something else.
"Too brown," said I.
Once more he patiently mixed.
"Too muddy coloured," I corrected.
"It must be fun to be a painter," said the girl.
"Oh, we get used to it," said he.
"Try a little yellow," I suggested. "I want that tint warmed up a
trifle."
He did so, and something emerged which looked right to me.
"That's a queer olive, though," said the girl.
"Well, it's a greenish, brownish, yellowish olive, isn't it?" I
replied. "That's what I asked for! Do the walls in this colour, and
paint the woodwork, mantels, and the panels over them and the bookcase
and settles a creamy white, with a creamy white on the ceiling, and oil
up this old floor and stain the strip of new boards where the partition
was, and my room is ready!"
We went into the little hall, where the front door stood open, and we
could see Hard on a ladder mending the beautiful carved door cap outside.
"This hall the same colour," said I, "with the rails of the baluster
in the cream white of the trim."
We went into the northeast room and the dining-room behind it.
"Same colour here?" asked the painter.
I was about to answer yes, when Miss Goodwin spoke. "I should think
you'd want these rooms lighter in colour," she said, "as they face
the north."
"The lady's right," said the painter.
"They always are," I smiled. "You two fix up the colour for this room,
then. We can decide on the other rooms after these downstairs are done."
"No," cried the girl, "I won't do anything of the kind! You might
not like what I picked."
"Incredible!" said I. "I've really got to get to work outside now."
And I ran off, leaving her looking a little angrily, I thought, after me.
I was so impatient to see how my lawn was going to look that I went
to the shed to hunt up a dummy sundial post which I could set up and
mark off my beds around it, getting them manured for planting. At first
I could find nothing, except some old logs, but looking up presently
into a loft under the eaves, I saw the dusty end of what looked like a
Doric pillar poking out. I scrambled up and pulled forth, to my joy,
a wooden pillar about nine feet long, in excellent preservation. How it
got there, I had no idea. The dust had evidently accumulated on it for
years. It had once been painted white. I dragged the heavy column down,
and ran to get Hard Cider.
He grunted. "All yer side porch pillars wuz them kind when I wuz a
boy," he said. "Old man Noble's fust wife didn't like the
porch--thought it kept light out o' the kitchen, an' hed it took down.
His second wife hed it put back, but some o' the columns hed got lost,
or burnt up, I reckon, so's they put it back with them square posts
yer hev now. I reckon that column's nigh on a century old."
I sawed off the upper four feet carefully, and stowed the remainder
back in the loft. Then I made a square base of planking, a temporary
one till I could build a brick foundation, washed off the dust, and
took my pedestal around to the lawn. With a ball of twine tied to the
centre of the south room door I ran a line directly out to the rose
trellis, and midway between the trellis and where the edge of my pergola
was to be I placed the pillar. Then I took out my knife, and thrust the
blade lightly in at an angle, to simulate the dial marker, and turned
to call Miss Goodwin.
But she was already standing in the door.
"Oh!" she cried, running lightly down the plank and across the ground,
"a sundial already, and a real pedestal! Come away from it a little,
and see how it seems to focus all the sunlight."
We stood off near the house, and looked at the white column in
mid-lawn. It did indeed seem to draw in the sunlight to this level spot
before the dwelling, even though it rose from the brown earth instead
of rich greensward, and even though beyond it was but the unsightly,
half-finished, naked trellis. Even as we watched, a bird came swooping
across the lawn, alighted on my knife handle, and began to carol.
"Oh, the darling!" cried Miss Goodwin. "He understands!"
I was very well content. I had unexpectedly found a pedestal, and was
experiencing for the first time the real sensation of garden warmth and
intimacy and focussed light which a sundial, rightly placed, can bring.
I did not speak, and presently beside me I heard a voice saying, "But
I forgot that I am angry at you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you had no right to leave me to pick out the paint for your
dining-room," said she.
"Why not?" said I. "You picked out the name of my house and the style
of the rose trellis."
"That was different," she replied.
"I don't see why."
"Then you are extremely stupid," she answered.
"Doubtless," said I. "But that doesn't help me any to understand,
you know."
"Come," she replied, "and see if the paint suits you. Then I must go
home and write some letters."
The paint and calcimine tint suited me, of course. They were a warm,
golden cream and a very delicate buff, which made the rooms seem lighter.
I thanked her as heartily as I could, and watched her depart up the
road, pausing only long enough to press to her nose the first bud on
the great lilac tree at the corner.
The place seemed curiously deserted after she had gone. I went out into
the vegetable area to see if Mike and Joe were getting on all right, and
to watch them planting, that I might learn how it was done.
"Aren't we pretty late with all these seeds?" I asked.
Mike shook his head. "There's some things, like peas, ye can't get
in too soon," he said, "and some like termaters and cauliflowers that
ye got to start under glass; but up here in these mountains, with the
frosts comin' and the cold nights, ye don't know when, ye can wait
till the middle o' May and dump on the manure and get yer crop with
the next man."
"Well, I'm trusting you," said I. "But next year we'll start
earlier, just the same. I don't want to be with the next man. I want to
beat him. I don't see why that isn't what a farmer should do as well
as a merchant."
"Sure, it is," said Mike, "only the God almighty don't like it, and
sinds frosts down upon yer presoomin'."
"You talk like a Calvinist," I laughed.
"Sure, I dunno what that is," Mike replied. "How much of this last
plantin' of corn shall I put in? It's Stowell's Evergreen. Maybe it's
the frosts will get it all, come September."
"We'll take a chance," said I. "I'm a gambler. Put in all you've
got room for."
"Yes, sor," said he, "and it's pea brush we'll be needin' soon for
them early peas I planted late. Is it Joe I shall sind to cut some in
the pasture lot behind the barn?"
I hadn't thought of my ten-acre pasture across the road. In fact, I had
scarcely been in it. "What's there to cut?" I asked.
"Poverty birch," said Mike. "Sure, it's walkin' up from the brook
like it was a weed, which it are, and eatin' the good grass up. The
pasture will be better for it out."
"Cut away, then," said I. "But, mind you, no other trees!"
I went back to my sundial, between two rows of cauliflower plants Bert
had given to me, and which Mike had set out thus early for an experiment,
between threads of sprouting radishes, lines of onion sets, and other
succulent evidences of the season to come. As I started to mark out the
beds around the pedestal, I found myself wishing Miss Goodwin were
there to advise me. I made a few marks on the ground, surveyed the
pattern, didn't like it, could think of nothing better, and resolved
to await her return. I took a few steps toward the house. Then I stopped.
"No, you fool," I said to myself. "This is your house. You are going
to live in it. If you can't plan it yourself, you'd better go back to
teaching."
I returned to the dial and went to work again. She had suggested a
ring of low flowers, and some taller ones, irregularly set. I measured
off a six-foot circle about the pedestal, as the inner ring of the
beds, and left four breaks in it, to the four cardinal points of the
compass, where the turf or paths could come in to the dial. Then I
extended the sides of these four beds on the straight axes of the paths
for three feet, and made the rear sides not on the regular arc of the
inner edges, but full of irregularities, almost of bulges, where I
would set clumps of tall flowers. "She'll like that, I guess," I
reflected, and then caught myself at it, and grinned rather sheepishly.
I rose and went to the barn for a load of manure. The great pile which
had been there when I bought the place was already used up, but I
secured enough litter with a rake to cover the beds and brought it
back. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late
to spade it under, so I went into the house to see if the painters
were getting the colour right. They were, or as nearly right as it
seems to be humanly possible for house painters to do, and I plodded up
the road to dinner. As I passed my potato field, I saw rows of green
shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure,
sitting in the shadow on the stone wall.
I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles
of potatoes toward her.
"It is time for dinner," I said meekly.
She looked up. "Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk."
"What was he saying?" I asked.
"Things you wouldn't understand," said she.
"About words in 'hy'?"
She shook her head. "Not at all; nothing quite so stupid--but nearly
as saddening." She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine,
enigmatically wistful.
"I missed you after you went away from Twin Fires," said I suddenly.
"I don't know whether I got the sundial beds right or not. Won't
you please come back to tell me? Or am I stupid again, and mustn't
you advise me about that?"
Her eyes twinkled a little. "You are still very stupid," she said,
"but perhaps I will consent to give my invaluable advice on this
important subject."
"Good!" I cried. "And we'll build some more trellis if your hands are
better."
"My hands are all right," she said, with the faintest emphasis on
the noun, which made a variety of perplexing interpretations possible
and kept me silent as I helped her over the wall into Bert's great
cauliflower field, and we tramped through the soft soil toward the house.
Chapter IX
WE SEAT THOREAU IN THE CHIMNEY NOOK, AND I WRITE A SONNET
After dinner she approved the sundial beds with a mock-judicial gravity,
and then she went at the trellis, working with a kind of impersonal
nervous intensity that troubled me, I didn't quite know why. She said,
with a brief laugh, it was because she had suggested the structure, and
she could never rest till any job she had undertaken was completed.
"You live too hard," said I. "That's the trouble with most of us
nowadays. We are over-civilized. We don't know how to take things
easy, because we have the vague idea of so many other things to be
done always crowding across the threshold of our consciousness."
"Perhaps," she answered. "The 'J' words, for instance, if they get
'I' done before my return. Thank heaven, 'J' hasn't contributed so
many words to science as 'Hy'!"
"Forget the dictionary!" I cried. "You are going to stay here a long
time--till these roses bloom, or at any rate till the sundial beds have
come to flower. Besides, there'll be a lot of things about my house
where your advice cannot be spared."
She darted a quick look at me, and turned back to the trellis, where
she was nailing on strips. She did not speak, and when I came over to
face her, with a post for the next arch, I saw that her eyes were moist.
She turned her face half away, blinking her eyelids hard, bit her lip,
then picked up the level and set it with a smack against the post. I
put my hand over hers--both our hands were dirty!--and said, "What is
the matter? Are you tired?"
"Please, please--level this post," she replied.
"Are you tired?"
"No, I'm not tired. I'm a fool. Come, we must finish the arch!"
"I guess we won't do any more arches to-day," I replied, "or you
won't, at any rate. You'll go home and rest."
She looked at me an instant with just the hint of her twinkle coming
back. "I'm so unused to taking orders," she said, "that I've lost
the art of obedience. Move the post a little to the right, please."
I did so, and we worked on in silence. We had built the wide central arch
by the time the sun began to drop down into our faces. There were only
five arches more to build.
"I shall write to-night and have the roses hurried along," said I.
We walked back toward the house and looked over the lawn, past the
sundial, and saw the farm through the trellis, and beyond the farm the
trees at the edge of my clearing, and then a distant roof or two, and
the far hills. The apple blossoms were fragrant in the orchard. The
persistent song sparrows were singing. The shadow of the dial post
stretched far out toward the east.
"It is pointing toward the brook," said I. "Shall we go and ask the
thrush to sing?"
She shook her head. "Not to-night," she said briefly, and I walked,
grieved and puzzling, up the road by her side.
The next day she pleaded a headache, and I went to the farm alone. The
south room was shining with its first coat of paint. Hard was, as he put
it "seein' daylight" in his work, and I realized that soon I should
be sending for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter and moving away from Bert's.
Somehow the idea made me perversely melancholy. The house seemed lonely
as I wandered through it, sniffing the strong odour of fresh paint.
I went out to find Mike, and learned that the small fruits had come--a
hundred red raspberries, fifty blackcaps, twenty-five of the yellow
variety, a hundred blackberries, not to mention currant bushes. We
walked about the garden to find the best site for them, and finally chose
for the berries the end of the slope between the vegetables and field
crops and the pines and tamaracks. Here was a long, narrow stretch where
the brook in times past had made the soil sandy, so that it drained well,
but where the swampy land was close enough to offer the least danger of
complete drying out. While Mike and Joe were ploughing the dressing
under and harrowing, I took my garden manual in hand and carefully
sorted out the varieties according to their bearing season. Then we
began planting them in rows.
There is no berry so fascinating nor so delicious to me as a raspberry,
especially at breakfast, half hidden under golden cream. There is
something soft and cool and wild about it; it is the feline of berries.
As we planted, I could almost smell the fruit. I could fancy the joy
of walking between these dewy rows in the fresh morning sun and picking
my breakfast. I could imagine the crates of ripe fruit sent to market.
In the pleasures of my fancy and the monotony of measured planting,
I lost track of time, nor did I think of Miss Goodwin. But thought of
her returned at noon, however, when Mrs. Bert told me her head had
felt better and she had gone off for a day's trolley trip to see the
country. After all, it was rather selfish of me not to show her the
country! Besides, I hadn't seen it myself. I had been too busy. Why
shouldn't I take a day off? But I couldn't do that till the berries
were all in, and that afternoon was not enough to finish them. It took
all of the next day as well, and most of the day following, for we
had the double rows of wire to mount as supports for the vines, and the
currant bushes to set in as a border to the garden six feet south of
the rose trellis. Most of this work I did alone, leaving Mike free for
other tasks, and Joe free to cut the pea brush. I saw Miss Goodwin
only at meals. After supper I had to drive myself to my manuscripts.
"It will be you who will need a rest soon," she said the second
morning, as she came down to breakfast and found me hard at work out
on the front porch.
"I'm going to take one--with you!" said I. "I want to see the
country, too."
She smiled a little, and picked a lilac bud, holding it to her nose.
She seemed quite far away now. The first few days of our rapid intimacy
had passed, and now she was as much a stranger to me as on that first
meeting in the pines. I said nothing about her coming to the farm; I
don't know why. Somehow, I was piqued. I wished her to make the first
move. In some way, it was all due to my asking her to choose the paint
for my dining-room, and that seemed to me ridiculous. I fear my manner
showed my pique a trifle, for I did not see her anywhere about when I
left after breakfast.
That evening I found the second coat of paint practically dry in the
south room, and there was no reason why I shouldn't install my desk at
last, order some kerosene for my student lamp, and do my work there, in
my own new home, by my twin fires. The wind was east as I walked back
to supper, and there was no sun to wake me in the morning, so that I
slept till half-past six. Outside the rain was pouring steadily down,
and I found Bert rejoicing, for it was badly needed. After breakfast I
waylaid Miss Goodwin.
"No work on the trellis to-day," said I, swallowing my pique; "so
I'm going to fix up the south room. I'm going to make twin fires out of
some of the nice, fragrant apple wood you haven't sawed for me, and hang
the Hiroshiges, and unpack the books, and have an elegant time--if you
don't make me do it alone."
The girl shot a look around Mrs. Bert's sitting-room, where a small
stuffed owl stood on the mantel under a glass case and a transparent pink
muslin sack filled with burst milkweed pods was draped over a crayon
portrait of Bert as a young man. I followed her glance and then our eyes
met.
"Just the same, they are dear, good souls," she smiled.
"Of course," I answered. "But to sit here on a cold, rainy day! You
may read by the fire while I work. Only please come!"
"May I read 'The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,' Doctor
Upton?" she said.
"You may read the dictionary, if you wish," I replied.
She went to get her raincoat. It was cold out of doors, and the rain
drove in our faces as we splashed down the road. The painters had made
a fire in the kitchen range, and as we stepped in the warmth greeted us
in a curious, friendly way. I brought several logs of dead apple wood
into the big room, made a second trip for kindlings, brought my one pair
of andirons from the shed and improvised a pair with bricks for the
other fireplace, and soon had the twin hearths cheerful with dancing
flames. Then I went back to the shed, and brought the two cushions
which had been on my window-seats at college, to place them on the
settle. But as I came into the room, instead of finding the girl waiting
to sit by the fire, I saw her with sleeves rolled up washing the west
window. Her body was outlined against the light, her hair making an
aura about her head. As she turned a little, I caught the saucy grace
of her profile. She was so intent upon her task that she had not heard
me enter, and I paused a full moment watching her. Then I dropped the
cushions and cried, "Come, here's your seat! That is no task for a
Ph. D."
"I don't want a seat," she laughed. "I'm having a grand time,
and don't care to have my erudition thrown in my face. I love to wash
windows."
"But 'The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century?'" said I.
"The whole nineteenth century is on these windows," she replied.
"I've got to scrub here to get at its foundations."
"But you'll get tired again," I laughed, though with real solicitude.
"I didn't want you to come to work--only to be company."
"I don't know how to be company. Please get me some fresh hot water."
I took the pail and fetched obediently. Then, while she worked at the
windows, I began tugging things in from the shed, calling Joe from
the barn to help me with the desk and bookcases. The desk, obviously,
went by the west window, where the light would come from the left. My
five bookcases, which had been made for my college rooms, of uniform
size, were placed, four along the south wall, filling the spaces between
the central door and the two windows, and the two windows and the end
walls, with the fifth on the west wall between the window and the
south, where I could have my reference books close to my desk chair. My
piano, which had stood in the dining-room ever since the furniture had
arrived, we unboxed, wheeled in to fill the space between the small east
windows, and took the covers off.
I looked around. Already the place was assuming a homelike air, and the
long room had contracted into intimacy. The girl dropped her rag into the
pail, and stood looking about.
"Oh, the nice room!" she cried. "And oh, the dirty piano!"
I went out to begin on the books, and when I returned with the first
load (I used a wheelbarrow, and wheeled a big load covered with my
raincoat as far as the front door, and up into the hall on a plank),
Miss Goodwin was scrubbing the keys. As I began to wipe off the books
and set them into the cases, I could hear that peculiar dust-cloth
glissando which denotes domestic operations on the piano, and which
brings curiously home to a man memories of his mother. When I returned
with the next load, I brought the piano bench, as well. The girl was
busy with the east window, and I set the bench down in silence. She was
seated upon it, when I arrived with the third load, and through the
house were dancing the sounds of a Bach gavotte.
She stopped playing as I entered, and looked up with a little smile of
apology.
"Please go on!" I cried.
"But you play," she said, "and I just drum. It's too silly."
"I play with one finger only," said I, "the forefinger of the right
hand."
"Then why do you have the piano?"
"For you," I smiled. "Please play on. You can't guess how pleasant
it is, how--how--homelike."
She wheeled back and let her hands fall on the keys, rippling by a
natural suggestion into the old tune "Amaryllis." The logs were
crackling. The gay old measures flooded the room with sound. My head
nodded in time, as I stacked the books on the shelves.
Suddenly the music stopped, and with a rustle of skirts the girl was
beside me. "There! Now I must help you with the books!" she cried.
"What's this? Oh, you're not putting them up right at all! Here's
James's 'Pragmatism' hobnobbing with 'The Freedom of the Will.'
Oh, horrors, and 'Cranford' next to Guy de Maupassant! I'm sure that
isn't proper!"
"On the contrary," said I, "it ought to prove a fine thing for both of
them."
She began to inspect titles, pulling out books here, substituting others
there, carrying some to other cases. "You won't know where anything
is, anyhow, in these new surroundings," she said, "so you might as
well start right--separate cases for fiction, history, philosophy, and
so on. Please have the poetry over the settle by the fire."
"Surely," said I. "That goes without saying. Here, I'll lug the books
in, and you put 'em up. Only I insist on the reference books going over
by my desk."
"Yes, sir, you may have them," she laughed.
I wheeled in load after load. "Lord," I cried, "of the making of many
books, _et cetera!_ I'll never buy another one, or else I'll never move
again."
"You'll never move again, you mean," said she. "Look, all the nice
poetry by the west fireplace. Don't the green Globe editions look pretty
in the white cases? And Keats right by the chimney. Please, may I put
the garden books, and old Mr. Thoreau, by the east fire?"
"Give old Mr. Thoreau any seat he wants," said I, "only Mr. Emerson
must sit beside him."
"Where's Mr. Emerson? Oh, yes, here he is, in a blue suit. Here, we'll
plant the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos!"
She took the set of Emerson and placed it in the top shelf by the east
fireplace, above a tumbled heap of unassorted volumes, standing back to
survey it with her gurgling laugh. "What is so decorative as books?"
she cried. "They beat pictures or wall paper. Oh, the nice room, the
nice books, nice old Mr. Emerson, nice twin fires!"
"And nice librarian," I added.
She darted a look at me, laughed with heightened colour, and herself
added, with a glance at her wrist watch, "And nice dinner!"
I brought back some of my manuscripts after dinner, in case the room
should be completed before supper time. We attacked it again with
enthusiasm, hers being no less, apparently, than mine, for it was
indeed wonderful to see the place emerge from bareness into the most
alluring charm as the books filled the shelves, as my two Morris chairs
were placed before the fires, as my three or four treasured rugs were
unrolled on the rather uneven but charmingly old floor which just
fitted the old, rugged hearthstones, and finally as the two bright
Hiroshiges were placed in the centre of the two white wood panels over
the fireplaces, and the other pictures hung over the bookcases.
"Wait," cried the girl suddenly. "Have you any vases?"
"A couple of glass ones," I said. "Why?"
"Get them, and never mind."
I found the barrel which contained breakables in the shed, unpacked
it, and brought in the contents--a few vases, my college tea set, a
little Tanagra dancing-girl. I placed the dancing figure on top of the
shelf between the settles, and Miss Goodwin set the tea things on my
one table by the south door. Then she got an umbrella and vanished.
A few minutes later she returned with two clumps of sweet flag blades
from the brookside, placed one in each of the small vases, and stood
them on the twin mantels, beneath the Japanese prints.
"There!" she cried, clapping her hands. "Now what do you think of your
room?"
I looked at the young green spears, at the bookcases with their patterns
of colour, at the warm rugs on the floor, at my desk ready for me by
the window, at the student lamp upon it, at the crimson cushions on
the twin settles, at the leaping flames on the hearths, and then at the
bright, flushed, eager face of the girl, raindrops glistening in her hair.
[Illustration: She was sitting with a closed book on her knee, gazing
into the fire]
"I think it is wonderful," said I. "I have my home at last! And how
you have helped me!"
"Yes, you have your home," said she. "Oh, it is such a nice one!"
She turned away, and went over to the east fire, poking it with her toe.
I lit my pipe, sat down at my old, familiar desk, heaved a great sigh
of comfort, and opened a manuscript.
"It's only four o'clock," said I. "I can get in that hour I wasted
in sleep this morning. Can you find something to read?"
"I ought to," she smiled.
I plunged into the manuscript--a silly novel. I heard Miss Goodwin on
the other side of the settle, taking down a book. I read on. The room
was very still. Presently the stillness roused me from my work, and I
looked up. I could not see the girl, so I rose from my chair and tiptoed
around the settle. She was sitting with a closed book on her knee, gazing
into the fire. I sat down, too, and touched her arm.
"What is there?" I asked, pointing to the flames.
She looked around, with a half-wistful little smile. "You are not making
up that lost hour," she answered.
"But the room was so still," said I, "that I wondered where you were."
"Perhaps I was many miles away," she replied. "Do you want me to make
a noise?"
"You might sing for me."
"I should hate to make the thrush jealous. No, my accomplishments cease
with philology. I'm very happy here, really. You must go back to your
work."
I went back, and read a few more pages of the silly novel.
"This story is so silly I really think it would be a success," I called
out.
A head peeped up at me over the settle. "You aren't working," she
reproached. "I'm going away, so you won't have me to talk to."
"Very well, I'll go with you," I cried, slamming the manuscript into a
drawer. "I'll come down here and work after supper."
"No, you'll work till five o'clock."
"Not unless you'll stay!"
The eyes looked at me over the settle, and I looked steadily back. We
each smiled a little, silently.
"Very well," said she, as the head disappeared.
I read on, vaguely aware that the west was breaking, and the room growing
warm. Presently I heard a window opened and felt the cooler rush of
rain-freshened air from the fragrant orchard. Then I heard the painters
come downstairs, talking, and tramp out through the kitchen. It was
five o'clock. But I still read on, to finish a chapter. The painters had
departed. The entire house was still.
Suddenly there stole through the room the soft andante theme of a Mozart
sonata, and the low sun at almost the same instant dropped into the clear
blue hole in the west and flooded the room. I let the manuscript fall,
and sat listening peacefully for a full minute. Then I moved across the
floor and stood behind the player. How cheerful the room looked, how
booky and old-fashioned! It seemed as if I had always dwelt there.
It seemed as if this figure at the piano had always dwelt there. How
easy it would be to put out my hands and rest them on her shoulders, and
lay my cheek to her hair! The impulse was ridiculously strong to do so,
and I tingled to my finger tips with a strange excitement.
"Come," I said, "it is after five, and the sun is out. We will go to
hear the thrush."
The girl faced around on the bench, raising her face to mine, "Yes, let
us," she answered. "How lovely the room looks now. Oh, the nice new
old room!"
She lingered in the doorway a second, and then we stepped out of the
front entrance, where we stood entranced by the freshness of the
rain-washed world in the low light of afternoon, and the heavy fragrance
of wet lilac buds enveloped us. Then the girl gathered her skirts up
and we went down through the orchard, where the ground was strewn with
the fallen petals, through the maples where the song sparrow was
singing, and in among the dripping pines. The brook was whispering
secret things, and the drip from the trees made a soft tinkle, just
detectable, on its pools.
We waited one minute, two minutes, three minutes in silence, and then the
fairy clarion sounded, the "cool bars of melody from the everlasting
evening." It sounded with a thrilling nearness, so lovely that it
almost hurt, and instinctively I put out my hand and felt for hers.
She yielded it, and so we stood, hand in hand, while the thrush sang
once, twice, three times, now near, now farther away, and then it seemed
from the very edge of my clearing. I still held her hand, as we waited
for another burst of melody. But he evidently did not intend to sing
again. My fingers closed tighter over hers as I felt her face turn
toward mine, and she answered their pressure while her eyes glistened, I
thought, with tears. Then her hand slipped away.
"Don't speak," she said, leading the way out of the grove.
We went into the house again to make sure that the fires had burned
down. The room was darker now, filled with twilight shadows. The last
of the logs were glowing red on the hearths, and the air was hot and
heavy after the fresh outdoors. But how cheerful, how friendly, how
like a human thing, with human feelings of warmth and welcome, the room
seemed to me!
"It has been a wonderful day," said I, as we turned from the fires to
pass out. "I wonder if I shall ever have so much joy again in my house?"
The girl at my side did not answer. I looked at her, and saw that she was
struggling with tears.
I did instinctively the only thing my clumsy ignorance could suggest--put
my hand upon hers. She withdrew it quickly.
"No, no!" she cried under her breath. "Oh, I am such a fool!
Fool--Middle English _fool_, _fole_, _fol_; Icelandic, _fol_; old
French _fol_--always the same word!"
She broke into a plaintive little laugh, ran through the hall and lifted
the stove lid to see if the fire there was out, and hastened to the road,
where I had difficulty to keep pace with her as we walked up the slope
to supper.
"You need a rest more than you think, I guess," I tried to say, but
she only answered, "I need it less!" and made off at once to her room.
That night I didn't go back to my house to work. I didn't work at
all. I looked out of my window at a young moon for a long while, and
then--yes, I confess it, though I was thirty years old, I wrote a sonnet!
Chapter X
WE CLIMB A HILL TOGETHER
The next morning I did not urge Miss Goodwin to come to the farm. In
fact, I urged her to sit in the sun and rest. It was a glorious day, a
real June day, though June was not due till the following Wednesday. It
was Sunday, the Sunday preceding Memorial Day. But, as my farm was so far
from the centre of the village, and my lawn was so screened from the
roads by the house on one side and the pines and maples on the other,
I resolved to hazard my reputation and go at my lawn, which the rain at
last had settled. I hitched the horse to my improvised drag and smoothed
it again, several times, in default of a roller. Then I led the horse
back to the barn.
As I came to the barn door again, a carryall was passing, with a woman
and a stout girl on the back seat, and another stout girl and a man on
the front seat. The women were dressed in their starched best, the
man, an elderly farmer with a white beard, in the blue uniform and
slouch hat of the G. A. R. They were going to Memorial service. I
instinctively saluted as the old fellow nodded to me in his friendly,
country way, and he dropped the reins with a pleased smile and brought
his own hand snap up to his hat brim. I watched the carryall disappear,
hearing it rattle over the bridge across my brook, and for the first
time felt myself a stranger in this community. I suddenly wanted to go
with them to church, to hear the drone of the organ and the soft wind
rushing by the open windows, bringing in the scent of lilacs, to see
the faces of my neighbours about me, to chat with them on the church
steps when the service was over. I realized how absorbed I had been
in my own little farm, and resolved to begin getting acquainted with
the town as soon as possible. Then I picked up a rake, and went back to
the lawn.
As soon as I had eliminated the horse's hoofprints, I got a bag of
lawn seed and scattered it, probably using a good deal more than was
necessary. Mike had assured me it was too late to sow grass, but I hoped
for fool's luck. I sowed it carefully about the sundial beds, so that
none should fall on them, but over the rest of the lawn I let it fall
from on high, delighting in the way it drifted with the gentle wind
on its drop to earth. I had not sown long before the birds began to come,
by ones, then by twos and threes and fours, till it seemed as if fifty
of them were hopping about. I shooed them away, but back they came.
"Well," thought I, "lawn seed is not so terribly expensive, and they
can't pick it all up!" I scattered it thicker than ever, and then
harrowed it under a little with a rake, working till one o'clock, for
Sunday dinner was at one-thirty. Then I went back to Bert's, with only
a peep into my big south room to see how cheerful it looked. I found Miss
Goodwin still sitting where I had left her, under the sycamore before the
house.
"You see, I've obeyed," she smiled. "I've not read, nor even
thought. I've 'jest set.' But I'm beginning to get restless."
"Good," said I. "Shall we celebrate the Sabbath by taking a walk? I'd
like to have you show me Bentford."
She assented, and right after dinner we set out, I having donned my
knickerbockers and a collar for the first time since my arrival, and
feeling no little discomfort from the starched band around my throat.
"The size of it is," I groaned, "all my clothes are now too small
for me. If you stay here till July, you'll probably have to send for an
entire new wardrobe."
"That's the fear which haunts me," she smiled, as we crossed my brook
and turned up the hill toward the first of the big estates. In front of
this estate we paused and peeped through the hedge. The family had
evidently arrived, for the unmistakable sounds of a pianola were issuing
from the house. The great formal garden, still gay with Darwin tulips
and beginning to show banks of iris flowers against lilac shrubbery,
looked extremely expensive. The residence itself, of brown stucco,
closely resembled a sublimated $100,000 ice-house. An expensive motor
stood before the door.
"How rich and ugly it is," said Miss Goodwin, turning away. "Let's
not look at houses. Let's find some woods to walk in."
We looked about us toward the high hills which ring the Bentford valley,
and struck off toward what seemed the nearest. The side road we were
on soon brought us to the main highway up the valley to the next town,
and a motor whizzed past us, leaving a cloud of dust, then a second,
and a third. We got off the highway as speedily as possible, crossing
a farm pasture and entering the timber on the first slope of the big
hill. Here a wood road led up, and we loitered along it, finding late
violets and great clumps of red trilliums here and there.
The girl sprang upon the first violets with a little cry of joy, picking
them eagerly and pressing them to her nose. "Smell!" she laughed,
holding them up to mine. She soon had her hands full, and was forced to
pass by the next bed--as I told her, with the regret of a child who
has eaten all the cake he can at a church supper.
"No child ever ate all the cake he could," she laughed. "Oh, please
dig up some trilliums and plant them in your garden, or rather in your
woods!"
"How are we going to get them home?" said I. "We'll have to dig up
some of the earth, too, with the roots."
"I know," she answered. "Even if I am a highbrow, I've not quite
forgotten my childhood lessons in manual work--which I always hated till
now. I'll weave a basket."
Looking about, I saw a wild grape vine, and I pulled it down from the
tree to which it was clinging. "I feel like a suffragette," said I,
"destroying the clinging vine."
"Cut it into two-foot lengths," she retorted, "and don't make poor
puns." She sat on the brown needles at the foot of a pine, and began
twisting the pieces of vine into a rough basket. I sat beside her and
watched her work. Out beyond us was a sun-soaked clearing, a tiny swamp
on the hillside, and the sunlight dappled in across her skirt. As she
worked, a wood thrush called far off, his last long-drawn note ringing
like a sweet, wistful fairy horn. The white fingers paused in their
weaving, and our eyes met. She did not speak, but looked smiling into
my face as the call was repeated, while her throat fluttered. Then,
without speaking, she turned back to her work. I, too, was silent. What
need was there of words?
"Was that a hermit, too?" she asked presently. "It sounded different."
"No, a wood thrush," said I. "He's not so Mozartian."
She finished the basket and held it out proudly. "There!" she cried.
"It isn't pretty, and it isn't art, but it will hold trilliums."
She dusted off her skirt, and I helped her to her feet. We continued up
the road, looking for trilliums, and when the first large clump appeared
pushing up their dark red blooms from the leafy mould, we were both
on our knees beside it, prying it up, earth and all. We soon had the
basket filled, and then pressed on straight up the hillside, leaving the
wood road. It was a steep scramble, over rocks where the thin, mossy
soil slipped from under foot, and through tangles of mountain laurel
bushes. I had frequently to help her, for she was not used to climbing,
and she was breathing hard.
"Let's stop," said I. "This is too hard work for you."
She grasped a dead stick, like a banner staff, struck an attitude, and
cried, "Excelsior!"
"No, sir," she added, "I'm going to reach the top of this hill and
look down the other side if I die on the summit. I know now for the
first time why Annie Peck and Hudson Stuck risked their lives on Mount
Something-or-other in the Andes and Mount McKinley in Alaska. It's a
grand sensation. I feel the primal urge!"
"Didn't you ever climb a mountain?" I queried, incredulous.
"Never," she answered. "Never even a baby mountain like this. My
altitude record is the top step of the Columbia University library."
"You poor child!" I cried. "Why, I'll _carry_ you to the top! I never
realized that you were such a hopeless urbanite."
We went on more slowly, for the way was very steep now, and between
helping her and holding the trilliums level I had my hands full. Laughing
when we had the breath, we scrambled through the last of the shrubbery,
and suddenly stood on a flat rock at the summit, with the world spread
out below us like a map. I set down the basket, wiped my face, and
ruefully felt of my wilted collar. The girl sank, panting, on the rock,
fanned herself with her wisp of a handkerchief, and gazed out over the
green Bentford valley below to the far hills in the south. The sky above
us was very blue and lazy afternoon clouds were floating in it. Far up
here only a few birds peeped in the scrub. We seemed strangely alone in
that privacy of the peak.
"'Silent upon a peak in Darien!'" I heard her say, as if to herself.
Then she turned her eager face to mine. "Isn't it wonderful!" she
cried. "Look, all the world like a map below you, and all this sky to
see at once, and the cooling breeze and the feeling that you are above
everybody! Oh, I love it! Quick, now let me see the other side!"
She ran across the rock, and I after her. From this side we looked
between the trees into the valley to the north, the next valley to
Bentford, and saw a blue lake, like a piece of the sky dropped down,
and several large estates, and the green and brown checkerboards of
farms, and far off a white steeple above the trees, and then once more
on the horizon the eternal ring of blue mountains. Even as we gazed,
from somewhere below us drifted up, faint and sweet, the sound of a
church bell.
"Oh, it is nice on the roof of the world!" she cried. "Think of
that--here am I, a Ph. D. in philology, and the only adjective I can
find is 'nice'!"
"It's all in how you say it," I smiled. "I think I understand. I
called you 'poor child' a few moments ago because you'd never been on
a high hilltop. Now I take it back. Think of getting those first virgin
impressions when you are old enough to appreciate them! I envy you. I
was only five when they took me up Mount Washington."
"I should think you'd have insisted on the Matterhorn by the time you
were ten," she laughed. "I should."
We hunted out some soft moss in the shade, and sat down to get cool in
the summit breeze before the descent. The girl spoke little, her eyes
wandering constantly off over the view with the light of discovery in
them. In my own staid way, I had always fancied I enjoyed the quieter
pleasures of the outdoors as much as any one, but before this rapture I
was almost abashed. If I did not speak, it was chiefly because I feared
to drop clumsy words into her mood.
But presently I did suggest that we must be starting down. As there
was no path visible--later I have found that since the advent of
motors there are never any paths where the walking is in the least
strenuous!--we took the way we had come, and began the descent.
Naturally I went ahead, and helped her all I could. To one unaccustomed
to hard walking, a steep descent is more tiresome than a climb, and I
began to fear that I had led her into an excess. But she came bravely
tumbling along behind. In some places I had to put up my arms and lift
her down. In others she had to slide one foot far ahead for a secure
resting-place, with a reckless show of stocking. But she laughed it
all off gayly. We missed, somehow, the way we had taken up, and
presently found ourselves on a ledge with a clean drop of eight feet. I
prospected to right and left, found a place where the drop was only six,
and jumped. Then she lowered the basket to me, sat on the edge herself,
leaned out and put her arms about my neck, and I swung her off. As I
set her on the ground again our faces were close together for an
instant, and I could feel rather than see her eyes laughing into mine.
"This is a very pleasant hill," said I.
"But we are almost to the wood road now," she darted back, jumping into
the lead.
A moment more, and we stood in the wood road, and presently we came
upon a spring under a rock, and plunged our faces into it and drank.
She looked up with the water dripping from her saucy nose, and quoted:
"'As rivers of water in a dry place.' I'm learning lots to-day. Now
it's the elemental force of the Bible similes."
"All the wisdom isn't in New York--and dictionaries," said I.
"There, now you've mentioned the Dictionary! How could you!" she
cried, and suddenly, like a child, snapped water into my face.
"You've ruined my collar," said I solemnly.
"Your collar looks like a fat man's at a dance in July," said she.
"Let's give the poor trilliums a drink."
She put the basket by the spring, dipped her hands in the water, and then
let palmsful drop on the wilted flowers. "How woodsy they smell!" she
cried, leaning over them. "Now I'm going to wash my face again."
She was like a child. She buried her face in the water, and when she
emerged the little curly hairs on her temples were dripping. "I'd like
to wade in it!" she exclaimed. "I wonder if I dare!"
"Go ahead," said I. "I'll go down the road and wait."
"That wouldn't be daring," she twinkled.
"Well, I'll sit here and wait."
She looked at me saucily, and laughed, shaking her head.
"Coward," said I.
But she only laughed again, sprang up, and started rapidly away.
I caught her by the arm. "Easy, easy," I cautioned. "You're a
broken-down, nervous wreck, remember. You mustn't overdo things."
Her moods were many that afternoon. Again she looked at me, but didn't
laugh. Her eyes, instead, held a sort of startled gratitude, like those
of a person, unused to kindness, suddenly befriended. She was no longer
the child let loose in the woods. She walked slowly at my side, and
so we came down to the high-road again. At the road we looked back to
the hilltop where we had been.
"How much easier the climb looks than it is," said she.
"That's the way of hills--and other things," said I sententiously.
"I knew about the other things," she answered. "Now I've learned it
about the hills. It seems as if I were learning all the old similes wrong
end foremost, doesn't it?--springs and--and all?"
Her tone was wistful, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from
touching her hand. "Oh, there's something to be said for that method,"
I answered cheerfully. "Think of all the pleasant things you have to
learn. The other way around you get the grim realism last."
But a thought plagued her as we turned down the side road to my house.
However, her face cleared as we drew near, and as the house itself
appeared she clapped her hands, crying, "Now, where are we going to put
the trilliums?"
"At the edge of the pines," I suggested, "where they can talk with
the brook?"
"Yes, that's the place." Suddenly she paused, looked back up the
slope, and cried, "Do you suppose this brook is that spring?"
I hastily ran over the contour of the country we had passed through, and
saw that indeed the spring must be its headwaters.
"I'm so glad!" she cried.
"Why?" I asked.
She darted a look at me, with twinkling eyes. "I shan't tell you,"
she said.
I got a trowel, and we planted the withered trilliums in partial shade
between the maples and the pines, and gave them water. Then I showed her
the newly sown lawn, and we peeped in to see the Hiroshiges over the twin
fires.
"Now, home and to bed for you," I cried. "I know you've done too
much."
"I know I've had a wonderful time," she answered soberly.
"I've--I've--it's hard to explain--but I've somehow connected up
this house with the wild country about it. Do you understand? If I had
a house in the country, I should want it where I could get out, this
way, on a Sunday afternoon into the woods and bring home trilliums. It
wouldn't seem right, complete, if I couldn't. I'd want my own dear
garden, and then a great big, God's garden over the fence somewhere."
"That is how I feel, too," said I. "Only I want, also, to connect up
my place with my neighbours; I want myself to be a part of the human
environment. I thought of that this morning, as I saw the folks going by
to church. If I ever get Twin Fires done, I'm going to join the Grange!"
"But Twin Fires comes first, doesn't it? I fear I've been selfish to
drag you off to-day."
"Drag me off is good!" I laughed. "You poor little city-bred, you,
as if your enjoyment hadn't given me the happiest day of my life! Only
I'm afraid you did too much."
"I _am_ pretty tired," she admitted, with a happy smile. "But I
wouldn't have missed it for the world."
I was pretty tired myself, but I did a remarkably good evening's work,
nevertheless, only pausing before the start to wonder why it was she
wept one night when she wasn't tired, and smiled the next when she had
tramped ten miles. But a man cannot afford to ponder such problems in
feminine psychology too closely if he has anything else to do!
Chapter XI
ACTÆON AND DIANA
Memorial Day dawned fair and warm. Bert and his wife and all their
"help" went off to the village after breakfast. There were no painters
in my house, and Mike had milked the cows and gone home before I arrived.
Miss Goodwin and I seemed to have that little section of Bentford quite
to ourselves, after the last of the carryalls had rattled past, taking
the veterans from Slab City to the town. Having no flag yet of my own, I
borrowed one from Bert, and we hung it from a second-story window,
facing the road, as our tiny contribution to the sentiment of the day.
Then we tackled the rose trellis, speedily completing it, for only two
arches remained to be built, one of the carpenters having built three
for me the day before, while waiting for some shingles to come for
the barn. Indeed, we had it done by ten o'clock.
"Now what?" said she.
I looked about the garden. The roses had not yet come, so we couldn't
very well plant them. I judged that the morning of a warm, sunny day was
no time to transplant seedlings. The painting was not yet completed
inside, so I could fix up no more of my rooms. The vegetable garden
didn't appear to need cultivation. We couldn't paint the trellis, as
there was no green paint.
"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, "this is the first time I've been at a
loss for something to do. It's a terrible sensation."
"Couldn't we build a bird bath?" she suggested.
"Madam," said I, "you are a genius!"
"At the brook?" she added.
"No, not the brook. I've a better idea. Up in Stephen Parrish's
lovely garden in Cornish I once saw a bird bath which we'll try to
duplicate, here on the lawn, so the birds will have the water handy to
wash down the grass seed they are eating so fast. Let's see; we'll
need bricks, sand, cement, a mason's trowel, a spade, a hoe, a level, a
box to mix in, and a box for a frame."
I had nearly a whole bag of cement left over from my dab at orchard
renovation, and there were plenty of packing-boxes. I selected one
which was exactly square, about two feet on each side, and carefully
knocked the bottom out. A shallower one did for a mixing-box. Down
cellar, where my heater had been installed, was a barrow load of extra
bricks which the plumber had left behind--inefficient business but very
convenient for me. Sand was easily procured by digging a hole near the
brook.
"Now," said I, "my plan is to put the bird bath on the east edge of
the lawn, halfway between the house and the rose aqueduct, corresponding
to the sundial in the centre, and to a white bench which will be placed
at the west side when the grape arbour is built."
"Approved," laughed Miss Goodwin.
We measured off the spot, and I trundled the barrow to a pile of coal
ashes behind the barn--where the previous owner had deposited them--and
brought back enough to make a frost-proof foundation. After we had
packed these into the ground and levelled them off, I mixed a lot of
cement, laid it over thick, set the bottomless box frame down upon
it, levelled that, and working from the inside, of course, laid the
bricks up against the box, with a great deal of cement between them,
and built up the four sides. As the girl had no gloves, I would not
allow her to handle the cement (for nothing cracks the skin so badly,
as I had discovered in my orchard work). But she kept busy mixing with
the hoe, and handing me bricks. Some I broke and put in endwise, and
I was careful to give all as irregular a setting as possible, till
the top was reached. Then, of course, I laid an even line of the best
bricks all the way around, and levelled them carefully. We had scarcely
got the last brick on when we heard Bert's carryall rattle over the
bridge and Bert's voice yelling "Dinner!"
"Oh, dear! That cement in the box will harden!" I cried. "Dump it all
in."
We tipped up the box, dumped the contents down into the hollow centre
of the brick work, and hurried home to a cold dinner, for Mrs. Bert,
too, had taken a holiday that morning. But we were so impatient to be
back at our work that we didn't care. On our return we filled the rest
of the hollow up with cement and stones to within three inches of the
top. Then, mixing more cement, with only two parts of fine sand to one
of cement, I laid over an even surface of the mixture and filled all
the corners and cracks between the top row of bricks, making a square
bowl, as it were, two inches deep, on the top of the little brick pile.
We let it settle a few moments, and then carefully broke away the box.
There stood the bird bath, needing only some cleaning away of cement
which had squeezed out between bricks, and some filling in of hollows
caused in removing the frame. It really looked quite neat and attractive,
and not too formally bricky, as so much cement showed.
"Can we put water in it yet?" the girl asked.
"Surely," said I. "Cement will harden under water. And we'll plant
climbing nasturtiums around it, too."
I spaded up the ground at the base a little, and we went to the seed
bed and dug up half a dozen climbing nasturtiums, which were already
six or seven inches high. We set them in, got a pail of water from the
brook and watered them, and carefully filled the bath level with the
brim. Then we removed all the tools and boxes to the shed again, and
came back to the south door to survey our work.
We passed through the house. The kitchen, dining-room, and hall were
finished and the paint drying. They looked very fresh and bright. The
south room, as we stepped into it, was flooded with sunlight and cheerful
with rugs and books. Flinging wide the glass door, we stepped out upon
the terrace of the pergola-to-be, and looked toward the new bird bath.
Upon its rim sat a song sparrow! Even as we watched, another came and
fluttered his feet and breast daintily through the trembling little
mirror of water. Then came a robin and drove them both away.
"The pig!" laughed Miss Goodwin. "Do you know, I've got a poorer
opinion of robins since I came here. We city dwellers think of robins as
harbingers of spring, and all that, and they epitomize the bird world.
But when you really are in that world, you find they are rather large
and vulgar and--and sort of upper West Side-y. They aren't half so nice
as the song sparrows, or the Peabodies, and, of course, compared with the
thrushes--well, it's like comparing Owen Meredith with Keats, isn't
it?"
"Don't be too hard on the robins," I smiled.
We looked our fill at the new bird bath, which was already functioning,
as she said her boss on the dictionary would put it, and at the white
sundial pillar, and at our prospective aqueduct of roses, and at the farm
and the far hills beyond--and then she suddenly announced with great
energy that she was going to saw wood.
"You may saw just one piece," said I, "and then you are going to take
a book and rest. I'm going to work, myself. Twin Fires is getting in
shape fast enough now so I can give up part of the daytime to the purely
mundane task of paying the bills."
I wheeled up a big dead apple branch from the orchard to the wood shed,
put it on the buck, gave her the buck-saw, and watched her first efforts,
grinning.
"Go away," she laughed. "You bother me."
So I went, opened the west window by my desk to the wandering summer
breeze, and went at my toil. Presently I heard her tiptoeing into the
room.
"Done?" said I.
She nodded. "Now I want--let's see what I want--well, I guess 'Marius
the Epicurean' and 'Alice in Wonderland' will do. I'm going to sit
in the orchard. You work here till five or your salary will be docked.
Good-bye."
I heard her go out by the front door, and then silence settled over the
sun-filled, cheerful room, while I plugged away at my tasks. I don't
know how long I worked, but finally my attention began to wander. I
wondered if she were still in the orchard. I looked out upon the sweet
stretches of my farm, with the golden light of afternoon upon it, and
work became a burden. "Shall I ever be able to work, except at night, or
on rainy days!" I wondered with a smile, as I tossed the manuscript I
was reading into a drawer, and went out through the front entrance.
The girl was nowhere to be seen. "She's probably in her beloved
pines," I reflected. "It would be a good time to clear out a path in
the pines." I turned back to get a hatchet, and then went down toward
the brook.
I trod as noiselessly as I could through the maples, thinking to surprise
her at her reading, and took care in the pines not to step on any dead
twigs. She was nowhere to be seen near the upper end of the grove, but as
I advanced I heard a splashing louder than the soft ripple of the brook,
and suddenly around a thick tree at a bend in the stream, where the
brook ran out toward the tamarack swamp in the corner of my farm, I came
upon her. She had her shoes and stockings off, and with her skirts held
high she was wading with solemn, quiet delight in a little pool. Her
back was toward me. I could have discreetly retreated, and she been
none the wiser. But, alas! Actæon was neither the first nor the last
of his sex. The water rippled so coolly around her white ankles! The
sunlight dappled down so charmingly upon her chestnut hair! And I said,
with a laugh, "So that is why you wanted my brook to come from the
spring!"
She turned with a little exclamation, the colour flaming to her cheeks.
Then she, too, laughed, as she stood in the brook, holding her skirts
above the water.
"Consider yourself turned to a stag," she said.
"All right," I answered, "but don't stay in that cold water too
long."
"If I do it will be your fault," she smiled, with a sidelong glance.
Then she turned and began wading tentatively downstream. But the brook
deepened suddenly, and she sank almost to her knees, catching her skirts
up just in time. I withdrew hastily, and called back to her to come
out. When I heard her on the bank, I brought her a big handkerchief for a
towel, and withdrew once more, telling her to hurry and help me plan
the path through the pines. In a moment or two she was by my side. We
looked at each other. Her face was still flushed, but her eyes were
merry. We were standing on almost the exact spot where we had first
met. But now there seemed in some subtle wise a new bond of intimacy
between us, a bond that had not existed before this hour. I could not
analyze it, but I felt it, and I knew she felt it. But what she said was:
"I told you to work till five o'clock."
"It's half-past four," I answered. "Besides, you must have sent for
me. Something suddenly prompted me to come out and hunt you up, at any
rate."
"To say I sent for you is rather--rather _forward_, under the
circumstances, don't you think?"
"It might be--and it might not be," I answered. "Did you have a good
time?"
"The best I ever had--till you spoiled it," she exclaimed. "Oh, the
nice, cold brook! Now, let's build the path you spoke about once."
We went back to the maples, where the ground was open, and selected a
spot on the edge of the pines where the path would most naturally enter.
Then we let it wind along by the brook, lopping off dead branches which
were in the way, and removing one or two small trees. Once we took it
across the brook, laying a line of stepping-stones, and out almost to
the stone wall, where one could get a momentary glimpse of the road and
over the road the blue mountains. Then we bent it in again, crossed
the brook once more just above the point where she had waded, and there
I rolled a large stone to the edge of the pool--"for you to sit on next
time," I explained. Finally we skirted the tamarack swamp, took the
path up through the fringe of pines at the southern end of the field
crops, and let it come back to the house beside the hayfield wall. When
we reached this wall, it was nearly six o'clock.
"Now, let's just walk back through it!" she cried. "To-morrow we can
bring the wheelbarrow, can't we, and pick up the litter we've made?"
"I can, at any rate, while you wade," said I.
She shot a little look up into my face. "I guess I'll help," she
smiled.
In the low afternoon light we turned about and retraced our steps.
There was but a fringe of pines along the southern wall, and as they
were forty-year-old trees here the view both back to the house and
over the wall into the next pasture was airy and open. Then the path led
through a corner of the tamarack swamp where in wet weather I should
have to put down some planks, and where the cattails grew breast high on
either side. Then it entered the thick pine grove where a great many
of the trees were evidently not more than fifteen or twenty years old
and grew very close. The sunlight was shut out, save for daggers of
blue between the trunks toward the west. The air seemed hushed, as if
twilight were already brooding here. The little brook rippled softly.
As we came to the first crossing, I pointed to the pool, already dark
with shadow, and said, "It was wrong of me to play Actæon to your Diana,
but I am not ashamed nor sorry. You were very charming in the dappled
light, and you were doing a natural thing, and in among these little
pines, perhaps, two friends may be two friends, though they are man and
woman."
She did not reply at once, but stood beside me looking at the dark pool
and apparently listening to the whisper of the running water against the
stepping-stones. Finally she said with a little laugh, "I have always
thought that perhaps Diana was unduly severe. Come, we must be moving
on."
As the path swung out by the road, we heard a carriage, and stopped,
keeping very still, to watch it drive past within twenty feet of us.
The occupants were quite unaware of our existence behind the thin screen
of roadside alders.
"How exciting!" she half whispered when the carriage had gone by.
Once more we entered the pines, following the new path over the brook
again to the spot where we first had met. There I touched her hand. "Let
us wait for the thrush here," I whispered.
I could see her glimmering face lifted to mine. "Why here?" she asked.
"Because it was here we first heard him."
"Oh, forgive me," she answered. "I didn't realize! The path has made
it look different, I guess. Forgive me."
She spoke very low, and her voice was grieving. Did it mean so much to
her? A sudden pang went through my heart--and then a sudden hot wave of
joy--and then sudden doubts. I was silent. So was the thrush. Presently
I touched her hand again, gently.
"Come," said I, "we have scared him with our chopping. He will come
back, though, and then we will walk down the clean path, making no noise,
and hear him sing."
"Nice path," she said, "to come out of your door, through your
orchard, and wander up a path by a brook, through your own pines! Oh,
fortunate mortal!"
"And find Diana wading in a pool," I added.
Again she shot an odd, questioning look at me, and shook her head. Then
she ran into the south room and put the books back on the shelves.
"Which one did you read, Marius or Alice?" I asked.
"Neither," she smiled, as I locked the house behind us.
Chapter XII
SHOPPING AS A DISSIPATION
I thought I could move into my house on the first of June--but I
didn't. A rainy day followed the holiday, and in the rain we first
set out the roses, which had arrived by freight and which Bert brought
over from the village on an early trip, and then tackled the rest of
the interior of the house. I wouldn't let Miss Goodwin wash any
windows, as that appeared to me to be Mrs. Pillig's job, but we hung my
few remaining pictures in the dining-room and hall, set up my old
mahogany drop-leaf table for a dining-table--it was large enough for
four people, on a pinch--and placed the only two straight-backed
chairs I possessed on either side of it.
"Dear, dear!" said I. "I was going to have Mr. and Mrs. Bert and you
as my guests at my first meal, but it looks as if you'd have to come
alone."
"You could bring in a chair and the piano bench from the south room,"
she smiled. "A more important item seems to be dishes."
"Heavens!" I cried, "I never thought of that! But I've got silver,
anyway. I've kept all my mother's silver. It's in a tin box in the
bottom drawer of my desk."
"Well, that's something," she admitted. "Have you got tablecloths and
napkins and kitchen utensils--to cook with, you know? And have you got
some bedding for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter?"
I ruefully shook my head. "I've got a sleeping-bag, though, which Peter
could put on the floor. What am I going to do?"
"I think you're going to make a trip to-morrow to the nearest large
town, and stock up," she smiled.
"Am I going alone?"
She laughed at me. "No, you helpless child, mamma will go with you."
So the next morning we set off early, provided with a list of necessary
articles compiled with Mrs. Bert's assistance. We tramped over to
Bentford and took the train there for a city some seventeen miles away,
which we reached about half-past eight. It was a clean, neat little
city, with fine old trees on the residence streets, and prosperous,
well-stocked shops. The girl was dressed jauntily in blue, and I wore
my last year's best suit and a hat and collar. I sniffed the city
smell, and declared, "Rather nice, just for a contrast. I've got an
all-dressed-up-in-my-best feeling. Have you?"
"It is a lark," she smiled. "I never saw a city from the country point
of view before. It seems queer to me--as if I didn't belong in it."
"You don't," said I; "you belong in the country."
She said nothing, but led me into a shop. It was a household-goods
shop, and here we looked at dishes first. The woman who waited on us
assumed a motherly air. It began to dawn upon me that she thought we
were stocking our little prospective home. I shot a covert glance at the
girl. Her eyes were twinkling, her colour high. I said nothing, but
pointed to the dinner set I desired.
She laughed. "That's Royal Worcester," she said.
"What of it? I like it."
"Well, then, look at it all you can now," she answered, "for you
can't have it."
The clerk laughed. "You see what you're in for, young man," she said,
with the familiarity which rather too often characterizes clerks in our
semi-rural regions.
I fear I coloured more than Miss Goodwin, which didn't help matters any.
"Please show us something at a reasonable cost," the girl said, with a
curious, dignified severity, which was effective.
"That will do, won't it, Mr. Upton?" she presently asked, with pointed
emphasis on the formal address, as a pretty set of dishes with a simple
pattern on the edge was displayed for $25.
"Admirably," said I. "But I wanted the crimson and gold ones."
"Now for the kitchen things," said she, with her old smile again.
Here we made use of Mrs. Bert's list, and left our order to be filled.
As we stepped out on the street, we looked at each other, and laughed.
"It's preposterous, but I suppose the evidence is against us," she
twinkled.
"The evidence is against us, at any rate," I answered.
She looked away quickly, and said, "Where is the furniture store?"
We found it, and here we looked at iron beds for Mrs. Pillig and son
Peter, and for one of the spare rooms so that I might have a guest up
after college closed. She let me have the bed I wanted for the spare
room, but the other two had to be plainer--or rather less plain, for
the cheaper furniture is, the more jimcracky it appears to be. I asked
the clerk why simplicity is always expensive, but he threw no light
on the point. Next we bought a few cheap bedroom chairs, and a cheap
bureau for Mrs. Pillig, and a better bureau for the spare room. I bought
no other furniture, preferring to wait till I could get to New York
or Boston, or better yet pick up old mahogany at country auctions,
which I then believed in my ignorance was possible. Then we invaded
the dry-goods shop, where again I stood helplessly by while the girl
bought bedding and tablecloths and napkins and dishcloths and towels.
"I know you haven't any decent towels," she said, "because you've
been a bachelor so long, and sent 'em to laundries. I send mine to
laundries, too. That's how I know."
I stood by helplessly, but not without emotion. Many emotions are
possible to a man while watching a woman shop, the most common, perhaps,
being impatience. Your average woman shopping is the epitome of
irresolution, or so it seems to the man. She always explains the huge
pile of goods, which she compels the poor clerk to heap on the counter,
by an alleged desire to get the most for her money--though she almost
invariably comes back to the first thing exhibited and buys that in the
end. A mere man buys the first thing he likes then and there. But my
companion was not the usual woman shopper. She wanted towels of a
certain grade, for instance, inspected them, and if they were up to
her standard bought them without further to-do. At my enthusiastic
comments she smiled. "That's because it is your money I'm spending. I
don't have to count the pennies!"
No, my emotion was not one of impatience. Indeed, I should have liked
to prolong the process. It was one which only a man with his bachelor
days fresh in mind can understand. It was the subtle thrill of being led
helpless by a woman who is intent on providing him creature comforts
which he could not arrange for himself, of seeing her purchase for him
the most intimate of domestic necessities, and inevitably filling his
mind with thoughts of her in his establishment. If I were a woman and
wanted to win a man, I should make him take me shopping when he needed
new towels!
We finished in the dry-goods store at last, and I said, "I am sorry."
"Why?" asked the girl.
"Because," I answered, "with every purchase you make for me, you lay a
new brick in the structure of our friendship--or a new towel!"
She turned her face quickly away, and made no reply.
Our next quest was for a sundial plate, but it was a vain search, for
not a store in town carried such an article. As we came out of the last
shop, she sighed. "Well, I can't spend any more of your money!" she
said. "But I've really saved it for you. Goodness knows how much
you'd have spent by yourself. Why, you wanted the most expensive kind
of _everything_!"
"Of course," said I; "nothing is too good for Twin Fires."
"Well, it's lucky I was along, then."
"Lucky isn't just the word," said I. "I feel already as if Twin Fires
was as much yours as mine."
Again she made no reply, except to ask when the train went back. But
the train had long since gone back. It was nearly two o'clock, and we
realized that we were hungry. So we gayly hunted out the hotel, and here
I took command. "I'm going to order this lunch," I declared, "and the
expense go hang. We'll have a regular spree, cocktails and all."
The hotel was really a good one, and the presence of several motor
parties gave the café almost a metropolitan appearance. The change from
Mrs. Bert's simple service to this was abrupt, and we were in the
highest spirits. The cocktails came, and we clinked glasses.
"To Twin Fires!" said the girl.
"To the fairy godmother of Twin Fires!" said I.
Our eyes met as our glasses touched, and something electric passed
between us. Then we drank.
"That is my first cocktail," she laughed, as she set her glass down.
"Heavens!" I exclaimed, "and we in a public place!"
It was my first since I came to Bentford, and we both enjoyed the luxury
of dissipation, and laughed brazenly at our enjoyment. Then the lunch
came, and we enjoyed that, and then we caught a train, and half an hour
later were walking toward the farm. We passed the golf links on the
way, at the end of the beautiful, elm-hung main street of Bentford,
and saw players striding over the green turf along the winding river.
"Quick, drag me past!" I cried. "Oh, Lord, lead us not into
temptation!"
"Haven't you joined yet?" she asked.
"No, I don't dare. I shan't join till the farm is in running order.
The game is like Brand's conscience, it demands all or nothing."
"You men are dreadful babies about your sports," she said.
"Yes'm," I replied, "quite so. We haven't the firm-mindedness of
your sex, about bridge, for instance."
"I never played a game of bridge in my life," said she indignantly.
"I wasn't thinking of you, but your sex," I answered.
"You find a difference?"
"Decidedly."
"That is just what Sentimental Tommy told every woman he met."
"Except Grizel--of whom it was true." I looked at her keenly, and she
cast down her eyes.
"A farmer shouldn't talk in literary allusions," she said softly.
"Well," I laughed, "they've got me past the golf links!"
We reached Twin Fires, and walked out to see if the roses were all alive,
though they hadn't had time to die. Then I went into the house to work,
and she gathered a few sprays of lilac, and while I was settling down
at my desk she arranged them in water and stood them on the mantels,
humming to herself. Then she turned to go.
"Don't go," I cried.
She looked at me with a little smile, as if of query.
"It's been such a nice day," I added, "and it's so pleasant to feel
you here in the house. Please strum something while I work."
"For ten minutes," she replied, sitting down at the piano. "Then I
must work, too--horrid letters."
She rose presently, while I was scarce aware of it, and slipped out. I
worked on, in silence save for the talk of the painters putting aside
their brushes after the day's work. But I could smell the lilacs she
had left, and the scent of them seemed like the wraith of her presence
in the sunny room.
Chapter XIII
THE ADVENT OF THE PILLIGS
The next day the painters left for good. Hard Cider had completed his
tasks, Mike had no further need for his son Joe till haying time,
and I no longer had an excuse for putting off my departure from Bert's
and my embarkation upon the dubious seas of housekeeping with Mrs.
Pillig at the wheel and son Peter as cabin boy. So I sent word to
Mrs. Pillig to be ready to come the next morning, asked Mrs. Bert to
order for me the necessary stock of groceries from the village, and
gave myself up to the joys of transplanting. It was a cloudy day, with
rain threatening, so that Mike assured me I could not find a better
time. Miss Goodwin worked by my side, her task consisting of a careful
perusal of the seed catalogue and a planting table. What colour were
the flowers? How far apart should the plants be set? How tall did they
grow? My ignorance was as profound as hers. But perhaps that added to
the pleasure. It did to mine, at any rate. I was experimenting with the
unknown.
I've set many a seedling since and needed no table to tell me how, but
I have never recaptured quite the glee of that soft, cloudy June morning,
when my shiny new trowel transferred unknown plants to the flats on the
wheelbarrow, and a voice beside me read:
"'_Phlox Drummondi_. This is one of the finest annuals, being hardy,
easy of cultivation, and making as a summer bedding plant an effective
and brilliant display. The flowers are of long duration and of most
gorgeous and varied colours. One foot. One fourth ounce, special
mixture; contains all the finest and most brilliant colours.' Wait,
now, P--ph--phlox--my, this is like the dictionary! Here we are! Plant
twelve inches apart. My goodness, if you plant all those twelve inches
apart, you'll fill the whole farm! Where are you going to put them?"
"Why not around the sundial?" said I. "They appear to be low and of a
superlative variety of brilliant colour. And they're an old-fashioned
posy."
"Everything is superlative in a seed catalogue, I observe," she smiled.
"Peter Bell could never have written a successful catalogue, could
he? Yes, I think they'd be lovely round the sundial, with something
tall on the outside, in clumps. Something white, like the pillar, to show
them off."
We wheeled out the phlox plants and set them in the circular beds ringing
the sundial, working on boards laid down on the ground, for my grass
seed was sprouting, if rather spindly and in patches. Then we returned
for something tall and white. Alas! we went over the catalogue once,
twice, three times, but there was nothing in my seed bed which would
do! The stock was little higher than the phlox. White annual larkspur
would have served, if there had been any--but there wasn't.
"It's the last time anybody else ever picks my seeds for me!" I
declared. "Gee, I'll know a few things by next year."
"Gee, but you must fill up those sundial beds, _this_ year," said she.
"Oh, dear, I did want some tall clumps of white on the outside!"
"Well, here are asters. Asters are white, sometimes. See if these are.
Giant comet, that sounds rather exciting. Also, débutante. They ought to
be showy. Most débutantes are nowadays."
She scanned my box of empty seed envelopes. "Oh, dear, the giant comets
are mixed," she said. "But"--with a look at the catalogue--"the
débutantes are white. They grow only a foot and a half, but they are
white."
"Well, they'll have to fox trot round the dial, then," said I.
I dug them up, and we put them in clumps in the irregularities on the
outside edges of the beds, first filling the holes part full of water,
as I had seen Mike do with the cauliflower plants.
"Let me do some," she pleaded. "Here I've been reading the old
catalogue all the morning, while you've been digging in the nice dirt."
She kneeled on the board, holding a plant caressingly in her hand, and
with her naked fingers set it and firmed it in the moist earth. Then she
set a second, and a third, holding up her grimy fingers gleefully.
"Oh, you nice earth!" she finally exclaimed, digging both hands eagerly
in to the wrists.
After dinner we spaded up little beds at the foot of each pillar of the
rose arch, and put flowers in each of them, facing the house, set a
row of _Phlox Drummondi_ along the line where the grape arbour was to
be, to mark more clearly the western edge of the lawn, and finally took
a load of the remaining seedlings, of various sorts, down to the brook,
just below the orchard, where I planned some day to build a pool and
develop a lovely garden nook. Here the soil was black and rich for a
foot or more in depth, and after spading and raking out the weeds and
grasses we had four little beds, though roughly and hastily made, two
on each side of the stream, with the future pool, as it were, in the
centre. These we filled with the remaining seedlings, helter skelter,
just for a splash of colour, and watered from the brook itself.
Then we straightened our stiff backs, and scurried for shelter from the
coming rain. We reached Bert's just as the first big drops began to fall.
"Nice rain!" she cried, turning to look at it from under the porch.
"You'll give all the flowers a drink, and they'll live and be
beautiful in the garden of Twin Fires."
"Do you like flowers as well as philology, really?" I asked.
"I don't see what's to prevent my liking both," she smiled, as she
disappeared up the stairs.
The next day it was still raining. I set off alone to make ready for the
arrival of the Pilligs. I was standing on my kitchen porch talking to
Mike when they arrived. It was a memorable moment. I heard the sound
of wheels, and looked up. A wagon was approaching, driven by an old
man. Beside him, beneath a cotton umbrella, sat a thin woman in black,
with gray hair and a worried look. Behind them, on a battered trunk,
sat Peter, who was not thin, who wore no worried look, and who chewed
gum. Beneath the wagon, invisible at first, trotted a mud-bespattered
yellow pup. The wagon stopped.
"Good morning, Mr. Upton," said Mrs. Pillig. "This is me and Peter."
"Where's Buster?" said Peter.
At the word Buster, the yellow pup emerged from beneath the cart,
wagging the longest tail, in proportion to the dog, ever seen on a
canine. It would be more correct to say that the tail wagged him, for
with every excited motion his whole body was undulated to the ears,
to counterbalance that tail.
I went out and aided Mrs. Pillig to alight, and then Mike and I lifted
the trunk to the porch. I looked at the dog, which had also joined us on
the porch, where he was leaving muddy paw marks.
"Do I understand that Buster is also an arrival?" said I.
"Oh, dear me, Mr. Upton, you must excuse me," Mrs. Pillig cried
anxiously. "Mrs. John Barker's boy Leslie gave Buster to Peter a
month ago, and of course I sent him right back, but he wouldn't stay
back, and yesterday we took him away again, and this morning he just
suddenly appeared behind the wagon, and I told Peter he couldn't come,
and Peter cried, and Buster wouldn't go back, and I'll make Peter
take him away just as soon as the rain stops."
"Well, I hadn't bargained on Buster, that's a fact," said I. I
didn't like dogs; most people don't who've never had one. But he
was such a forlornly muddy mongrel pup, and so eloquent of tail, that I
spoke his name on an impulse, and put out my hand. The great tail wagged
him to the ears, and with the friendliest of undulations he was all at
once close to me, with his nose in my palm. Then he suddenly sat up on
his hind legs, dangled his front paws, looked me square in the eyes, and
barked.
That was too much for me. "Peter," said I, "you may keep Buster."
"Golly, I'd 'a' had a hard time not to," said that young person,
immediately making for the barn, with Buster at his heels.
Mrs. Pillig and I went inside. While she was inspecting the kitchen, Mike
and I carried her trunk up the back stairs.
"I hope your bed comes to-day," said I, returning. "You see, the house
is largely furnished from my two rooms at college, and there was hardly
enough to go around."
Mrs. Pillig looked into the south room. "Did you have all them books in
your two rooms at college?" she asked.
I nodded.
"They must 'a' been pretty big rooms," she said. "Books is awful
things to keep dusted."
"Which reminds me," I smiled, leading her over to my desk, at which
I pointed impressively. "Woman!" said I, in sepulchral tones, "that
desk is never to be dusted, never to be touched. Not a paper is to be
removed from it. No matter how dirty, how littered it gets, _never touch
it under pain of death!_"
She looked at me a second with her worried eyes wide open, and then a
smile came over her wan, thin face.
"I guess you be n't so terrible as you sound," she said. "But I
won't touch it. Anything else I'm not to touch?"
"Yes," I answered. "The ashes in those two fireplaces. _The ashes
there are never to be taken out_, no matter if they are piled a foot
thick, and spill all over the floor. A noble pile of ashes is a room's
best recommendation. Those are the only two orders I have. In all else,
I'm at your mercy. But on those two points you are at mine--and I have
none!"
"Well, I reckon I'll wash the kitchen windows," said Mrs. Pillig.
I was sawing up a few more sticks from the orchard, when the express man
drove up with the beds, the crockery, and so on. I called son Peter,
who responded with Buster at his heels. "Peter," said I, "you and
I'll now set up the beds. You ought to be in school, though, by the way.
Why aren't you?"
"Hed ter bring maw over here," said Peter.
"That's too bad. Aren't you sorry?"
Peter grinned at me and slowly winked. I was very stern. "Nevertheless,
you'll have a lesson," I said. "You shall tell me the capitals of all
the states while we set up your bed."
Peter and I carried the beds, springs, and mattresses upstairs, and
while we were joining the frames I began with Massachusetts and made
him tell me all the capitals he could. We got into a dispute over the
capital of Montana, Peter maintaining it was Butte, and I defending
Helena. The debate waxed warm, and suddenly Buster appeared upon the
scene, his tail following him up the stairs, to see what the trouble
was. He began to leave mud tracks all over the freshly painted floor,
so that we had to grab him up and wipe his paws with a rag. Peter held
him while I wiped, and we fell to laughing, and forgot Montana.
"You'll have to get rubbers for him," said I.
This idea amused Peter tremendously. "Gee, rubbers on a dog!" he cried.
"Buster'd eat 'em off in two seconds. Say, where's Buster goin' to
sleep?"
We had to turn aside on our way downstairs for more furniture to make
Buster a bed in a box full of excelsior in the shed. We put him in it,
and went back to the porch. Buster followed us. We took him back, and
put him in the box once more. He whacked the sides with his tail, as if
he enjoyed the game--and jumped out as soon as we turned away.
"Gee, he's too wide awake now," said Peter.
So we fell over Buster for the rest of the morning. I never saw a dog
before nor since who could so successfully get under your feet as
Buster. If I started upstairs with the frame of a pine bureau on my
back, Buster was on the third step, between my legs. If I was carrying in
a stack of plates from the barrel of crockery, Buster was wedged in
the screen door, pushing it open ahead of me, to let it snap back in
my face. When I scolded him, he undulated his silly yellow body, sprang
upon his hind legs, and licked my hands. If I tried to kick him, he
regarded it as a game, and bit my shoe lace. Peter's shoe laces, I
noted, were in shreds. But Buster disappeared after a time, and Peter
and I got the china and kitchenware all in, and Mrs. Pillig had it
washed and in the cupboards before he reappeared. He came down the
front stairs with one of my bath slippers in his mouth, and, with a
profoundly proud undulation of tail and body, laid it at my feet for me
to throw, barking loudly. We all laughed, but I took the slipper and
beat him with it, while Peter appeared on the verge of tears.
"No, Buster," I cried. "You keep out of doors. Peter, put him out."
Peter resentfully deposited the pup on the porch, and took my slipper
back upstairs. Meanwhile, Buster, after looking wistfully through the
screen door a second, pushed it open with his nose and paw and reëntered,
immediately sitting up on his hind legs and gazing into my eyes with the
most human look I ever saw.
"Buster," said I, "you are the limit. Very well, stay in. I give up!"
Buster plopped down on all fours, as if he understood perfectly, and
took a bite at my shoe string. I patted his head. I had to. The pup was
irresistible.
"And what time will you have your dinner?" asked Mrs. Pillig.
"There's no meat in the house. Guess you forgot to order the butcher
to stop; but there's eggs."
"Eggs will do," said I, "and one o'clock. Bert has his at twelve,
but I want mine at one. Maybe I shall have a guest."
"A guest!" she cried. "You wouldn't be puttin' a guest on me the
first mornin'!"
"Well, it's doubtful, I'm afraid," I answered. "Perhaps I'll wait
till to-morrow night, and have three guests for supper--just Bert and
his wife and their boarder--sort of a housewarming, you know. I want you
to make a pie."
"Well, I reckon I can wait on table stylish enough for Mrs. Temple,"
said she, "and I'll make a lemon pie that'll make Bert Temple sorry he
didn't marry _me_."
"I shouldn't want you to wreck Bert's domestic happiness," said I,
"but make the pie, just the same!"
I went into the south room, and sat at my desk answering some letters,
while I waited for dinner. I could hear the rattle of dishes in the
kitchen--the first of those humble domestic sounds which we associate
with the word home. Through the house, too, and in to me, floated the
aroma of bacon and of coffee, faintly, just detectable, mingled with the
smell of earth under June rain, which drifted through an open window.
Presently I heard the front door open very softly. As I guessed that
Peter had his instructions in behaviour from his mother, I knew it must
be Miss Goodwin. My pen poised suspended over the paper. I waited for
her to enter the room, in a pleasant tingle of expectation. But she
did not enter. Several minutes passed, and I got up to investigate,
but there was no sign of her. The front door, however, stood ajar. Then
Mrs. Pillig called "Dinner!"
I walked into my dining-room, and sat down at the table, which was
covered with a new tablecloth and adorned with my new china. Beside
my plate was the familiar, old-fashioned silver I had eaten with when a
boy, and the sight of it thrilled me. Then I spied the centrepiece--a
glass vase bearing three fresh iris buds from the brookside. Here was the
secret, then, of the open door! Mrs. Pillig came in with the platter
of eggs and bacon, and she, too, spied the flowers.
[Illustration: "Well, well, you've got yourself a bookay," she said]
"Well, well, you've got yourself a bookay," she said.
"Not I," was my answer. "They just came. Mrs. Pillig, there's a
fairy lives in this house, a nice, thoughtful fairy, who does things
like this. If you ever see her, don't be frightened."
Mrs. Pillig looked at me pityingly. "I'll bring your toast and coffee
now," she said.
The coffee came in steaming, and it was good coffee, much better
than Mrs. Bert's. The eggs were good, too. But best of all was the
centrepiece. She had come in so softly, and gone so quickly, and nobody
had seen her! She had been present at my first meal in Twin Fires,
after all, and so delicately present, just in the subtle fragrance of
flowers and the warm token of thoughtfulness! My meal was a very
happy one, happier even, perhaps, than it would have been had she
sat opposite me in person. We are curious creatures, who can on
occasion extract a sweeter pleasure from our dreams of others in
loneliness than from their bodily presence. Mrs. Pillig fluttered in and
out, to see if I was faring well, and though her service was not that of
a trained waitress it sufficed to bring me dessert of some canned
peaches, buried under my own rich cream, and to remind me that my
wants were solicitously cared for. Out on the porch I could see Peter
playing with Buster and hear that ingratiating pup's yelps of canine
delight. Before me stood the purple iris blooms, with golden hearts just
opening, their slender stems rising from the clear water in the vase,
and spoke of her whose thought of me was so gracious, so delicately
expressed, so warming to my heart. The spoon I held bore my mother's
initials, reminding me of my childhood, of that other home which death
had broken up ten years before, since when I had called no place home
save my study and bedroom high above the college Yard. I thought of the
Yard--pleasantly, but without regrets. I looked through the window
as my last spoonful of dessert was eaten, and saw the sky breaking into
blue. I folded my new napkin, put it into the old silver ring which bore
the word "John" on the side, failed utterly to note the absence of a
finger-bowl, and rose from my first meal in Twin Fires.
"I have a home again," said I, aloud; "I have a home again after ten
years!"
Then I went up the road toward Bert's.
Chapter XIV
THE FIRST LEMON PIE
Miss Goodwin was not there. She had gone for a walk. Disappointed, I
went back to my farm, and resolved to clean up the path through the
pines, to surprise her. The grove was dripping wet, the brook high,
and when I had stacked up the slash from as far as the tamarack swamp,
I brought down some old planks from the house and made a walk with them
over the wet corner. There was scarcely any slash in the open border
of pines along the south wall, so that I had time to smooth with a
rake the path on between the vegetables and the hayfield well back
toward the house, mow it out with a scythe across the little slope of
neglected grass just west of the house, where I was going some day to
plant more orchard and place my chicken houses, and finally bring it
down sharp through the group of pines by the road just northwest of the
woodshed (evidently planted there for a windbreak), ending it up at the
driveway which led in to the vegetable garden, around the end of the
shed. Then I put up my tools, and walked back proudly around the
circle. The path practically encompassed ten acres, so that it made
quite a respectable stroll. First, it led west through the small group
of pines, then south along the wall by the potato field, where I
glimpsed the rows of sprouting plants, and beyond them the lone pine and
the acres of Bert's farm and the far hills up the valley. Then it led by
the hayfield wall, on the right a tangle of wild roses and other wallside
flowers and weeds, on the left the neat rows of my vegetables, with the
peas already brushed. At the end of the farm it turned east, between
two rows of pine trunks like a natural cloister, and finally entered
the tamarack swamp, and then the hush and silence of the pine grove,
where the brook ran along in its mossy bed and you might have been
miles from any house. It emerged into the maples where Twin Fires was
visible, spick and span with new white paint and green shutters,
above its orchard. I was very proud of that path, of its length, its
charm, its variety, its spontaneous character. It seemed to me then,
and it has never ceased to seem, better than any extended acres of
formal garden planting, more truly representative of the natural
landscape of our country, and so in a truer sense a real garden.
There are spots along that brook now where I have sown ferns and wild
flowers from the deep woods, brought home, like the trilliums, in a
grapevine basket, spots which for sheer exquisiteness of shadowed
water and shy bloom and delicate green beat any formal bed you ever
dreamed. I have even cleared out three trees to let the morning sun fall
on a little pool by the brook, and into that place I have succeeded in
transplanting a cardinal flower, which looks at its own reflection
in the still water below, across the pool from a blue vervain. Just
one cardinal flower--that is all--under a shaft of sunlight in the
woods. But it is, I like to think, what Hiroshige would most enjoy.
However, I am running ahead of my story. Returning to the house, I went
up to my new chamber, where my striped Navajo blanket (a gift from a New
Mexican undergraduate who had been in one of my courses and entertained
an inexplicable regard for me, possibly because I persuaded him that
he was not destined for a literary career) was spread on the floor,
my old college bed was clean with fresh linen, and my college shingles
hung on the walls, a pleasant reminder of those strange social ambitions
which mean so much to youth. Through my west window streamed in the
sunset. I peeled off my clothes and dove into my brand new and quite too
expensive porcelain bath tub--a luxury Bert's house did not possess.
Then I got into my good clothes and a starched collar, more for the
now novel sensation than anything else, ate my supper, and in the warm
June evening walked up the road.
Bert and his wife were in the front sitting-room. I could see them
beneath the hanging lamp. The girl was walking idly up and down before
the house. Out of range of the open window I took her hand and gave it a
little pressure. "For the centrepiece," said I. "You sat opposite me
at my first meal, bless you!"
"Did I?" she answered. "What are you talking about?" She smiled it
off, but I knew that she was pleased at my pleasure.
Then I led the way into the parlour. "Hear, ye; hear, ye; hear, ye!"
I cried. "To-morrow night at seven a housewarming dinner-party will
be given at Twin Fires. The guests will be Mrs. Bert Temple, her lesser
fraction, and Miss Stella Goodwin."
"Land o' Goshen!" said Mrs. Bert. "I ain't got no fit clothes."
Bert and I roared. "They're all alike," cried Bert to me. "You ain't
got no fit clothes, neither, hev you, Miss Goodwin?"
"Of course not," she laughed. "But I expect to go."
"Well, I ain't got no swaller tail myself," said Bert. "But I expect
to go. We'll jest leave the old lady ter home."
"Will you, now?" said she. "Do you s'pose I'd lose a chance to see
how Mrs. Pillig's feedin' our friend? Not much!"
"Seven o'clock, then!" I called, as I went back down the road, to
light my old student's lamp again at last, and labour in my own house
in the quiet evening, the time of day the Lord appointed for mental
toil. As I drew near, the form of Buster emerged from the shed, barking
savagely, his bark changing to whimpers of joy as I spoke his name.
He pleaded to come into the house with me, so I let him come, and all
the evening he lay on the rug beside my chair, while I worked. Now and
then I leaned to stroke his head, whereupon he would roll over on his
back, raise his four paws into the air, and present his white belly to be
scratched. When I stopped, he would roll back with a grunt of profound
satisfaction, bat one eye at me affectionately, and go to sleep again.
"Buster," said I, "hanged if I don't like you."
His great tail spanked the rug.
The house seemed oddly more companionable for his presence. Yes, I did
like him--I who had thought I hated dogs! I put him to bed at eleven,
in the woodshed, and bade him good-night aloud.
The next day Mrs. Pillig was nervously busy with preparations for the
feast. The ice man came, and the butcher. I worked half the day at my
manuscripts, and half cleaning up the last of my orchard slash, mowing
the neglected grass with a scythe, and trimming the grass between the
house and the road with a lawn mower. I also edged the path to the
kitchen door. Every few moments I looked up the road toward Bert's,
but no figure drew near with saucily tilted nose. There was only
Buster, trotting hither and yon in every part of the landscape, and, at
half-past three, the chunky form of Peter coming home from the Slab
City school. I set Peter to work for an hour sawing wood.
"But I gotter study," he said.
"What?" said I.
"Spellin'," said Peter.
"All right," said I, "I'll ask you words while you saw."
He gave me his book which I held open on the lawnmower handle, and every
time the machine came to his end of the strip of lawn I asked him a new
word. Then I'd mow back again, and he'd make another cut of apple
bough, and then we'd have a fresh word.
"This lends an extremely educational aspect to agricultural toil,
Peter," said I.
"Yes, sir," said he.
Peter had his lesson learned and I had the lawn mowed by five o'clock.
I devoted the next hour to my correspondence, and then went up to make
myself ready for the feast. For some reason I went into the spare room
at the front of the house, and glancing from the window saw Miss Stella
stealing up through the orchard, her hands full of flowers. I watched
cautiously. She peeped into the east window, saw that the coast was
clear, and I heard the front door gently opened. I tiptoed to the head
of the stairs, and listened. She was in the south room. Presently I
heard voices.
"Sh," she was cautioning, evidently to Mrs. Pillig. A second later I
heard Buster bark his "stranger-coming!" bark by the kitchen door. When
I came downstairs, there were fresh flowers beneath the Hiroshiges, a
bowl of them on the piano, and a centrepiece in the dining-room. I smiled.
"That fairy's been here again," said Mrs. Pillig slyly. "Gave me
quite a start."
Promptly at seven my guests arrived, and I ushered them with great
ceremony into the south room, where Mrs. Bert gazed around with unfeigned
delight, and cried, "Well, land o' Goshen, to think this was them two
old stuffy rooms of Milt's, with nothin' in 'em but a bed and a
cracked pitcher! Hev you read all them books, young man?"
"Not quite all," I laughed, as I opened the chimney cupboard to the
left of my west fireplace.
"Lucky you read what you did before you began ter run a farm," said
Bert.
I now brought forth from the cupboard a bottle of my choicest Bourbon and
four glasses. The ladies consented to the tiniest sip, but, "There's
nothin' stingy about me!" said Bert. "Here's to yer, Mr. Upton, and
to yer house!"
We set our glasses down just as Mrs. Pillig announced dinner. On the way
across the hall I managed to touch the girl's hand once more. "For the
second centrepiece, dear fairy," I whispered.
Bert was in rare form that evening, and kept us in gales of merriment.
Mrs. Pillig brought the soup and meat with anxious gravity, set the
courses on the table, and then stopped to chat with Mrs. Temple, or to
listen to Bert's stories. She amused me almost as much as Bert did.
Bert and his wife weren't company to her, and the impersonal attitude
of a servant was quite impossible for her. It was a family party with the
waitress included. Miss Goodwin and I exchanged glances of amusement
across the table.
Then came the lemon pie.
"Now there's a pie!" said Mrs. Pillig, setting it proudly before me.
I picked up my mother's old silver pie knife and carefully sank it
down through the two-inch mass of puffy brown méringue spangled with
golden drops, the under layer of lemon-yellow body, and finally the
flaky, marvellously dry and tender bottom crust.
"Mrs. Pillig," said I, "pie is right!"
"Marthy," said Bert, smacking his lips over the first mouthful, "if
you could make a pie like this, you'd be perfect."
"The creation of a pie like this," said I, "transcends the
achievements of Praxiteles."
"If I could make a pie like this," said Miss Goodwin, "I should resign
from the dictionary and open a bakeshop."
Mrs. Pillig stood in the doorway, her thin, worried face wreathed in
smiles. Under her elbow I saw Peter peeping through, less curious
concerning us, I fancied, than the fate of the pie.
"You lose, Peter," I called. "There ain't going to be no core."
At the sound of my voice Buster came squeezing into the room, and put his
forepaws in my lap. Then he went around the table greeting everybody,
and ended by nestling his nose against Miss Goodwin's knee. I slid back
my chair, supremely content. Bert slid back his. I reached to the mantel
for a box of cigars and passed one to Bert, along with a candle, for
I had no lamp in the dining-room as yet, nor any candles for the table.
That was a little detail we had forgotten. Bert bit off the end, and
puffed contentedly.
"That's some seegar," he said. "Better'n I'm used ter. Speakin'
o' seegars, though, reminds me o' old Jedge Perkins, when he went
to Williams College. They used ter what yer call haze in them days,
an' the soph'mores, they come into the young Jedge's room to smoke
him out, an' they give him a dollar an' told him to go buy pipes an'
terbacker; so he went out an' come back with ninety-nine clay pipes
an' a penny's worth o' terbacker, an' it pleased the soph'mores
so they let him off. 'Least, that's what the Jedge said."
We rose and went back into the south room, followed by Buster. Bert was
puffing his cigar with deep delight, and sank into the depths of a Morris
chair, stretching out his feet. "Say, Marthy, why don't we hev a chair
like this?" he said.
"'Cause you can't stay awake in a straight one," she replied.
Mrs. Bert wandered about the room inspecting my books and pictures like
a curious child. Miss Stella and I watched them both for a moment,
exchanging a happy smile that meant volumes.
"I'm so glad you invited them," she whispered.
"I'm so glad you are here, too, though," I whispered back. "I can't
think of my housewarming now, without you."
She coloured rosily, and moved to the piano, where, by some right
instinct, she began to play Stephen Foster.
"'Old Kentucky Home!' By jinks, Marthy, do yer hear thet? Remember
how I courted you, with the Salem Cadet Band a-playin' thet tune out on
the bandstand, an' us in the shadder of a lilac bush?"
Martha Temple blushed like a girl. "Hush up, Bert," she laughed. But
she went over and sat on the arm of the Morris chair beside him, and I
saw his big, brown, calloused hand steal about her waist. My own instinct
was to go to the piano, and I followed it, bending over the player and
whispering close to her ear:
"You've touched a chord in their hearts," I said, "that you couldn't
have reached with Bach or Mozart. Don't stop."
"The old dears," she whispered back. "I'll give them 'The Old Folks
at Home.'"
She did, holding the last chord open till the sound died away in the
heart of the piano, and the room was still. Then suddenly she slipped
into "The Camptown Races," and Bert, with a loud shout of delight,
began to beat out the rhythm on Martha's ample hip, for his arm was
still about her.
"By cricky," he cried. "I bet thet tune beats any o' these
new-fangled turkey trots! Speakin' o' turkey trots, Marthy, you and me
ain't been to a dance in a year. We mus' go ter the next one."
"Do you like to dance?" asked Miss Goodwin, coming over to the settle.
"Wal, now, when I was young, I was some hand at the lancers," he
laughed. "Used ter drive over ter Orville in a big sleigh full o' hay,
an' hev a dance an' oyster stew to the hotel thar. Sarah Pillig wuz
some tripper in them days, too."
"Ah, ha!" said I, "now I see why Mrs. Temple was so anxious to come
to-night!"
"Stuff!" said that amiable woman.
The girl was looking into the ashes on the hearth. "Sleigh rides!" she
said. "I suppose you all go jingling about the lovely country in sleighs
all winter! Do you know, I never had a sleigh ride in my life?"
"No!" cried Bert. "Don't seem possible. Speakin' o' sleighs, did I
ever tell you about old Deacon Temple, my great uncle? He used ter hev
a story he sprung on anybody who'd listen. Cricky, how he did welcome
a stranger ter town! 'Cordin' ter this story, he wuz once drivin'
along on a fine crust, when his old hoss run away, an' run, an' run,
an' finally upset the sleigh over a wall into a hayfield whar they
was mowin', an' he fell in a haycock an' didn't hurt himself at
all. Then the stranger would say: 'But how could they be mowin' in
Massachusetts in sleighin' time?' and the Deacon would answer: 'They
wa'n't. The old mare run so far she run into Rhode Island.'"
Mrs. Temple rose. "Bert, you come home," she said, "before you think
of any more o' them old ones."
"Oh, jest the woodchuck," Bert pleaded.
Miss Stella and I insisted on the woodchuck, so Bert sank back
luxuriously, and narrated the tale. It had happened, it seems, to his
grandfather and this same brother, the Deacon, when they were boys.
"The old place wuz down by the river," said Bert, "an' there was
a pesky 'chuck they couldn't shoot ner trap, he wuz so smart, who
hed a burrow near the bank. So one day grandad seen him go in, an'
he called the Deacon, an' the two of 'em sot out ter drown the critter.
They lugged water in pails, takin' turns watchin' and luggin', for
two hours, dumpin' it into the hole till she was nigh full up. Then
they got too tuckered ter tote any more, an' sat down behind a bush ter
rest. Pretty soon they seen the old woodchuck's head poke up. He
looked around, careful like, but didn't see the boys behind the bush,
so he come all the way out and what do you think he done?"
"Tell us!" cried Miss Stella, leaning forward, her eyes twinkling.
"He went down ter the river an' took a drink," said Bert.
"Won't you copy the wisdom of the woodchuck?" I asked, when the laugh
had subsided.
Bert nodded slyly and I opened my chimney cupboard again.
"It's agin all laws," said Bert, pointing a thumb toward his wife,
"but it ain't every day we hev a noo neighbour in these parts. Here's
to yer, once more!"
The four of us walked up the road in merry mood, and the older folk left
the girl and me on the porch. She held the door open, as if to go in
after them, but I pleaded that the lovely June night was young. "And
so are we," I added.
She looked at me a moment, through the dusk, and then came out on the
stoop. We moved across the dewy lawn to a bench beneath the sycamore
that guarded the house, and sat down. Neither of us spoke for a long
moment. Then I said abruptly: "You've only come to my house wearing a
fairy cap of invisibility, since I moved in--till to-night. Won't you
come to-morrow and walk through the pines? I've cleared all the slash
out for you, and put planks in the swamp. The thrush won't sing for me
alone."
"Yes, I'll come--for the last time," she said softly.
"Why for the last time?" I cried.
"Because I'm going back to the I's, or the J's, on the day after,"
she answered.
"Oh, no, no, you mustn't!" I exclaimed. "You must stay here with
the jays. Why, you're not strong enough, and New York will be horribly
hot, and you haven't seen the phlox in bloom yet round the sundial,
and you've got to tell me where to plant the perennials, when I sow
them, and--and--well, you just mustn't go."
She smiled wistfully. "Pronunciation is more important for me than
perennials, if not so pleasant," she said. "I shall think of Twin
Fires often, though, in--in the heat."
"They'll arrest you if you try to wade in Central Park," said I.
She laughed softly, lifting the corners of her eyes to mine.
"Anyhow," I maintained, "you are not well enough to go back. You are
just beginning to get strong again. It's folly, that's what it is!"
"Strong! Why, my hands are as calloused as yours," she laughed, "and
about as tanned."
"Let me feel," I demanded.
She hesitated a second, and then put out her hand. I took it in mine,
and touched the palm. Then my fingers closed over it, and I held it in
silence, while through the soft June night the music of far frogs came
to us, and the song of crickets in the grass. She did not attempt to
withdraw it for a long moment. The night noises, the night odours in the
warm dark, wrapped us about, as we sat close together on the bench. I
turned my face to hers, and saw that she was softly weeping. Strange
tears were very close to my own eyes. But I did not speak. The hand
slipped out of mine. She rose, and we moved to the door.
"The path to-morrow, at twilight," I whispered.
She nodded, not trusting to speech, and suddenly she was gone.
I walked down the road to Twin Fires in a dream, yet curiously aware of
the rhythmic throb, the swell and diminuendo, of the crickets' elfin
chime.
Chapter XV
A PAGAN THRUSH
All that next June day I worked in my garden, in a dream, my hands
performing their tasks mechanically. I ran the wheel hoe between the
rows of newly planted raspberries and blackberries, to mulch the soil,
without consciousness of the future fruit which was supposed to delight
me.
Avoiding Mike, who would have insisted on conversing had I worked near
him, I next went down to the brook below the orchard, armed with a
rake, brush scythe, and axe, and located the spot on the stone wall
which exactly faced my front door. I marked it with a stake, and thinned
out the ash-leaved maples which grew like a fringe between the wall
and the brook, so that the best ones could spread into more attractive
trees, and so that a semicircular space was also cleared which could
surround the pool, as it were, and in which I could place a bench, up
against the foliage, to face the door of the house. From the door you
would look over the pool to the bench. From the bench you would look
over the pool and up the slope through the orchard to the house entrance.
After I had the bench site correctly located, I saw that the four flower
beds which Miss Goodwin and I had made were at least four feet out of
centre, and would all have to be moved. But that was too much of a
task for my present mood. I left them as they were, and busied myself
with rooting out undeniable weeds and carting off the slash and rubbish.
My mind was not on the task. Over and over I was asking myself the
question, "Do I love her? What permanence is there in a spring passion,
amid gardens and thrush songs, for a girl who caresses the sympathies
by her naïve delight in the novelty of country life? How much of my
feeling for her _is_ passion, and how much is sympathy, even pity?"
Over and over I turned these questions, while my hands worked
mechanically. And over and over, too, I will be honest and admit, the
selfish incrustations of bachelor habits imposed their opposition to the
thought of union. I had bought the farm to be my own lord and master;
here I was to work, to create masterpieces of literature, to plan
gardens, to play golf, to smoke all over the house, to toil all night and
sleep all day if I so desired, to wear soft shirts and never dress
for dinner, to maintain my own habits, my own individuality, undisturbed.
What had been so pleasant, so tinglingly pleasant, for a day, a
week--the presence of the girl in the garden, in the house, the
rustle of her skirt, the sound of her fingers on the keys--would it
be always pleasant? What if one wished to escape from it, and there
were no escape? Passions pall; life, work, ambitions, the need of
solitude for creation, the individual soul, go on.
"All of which means," I thought, laying down my brush scythe and gazing
into the brook, "that I am not sure of myself. And if I am not sure of
myself, do I really love her? And if I am not sure of that, I must wait."
That resolution, the first definite thing my mind had laid hold on,
came to me as the sun was sinking toward the west. I went to the house,
changed my clothes, and hastened up the road to meet her, curiously eager
for a man in doubt.
She was coming out of the door as I crossed the bit of lawn, dressed not
in the working clothes which she had worn on our gardening days, but all
in white, with a lavender ribbon at her throat. She smiled at me brightly
and ran down the steps.
"Go to New York--but see Twin Fires first," she laughed. "I'm all
ready for the tour."
I had not quite expected so much lightness of heart from her, and I was
a little piqued, perhaps, as I answered, "You don't seem very sorry
that you are seeing it for the last time."
She smiled into my face. "All pleasant things have to end," she said,
"so why be glum about it?"
"Do they have to end?" said I.
"In my experience, always," she nodded.
I was silent. My resolution, which I confess had wavered a little when
she came through the doorway, was fixed again. Just the light banter in
her tone had done it. We walked down the road, and went first around
the house to take a look at the lawn and rose trellis. The young grass
was already a frail green from the house to the roses, the flowers around
the white sundial pedestal, while not yet in bloom, showed a mass of
low foliage, the nasturtiums were already trying to cling, with the
aid of strings, to the bird bath (which I had forgotten to fill), and
the rose trellis, coloured green by the painters before they departed,
was even now hidden slightly at the base by the vines of the new roses.
"There," said I, pointing to it, "is the child of your brain, your
aqueduct of roses, which you refuse to see in blossom."
"The child of my hands, too; don't forget that!" she laughed.
"Of _our_ hands," I corrected.
"The ghost of Rome in roses," she said, half to herself. "It will be
very lovely another year, when the vines have covered it."
"And it will be then, I trust," said I, "rather less like 'the rose
of beauty on the brow of chaos.' The lawn will look like a lawn by then,
and possibly I shall have achieved a sundial plate."
"Possibly you will," said she, with a suspicious twinkle. "And
possibly you'll have remembered to fill your bird bath."
She turned abruptly into the house and emerged with a pitcher of water,
tiptoeing over the frail, new grass to the bath, which she filled to the
brim, pouring the remainder upon the vines at the base.
"My last activity shall be for the birds," she smiled, as she came back
with the pitcher. As if in gratitude, a bird came winging out of the
orchard behind her, and dipped his breast and bill in the water.
"The darling!" I heard her exclaim, under her breath.
We took the pitcher inside, and I saw her glance at the flowers in the
vases. "I ought to get you some fresh ones," she said.
"No," I answered. "Those shall stay a long while, in memory of the
good fairy. Now I will show you my house. You have never seen my house
above the first story."
"It isn't proper," she laughed. "I shouldn't be even here, in the
south room."
"But you have been here many times."
Again she laughed. "Stupid! But Mrs. Pillig wasn't here then!"
"Oh!" said I, a light dawning on my masculine stupidity, "I begin
to realize the paradoxes of propriety. And now I see at last why I
shouldn't have asked you to pick the paint for the dining-room--when I
did."
Her eyes narrowed, and she looked into my face with sudden gravity. "I
wonder if you do understand?" she answered. Slowly a half-wistful smile
crept into the corners of her mouth, and she shook her head. "No, you
don't; you don't at all."
Then her old laugh came bubbling up. "I suspect Mrs. Pillig is more of
an authority on pies than propriety," she said in a cautious voice,
"and, besides, I'm going away to-morrow, and, besides, I don't care
anyway. Lead on."
We went up the uncarpeted front stairs, into the square upper hall which
was lighted by an east window over the front door. I showed her first
the spare room on the northeast corner, which connected with the bath,
and then the second front chamber opposite, which was not yet furnished
even with a bed. Then we entered my chamber, where the western sun was
streaming in. She stood in the door a second, looking about, and then
advanced and surveyed the bed.
"The bedclothes aren't tucked in right," she said.
"I know it," I answered sadly. "I have to fix them myself every night.
Mrs. Pillig is better on pies."
The girl leaned over and remade my monastic white cot, giving the pillow
a final pat to smooth it. Then she inspected the shingles and old
photographs on the walls, turning from an undergraduate picture of me,
in a group, to scan my face, and shaking her head.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't tell me I'm getting bald."
"No, not bald," she answered, "but your eyes don't see visions as
they did then."
I looked at her, startled a little. "What makes you say that?" I asked.
"Forgive me," she replied quickly. "I meant nothing."
"You meant what you said," I answered, moving close to her, "and
it is true. It is true of all men, and all women, in a way--of all
save the chosen few who are the poets and seers. 'Shades of the prison
house begin to close'--you know that shadow, too, I guess. I have
no picture of you when you were younger. No--you are still the poet; you
see aqueducts of roses. So you think I'm prosy now!"
"I didn't say that," she answered, very low.
"One vision I've seen," I went on, "one vision, lately. It was--it
was----"
I broke abruptly off, remembering suddenly my resolve.
"Come," said I, "and I'll show you Mrs. Pillig's quarters."
She followed in silence, and peeped with me into the chambers in the
ell, smiling a little as she saw Peter's clothes scattered on the floor
and bed. Then, still in silence, and with the golden light of afternoon
streaming across the slopes of my farm, we entered the pines by the
woodshed, and followed the new path along by the potato field and the
pasture wall, pausing here and there to gather the first wild rose buds,
and turning down through the cloister at the south.
As we slipped into the corner of the tamarack swamp my heart was beating
high, my pulses racing with the recollection of all the tense moments in
that grove ahead, since first I met her there. I know not with what
feelings she entered. It was plain now even to me that she was masking
them in a mood of lightness. She danced ahead over the new plank
walk, and laughed back at me over her shoulder as she disappeared into
the pines. A second later I found her sitting on the stone I had placed
by the pool.
She looked up out of the corners of her eyes. "I should think this would
be a good place to wade," she said.
"So it might," said I. "Do you want to try it?"
"Do you want to run along to the turn by the road and wait?" The eyes
still mocked me.
"No," said I.
She shook her head sadly. "And I did so want to wade," she sighed.
"Really?" I asked.
"Really, yes. I won't have a chance again for--oh, never, maybe."
"Then of course I'll go ahead." I stepped over the brook, out of
sight. A moment later I heard a soft splashing of the water, and a voice
called, "I'm only six now. Oh, it's such fun--and so cold!"
I made no reply. In fancy I could see her white feet in the water, her
face tipped up in the shadows, her eyes large with delight. How sweet
she was, how desirable! I stood lost in a rosy reverie, when suddenly
I felt her beside me, and turned to meet her smile.
"How you like the brook," I said.
"How I love it!" she exclaimed. "Don't think me silly, but it really
says secret things to me."
"Such secrets as the stream told to Rossetti?" I asked.
She looked away. "I said secret things," she answered.
We moved on, around the bend by the road where the little picture of
far hills came into view, and back into the dusk of the thickest pines.
At the second crossing of the brook, I took her hand to steady her over
the slippery stones, and when we were across, the mood and memories
of the place had their way with us, and our hands did not unclasp. We
walked on so together to the spot where we first had met, and where
first the thrush had sounded for us his elfin clarion. There we stopped
and listened, but there was no sound save the whisper of the pines.
"The pines sound like soft midnight surf on the shore," she whispered.
"I want the thrush," I whispered back. "I want the thrush!"
"Yes," she said, raising her eyes to mine, "oh, yes!"
And then, as we waited, our eyes meeting, suddenly he sang, far off
across the tamaracks, one perfect call, and silence again. Her face was a
glimmering radiance in the dusk. Her hand was warm in mine. Slowly my
face sank toward hers, and our lips met--met for an instant when we
were not masters of ourselves, when the bird song and the whispering
pines wrought their pagan spell upon us.
Another instant, and she stood away from me, one hand over her mouth, one
hand on her panting breast, and fright in her eyes. Then, as suddenly,
she laughed. It was hardly a nervous laugh. It welled up with the
familiar gurgle from her throat.
"John Upton," she said, "you are a bad man. That wasn't what the
thrush said at all."
"I misunderstood," said I, recovering more slowly, and astounded by
her mood.
"I'll not reproach you, since I, a philologist, misunderstood for a
second myself," she responded. "Hark!"
There was a sudden sound of steps and crackling twigs in the grove behind
us, and Buster emerged up the path, hot on our scent. He made a dab
with his tongue at my hand, and then fell upon Miss Goodwin. She sank to
her knees and began to caress him, very quickly, so that I could not see
her face.
"Stella," said I, "Buster has made a friend of you. That's always
a great compliment from a dog."
She kept her face buried in his neck an instant longer, and then her eyes
lifted to mine. "Yes--John," she said. "And now I must go home to pack
my trunk."
"Let me drive you to the station in the morning," said I, as we emerged
from the grove, in this sudden strange, calm intimacy, when no word had
been spoken, and I, at least, was quite in the dark as to her feelings.
She shook her head. "No, I go too early for you. You--you mustn't try
to see me."
For just a second her voice wavered. She stopped for a last look at Twin
Fires. "Nice house, nice garden, nice brook," she said, and added,
with a little smile, "nice rose trellis." Then we walked up the road,
and at Bert's door she put out her hand.
"Good-bye," she said.
"Good-bye," I answered.
Her eyes looked frankly into mine. There was nothing there but smiling
friendship. The fingers did not tremble in my grasp.
"I shall write," said I, controlling my voice with difficulty, "and
send you pictures of the garden."
"Yes, do."
She was gone. I walked slowly back to my dwelling. I had kept my
resolution. Yet how strangely I had kept it! What did it mean? Had I
been strong? No. Had she made me keep it? Who could say? All had been
so sudden--the kiss, her springing away, her abrupt, astonishing
laughter. But she had not reproached me, she had not been righteously
angry, nor, still less, absurd. She had thought it, perhaps, but the
mood of the place and hour, and understood. That was fine, generous! Few
women, I thought, would be capable of it. Stella! How pleasant it had
been to say the name! Then the memory of her kiss came over me like a
wave, and my supper stood neglected, and all that evening I sat staring
idly at my manuscripts and stroking Buster's head.
Yes, I had kept my resolution--and felt like a fool, a happy, hopeless
fool!
Chapter XVI
I GO TO NEW YORK FOR A PURPOSE
I shall not here recount the events on the farm during the weeks which
followed Miss Stella's departure. They did not particularly interest me.
My whole psychological make-up had been violently shaken, the centres of
attention had been shifted, and I was constantly struggling for a
readjustment which did not come. The post-office appealed to me more
than the peas, and I laboured harder over my photographs of the sundial
beds than over the beds themselves. I sent for a ray filter and a
wide-angle lens, spending hours in experiment and covering a plank
in front of the south door with printing frames.
I had written to her the day after she had departed, but no reply
came for a week, and then only a brief little note, telling me it was
hot in town and conveying her regards to the roses. I, too, waited a
week--though it was hard--and then answered, sending some photographs,
one of them a snapshot of a bird on the edge of the bath, one of
them of Buster sitting on his hind legs. Again she answered briefly,
merrily, conveying her especial regards to Buster, but ending with a
plaintive little postscript about the heat.
I sat, the evening after this letter arrived, in my big, cool room, with
Buster beside me, and thought of her down there in the swelter of town.
I wanted to answer her letter, and wanted to answer it tenderly. I was
lonely in my great, cool room; I was unspeakably lonely.
Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the evening of Class Day.
The Yard was full of lanterns, of music, of shimmering dresses, of
pretty faces, of young men in mortar boards and gowns. I might have
been sitting in the deep window recess of my old room above the Yard,
drinking in the scene with the pleasant impersonal wistfulness of an
older man in the presence of happy youth. But I wasn't. I was sitting
here alone with Buster, thinking of a poor girl in a hot, lonely New York
lodging-house. I pulled my pad toward me and wrote her a letter. It read:
Dear, Nice Lady: I'm lying here on the rug, my tail quite
tired after a hard day's work, looking up in Mr. John's
face. His face is kind of glum and his eyes sort of faraway
looking. I don't know what's the matter with him. He's
been that way nights for two or three weeks now, which makes
me sad, too; only he goes to the post-office often, which
makes me glad, 'cause I love to walk or to run behind the
buggy, and there's a collie pup on the way who is very nice.
What do you suppose is the trouble? Sometimes he goes to
the brook and sits on a stone by a pool there, while I go
wading and get my stummick wet and drippy and cool. I wish
you'd come back. I didn't get to know you so awful well, but
I liked you, and a house with just one glum, stupid man in it
ain't--I mean isn't--very nice, 'specially as Peter's still
at school. Schools last awful late up here.
I am yours waggishly--
"Here, Buster," said I. The pup rose and snuggled his nose into my lap.
I picked him up, held his forepaw firmly and put some ink on it with the
end of a match. Then I held the paper below it, pressed the paw down,
and made a signature, wiping the paw afterward with a blotter. Buster
enjoyed the strange operation, and wagged his tail furiously. I sealed
and addressed the letter, and went to bed.
A few days later a box came addressed to Buster in my care. I opened
it in Buster's presence, indeed literally beneath his nose. On top
was a small package, tied with blue ribbon, and labelled "For Buster."
It proved to be a dog biscuit, which the recipient at once took to the
hearth and began upon. Beneath this was a note, which I opened with eager
fingers. It began:
DARLING BUSTER: Your waggish epistle received and contents
noted. While most of us at times agree with him who said that
the more he saw of men the better he liked dogs, nevertheless
the canine intelligence is in some ways limited. Pray do
not misunderstand me, dear Buster. In its limits lies its
loyalty! No man is a hero to his valet, but every man to his
dog. However, these same limits of the canine intelligence,
which logic compels me to assume that you also possess, are
probably responsible for your mistake in assigning the term
glumness to what you observe in Master John, when it is really
lack of occupation. You see, dear Buster, he has got Twin
Fires so far under way that he doesn't work at it all the
time, so he ought to be at his writing of stories, made up of
big dictionary words which I am defining or inventing for him
down here in a very hot, dirty, dusty, smelly town. He isn't
doing that, is he? Won't you please tell him to? Tell him
that's all the trouble. He has a reaction from his first
farming enthusiasm, and doesn't realize that the thing to do
is to go to work on the new line, _his_ line. For it _is_ his
line, you know, Buster.
Underneath this you'll find something to give him, with my
best wishes for sunshine on the dear garden. I'd kiss you,
Buster, only dogs are terribly germy.
Stella.
P.S. That _is_ a nice pool, isn't it?
I sat on the floor with the letter in my lap, smiling happily over it.
Then I took the last package out of the box. It was heavy, evidently
metal. Removing the papers, I held in my hand an old bronze sundial
plate, a round one to fit my column, and upon it, freshly engraved, the
ancient motto--
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
My first thought was of its cost. She couldn't afford it, the silly,
generous girl! She'd bought it, doubtless, at one of those expensive New
York antique shops, and then taken it to an engraver's, for further
expense. I ought not accept it. Yet how could I refuse? I couldn't.
I hugged it to my heart, and fairly ran to the dial post, Buster at my
heels. It was already nearly noon, so I set it on the pedestal, got a
level and a pot of glue, which was the only means of securing it to the
post which I had, and watch in hand waited for the minute of twelve.
At the minute, I set the shadow between the noon lines, levelled it with
thin bits of match underneath, and glued it down. Then I stood off and
surveyed it, sitting there in the sun--_her_ dial! Then I ran for my
camera.
I developed the film at once, and made a print that afternoon. When it
was made, I went out into the vegetable garden, on a sudden impulse to
work off physical energy, took the wheel hoe away from Mike, and began
to cultivate.
Did you ever spend an afternoon with a wheel hoe, up and down, up and
down, between rows of beets and carrots and onions, between cauliflower
plants and tomato vines, between pepper plants and lettuce? It
requires a certain fixity of attention to keep the weeders or the
cultivator teeth close to the plants without also injuring them. But
there is a soothing monotony in the forward pushes of the machine,
and a profound satisfaction in seeing the weeds come up, the ground
grow clean and brown and broken on each side of the row behind you, and
to feel, too, how much you are accomplishing with the aid of this
comparatively simple tool.
My early peas were ready for market. Mike announced that he was going
to take the first lot over in the morning. They had been planted very
late, but fortune had favoured them, and now they were hardly more
than a week behind Bert's, which had been planted early in April. The
foot-high corn was waving in the breeze, the long rows of delicate
onion tops, of beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce plants were as
characteristically different as the vegetables themselves. I fixed
their characteristics in my vision. I suddenly found myself taking a
renewed interest in the farm. As I paused to wipe my bronzed forehead
or relight my pipe, I would raise my head and look back over the rows,
or through the trellis aqueduct to the house, seeing the sundial telling
the hours on the lawn, and think of Stella, think of her down in the
hot city, where I knew at last that I should not let her stay.
Yes, I had no longer any doubts. I wanted her. I should always want
her. Twin Fires was incomplete, I was incomplete, life was incomplete,
without her. I pushed the hoe with redoubled zeal, long after Mike had
milked the cows and departed.
At six I stopped, amazed to find the plot of a story in my head.
Heaven knows how it got there, but there it was, almost as full-statured
as Minerva when she sprang from the head of Jove, though considerably
less glacial. I even had the opening sentence all ready framed--to
me always the most difficult point of story or essay, except the
closing sentence. Nor did this tale appear to be one I had incubated
in the past, and which now popped up above the "threshold" from my
subconsciousness. It was a brand-new plot, a perfect stranger to me. The
phenomenon interested me almost as much as the plot. The tale grew even
clearer as I took my bath, and haunted me during supper, so that I was
peremptory in my replies to poor Mrs. Pillig and refused to aid Peter
that evening with his geography.
"To-morrow," said I, vaguely, going into my study and locking the door.
I worked all that evening, got up at midnight to forage for a glass of
milk and a fresh supply of oil for my lamp, and returned to my desk to
work till four, when the sun astonished me. The story was done! Instead
of going to bed, I went down in the cool of the young morning, when only
the birds were astir, and took my bath in Stella's pool. Then I went
to the dew-drenched pea vines and began to pick peas.
Here Mike found me, with nearly half a bushel gathered, when he appeared
early to pick for market.
"It's the early bird gets the peas," said I.
"It is shurely," he laughed. "You might say you had a tiliphone call
to get up--only these ain't tiliphones."
"Mike!" I cried, "a pun before breakfast!"
"Shure, I've had me breakfast," said he.
Which reminded me that I hadn't. I went in the house to get it, reading
over and correcting my manuscript as I ate. After breakfast I put on
respectable clothes, tucked the manuscript in my pocket, and mounted the
seat of my farm wagon, beside Mike. Behind us were almost two bushels
of peas and several bunches of tall, juicy, red rhubarb stalks from the
old hills we found on the place. Mike had greatly enriched the soil, and
grown the plants in barrels.
"Well, I'm a real farmer now," said I.
"Ye are, shurely," Mike replied. "Them's good peas, if they was
planted late."
We drove past the golf links and the summer hotel, to the market, where
I was already known, I found, and greeted by name as I entered.
"I'll buy anything you'll sell me," said the proprietor, "and be
glad to get it. Funny thing about this town, the way folks won't take
the trouble to sell what they raise. Most of the big summer estates have
their own gardens, of course, but there's nearly a hundred families
that don't, and four boarding-houses, and the hotels. Why, the hotels
send to New York for vegetables--if you can beat that! Guess all our
farmers with any gumption have gone to the cities."
"Well," said I, "I'm not in farming for my health, which has always
been good. I've got more than a bushel of peas out there."
"Peas!" cried the market man. "Why, I have more demands for peas than
I can fill. The folks who could sell me peas won't plant 'em 'cause
it's too much trouble or expense to provide the brush. I'll give you
eight cents a quart for peas to-day."
"This is too easy," I whispered to Mike, as we went out to get the
baskets.
I sold my rhubarb also, and came away with a little book in which there
was entered to my credit $4.16 for peas and $1.66 for rhubarb. I put
the book proudly in my pocket, for it represented my first earnings from
the farm, and mounting the farm wagon again told Mike to drive me to the
hotel.
As we pulled up before the veranda, the line of old ladies in rockers
focussed their eyes upon us.
"Shure," whispered Mike, "they look like they was hung out to dry!"
I went up the steps and into the office, where the hotel proprietor
suavely greeted me, asked after my health, and inquired how my "estate"
was getting on.
"You mean my farm," said I.
He smiled politely, but not without a skepticism which annoyed me. I
hastened from him, and left my manuscript with the stenographer, who
had arrived for the summer.
"I'll call for the copy to-morrow noon," said I. Then I went to the
telegraph booth and sent a day letter to Stella. "Buster sending me to
thank you," it read. "Meet me Hotel Belmont six to-morrow. Sold over a
bushel of peas to-day. Prepare to celebrate."
"Mike," said I, returning to the cart, "drop me at the golf club. Tell
Mrs. Pillig not to expect me to lunch."
It was ten o'clock when we arrived at the entrance to the club. I jumped
out and Mike drove on. The professional took my name, and promised
to hand it to the proper authorities as a candidate. Then I paid the
fee for the day, borrowed some clubs from him, and we set out. I had not
touched a club since the winter set in. How good the driver felt in
my hand! How sweetly the ball flew from the club (as the golf ball
advertisements phrase it), on the first attempt! I sprang down the
course in pursuit, elated to see that I had driven even with the pro.
Alas! my second was not like unto it! His second spun neatly up on the
green and came to rest. Mine went off my mashie like a cannon ball, and
overshot into the road. My third went ten feet. But it was glorious.
Why shouldn't a farmer play golf? Why shouldn't a golfer run a farm?
Why shouldn't either write stories? Heavens, what a lot of pleasant
things there are to do in the world, I thought to myself, as I finally
reached the green and sank my putt. Poor Stella, sweltering over a
dictionary in New York! Soon she'd be here, too. She should learn to
play golf, she should dig flower beds, she should wade in a brook. I
flubbed my second drive.
"You're taking your eye off," said the pro.
"I'm taking my mind off," said I. "Give me a stroke a hole from here,
for double the price of the round, or quits?"
"You're on," said he.
I stung him, too! I felt so elated that I went back to the hotel for an
elaborate luncheon, and returned for eighteen holes more. The feats a man
can perform the first day after he has had no sleep are astonishing. The
second day it is different. In fact, I began to get groggy about the
tenth hole that afternoon, so that the pro. got back his losses, as in
a burst of bravado I had offered to double the morning bet. He came back
with an unholy 68 that afternoon, confound him! They always do when the
bet is big enough, which is really why they are called professionals.
That night I slept ten hours, worked over my manuscripts most of the
next morning, packed a load of them in my suitcase, and after an early
dinner got Peter to drive me to the train, for his school had now closed.
"Peter," said I at the station, "your job is to take care of your
mother, and keep the kindlings split, and drive to market for Mike when
he needs you. Also to water the lawn and flower beds with the spray
nozzle every morning. Mind, now, the spray nozzle! If I find you've
used the heavy stream, I'll--I'll--I'll sell Buster!"
That amiable creature tried to climb aboard the train with me, and Peter
had to haul him off by the tail. My last sight of Bentford was a yellow
dog squirming and barking in a small boy's arms.
The train was hot and stuffy. It grew hotter and stuffier as we came
out of the mountains into the Connecticut lowlands, and we were all
sweltering in the Pullman by the time New York was reached. As I stepped
out of the Grand Central station into Forty-second Street my ears were
assaulted by the unaccustomed din, my nose by the pungent odour of city
streets, my eyes smarted in a dust whirl. But my heart was pounding
with joy and expectation as I hurried across the street.
I climbed the broad steps to the lobby of the hotel, and scarcely had
my feet reached the top than I saw a familiar figure rise from a chair.
I ran toward her, waving off the boy who rushed to grab my bag. A second
later her hand was in mine, her eyes upon my eyes.
"It--it was nice of Buster to send you," she said.
"You look so white, so tired," I answered. "Where is all your tan?"
"Melted," she laughed. "Have you business in town? It's awfully hot
here, you poor man."
"Yes," said I, "I have business here, very important business. But
first some supper and a spree. I've got 'most two bushels of peas to
spend!"
We had a gay supper, and then took a cab, left my grip at my college
club, where I had long maintained a non-resident membership, and drove
thence to Broadway.
"How like Bentford Main Street!" I laughed, as we emerged from
Fourty-fourth Street into the blaze of grotesque electric signs which
have a kind of bizarre beauty, none the less. "Where shall we go?"
"There's a revival of 'Patience' at the Casino," she suggested,
"and there are the Ziegfeld Follies----"
"Not the Follies," I answered. "I'm neither a drummer nor a rural
Sunday-school superintendent. Gilbert and Sullivan sounds good, and I've
never heard 'Patience.'"
We found our places in the Casino just as the curtain was going up, and
I saw "Patience" for the first time. I was glad it was for the first
time, because she was with me, to share my delight. As incomparable
tune after tune floated out to us the absurdest of absurd words, her eyes
twinkled into mine, and our shoulders leaned together, and finally,
between the seats, I squeezed her fingers with unrestrainable delight.
"Nice Gilbert and Sullivan," she whispered.
"It's a masterpiece; it's a masterpiece!" I whispered back. "It's
as perfect in its way as--as your sundial! Oh, I'm so glad you are with
me!"
"Is it worth coming way to New York for?"
"Under the conditions, around the world for," said I.
She coloured rosy, and looked back at the stage.
After the performance she would not let me get a cab. "You've not
that many peas on the place," she said. So we walked downtown to her
lodgings, through the hot, dusty, half-deserted streets, into the older
section of the city below Fourteenth Street. I said little, save to
answer her volley of eager questions about the farm. At the steps of
an ancient house near Washington Square she paused.
"Here is where I live," she said. "I've had a lovely evening. Shall
I see you again before you go back?"
I smiled, took the latchkey from her hand, opened the door, and
stepped behind her, to her evident surprise, into the large, silent,
musty-smelling hall. She darted a quick look about, but I ignored
it, taking her hand and leading her quickly into the parlour, where,
by the faint light from the hall, I could see an array of mid-Victorian
plush. The house was silent. Still holding her hand, I drew her to me.
"I am not going back--alone," I whispered. "You are going with me.
Stella, I cannot live without you. Twin Fires is crying for its mistress.
You are going back, too, away from the heat and dust and the town, into a
house where the sweet air wanders, into the pines where the hermit sings
and the pool is thirsty for your feet."
I heard in the stillness a strange sob, and suddenly her head was on my
breast and her tears were flowing. My arms closed about her.
Presently she lifted her face, and our lips met. She put up her hands
and held my face within them. "So that was what the thrush said, after
all," she whispered, with a hint of a happy smile.
"To me, yes," said I. "I didn't dream it was to you. _Was_ it to
you?"
"That you'll never know," she answered, "and you'll always be too
stupid to guess."
"Stupid! You called me that once before about the painters. Why were
you angry about choosing the dining-room paint?"
She grew suddenly wistful. "I'll tell you that," she said. "It
was--it was because you let a third person into our little drama of
Twin Fires. I--I was a fool, maybe. But I was playing out a kind--a
kind of dream of home building. Two can play such a dream, if they
don't speak of it. But not three. Then it becomes--it becomes, well,
matter-of-facty, and people talk, and the bloom goes, and--you hurt me a
little, that's all."
I could not reply for a moment. What man can before the wistful sweetness
of a woman's secret moods? I could only kiss her hair. Finally words
came. "The dream shall be reality now," I said, "and you and I
together will make Twin Fires the loveliest spot in all the hills.
To-morrow we'll buy a stair carpet, and--lots of things--together."
"Still with the pea money?" she gurgled, her gayety coming back. "No,
sir; I've some money, too. Not much, but a little to take the place
of the wedding presents I've no relatives to give me. I want to help
furnish Twin Fires." She laid her fingers on my protesting lips. "I
shall, anyway," she added. "We are two lone orphans, you and I, but we
have each other, and all that is mine is yours, all--all--all!"
Suddenly she threw her arms about my neck, and I was silent in the
mystery of her passion.
Chapter XVII
I DO NOT RETURN ALONE
Many people, I presume, long to fly from New York during a late June
and early July hot spell. But nobody who does not possess a new place
in the country, still unfurnished, with a garden crying for his
attention and a brook wandering amid the pines, can possibly realize
how the dust and heat of town affected me in the next ten days. It
affected me the more because I saw how pale Stella was, how tired
when the evenings came. With her woman's conscientiousness, she was
struggling to do two weeks' work in one before leaving the dictionary.
She even toiled several evenings, denying herself to me, while I wandered
disconsolate along Broadway, or worked over my manuscripts at the
club, surrounded by siphons of soda. At the luncheon hour and between
five and six we shopped madly, getting a stair carpet, dining-room
chairs (a present from her to herself and me, as she put it--fine
Chippendale reproductions), a few rugs--as many as we could afford--and
other necessary furnishings, including stuff for curtains. For the south
room the curtains were gay Japanese silk from an Oriental store, to
balance the Hiroshiges, and while we were buying them she slipped away
from me and presently returned, the proud possessor of two small ivory
elephants.
"Look, somebody has sent us another present!" she laughed. "Folks are
so good to us! These are to stand on the twin mantels, under the prints."
"From whom are they?" I asked.
"Your best friend and my worst enemy," she answered.
For three days after she left the office of the dictionary I saw little
of her. "There are some things you can't buy for me--or with me," she
smiled. Then we went down together to the City Hall for our license,
sneaking in after hours, thanks to the kindly offices of a classmate of
mine, the city editor of a newspaper. The clerk beamed upon us like a
municipal Cupid.
That last evening she left me, to pack her trunks, and I went back
to the club, and found there a letter from the magazine where I had
submitted my story. It was a letter of acceptance! Misfortunes are
not the only things which never come singly. I danced for joy. If the
stores had been open I should have rushed out then and there and bought
the mahogany secretary we had seen a few days before and wistfully
passed by. Fortunately, they were not open.
In the morning my cab stopped in front of the old house near Washington
Square, and Stella came forth with a friend, a sober little person
who appeared greatly impressed with her responsibilities, and bore the
totally inappropriate name of Marguerite.
"Dear, dear!" she said, "I've never attended a bride before. It's
very trying. And it's very mean of you, Mr. Upton, to take Stella from
us, and leave me with a new and stupid co-worker. How do you expect the
dictionary to come out?"
"I don't," said I, "nor do I care if it doesn't. There are too many
words in the world already."
Bill Chadwick, another classmate of mine, came up from downtown, and met
us at the church door. The rector was a friend and fellow alumnus of
ours. It was like a tiny family party, suddenly and solemnly hushed by
the organ as we stood before the altar, and in the warm dimness of the
great vacant church Stella and I were made man and wife. The four of us
went out to the cab again, and Bill insisted on a wedding breakfast at
Sherry's.
"Good Lord!" he said, "you two gumshoe into an engagement, and get
married without so much as a reporter in the church, and then expect to
make a getaway like a pair of safe breakers! No, sir, you come with me,
and get one real civilized meal before you go back to your farm fodder."
Bill had the solemn little bridesmaid laughing before the luncheon was
over, but the last we saw of them they were waving us good-bye from
behind the grating as we went down the platform to our train, and the
poor girl was mopping her eyes.
"Isn't the best man supposed to fall in love with the bridesmaid?" I
asked. "At least I hope he'll dry her tears."
"Good gracious, yes!" cried Stella. "I never thought of that. You
don't know what we've done! Marguerite is a dear girl and an excellent
cross-indexer, but she's no wife for your gay friend William. You'd
best send him a telegram of warning."
"Never!" said I. "Bill has cruised so long in Petticoat Bay as a
blockade runner that I hope she shoots him full of holes and boards
him in triumph. Besides, _everybody_ ought to get married."
Stella's eyes looked up at mine, deep and happy below their twinkle,
and we boarded the train.
The train started, it left New York behind, it ran into the suburbs,
then into the country, and at last the hills began to mount beside the
track, and a cooler, fresher air to come in through the windows. Still
her eyes smiled into mine, but she said little, save now and then to
lean forward and whisper, "Is it true, John, is it true?"
So we came to Bentford station, in the early dusk of evening, and the
air was good as we alighted, and the silence. Suddenly Buster appeared,
undulating with joyous yelps along the platform, and sprang at Stella's
face. He almost ignored me.
Peter was waiting with the buggy. We sat him between us and drove home.
"Home--your home, our home," I whispered, pressing her hand behind
Peter's back.
"Sold a lot o' peas and things," said Peter. "I got 'em all down in
the book. Gee, I drove over 'most every day, an' I'm goin' to be on
the ball team in the village, an' I wanter join the Boy Scouts, but ma
won't let me 'less you say it's all right, an' ain't it?"
"We'll think it over, Peter," said I.
Stella was bouncing up and down on the seat with excitement as the
buggy rattled over the bridge. Lamplight was streaming from Twin Fires.
On the kitchen porch stood Mrs. Pillig, dressed in her best, and Mrs.
Bert and Bert. As we climbed from the buggy, Bert raised his hand,
and a shower of rice descended upon us. Stella ran up the path, and
Mrs. Bert's ample arms closed about her. Both women were half laughing,
half crying, when I got there with the grips.
"Ain't that jest like the sex?" said Bert, with a jerk of his
thumb--"so durn glad they gotter cry about it!"
"You shet up," said Mrs. Bert. "For all _you_ know, I'm pityin' the
poor child!"
Mrs. Pillig had an ample dinner ready for us, with vegetables and salad
fresh from the garden, and, as a crowning glory, a magnificent lemon pie.
"This is much better than anything at Sherry's," cried Stella, beaming
upon her.
We sat a long while looking at each other across the small table, and
then we wandered out into the dewy evening and our feet took us into the
pines, where in the darkness we stopped by a now sacred spot and held
each other close in silence. Then we went back into the south room.
"Oh, if the curtain stuff would only hurry up and come!" cried my wife.
"You must learn patience--Mrs. Upton," said I, while we both laughed
sillily over the title, as others have done before us, no doubt.
Presently Mrs. Pillig's anxious face appeared at the door. She seemed
desirous of speaking, and doubtful how to begin.
"What is it, Mrs. Pillig?" I asked.
"Well, sir," she said, hesitantly, "I suppose now you are married you
won't need me, after all." She paused. "I rented my house," she added.
"Need you!" I cried. "Why now I shall need you more than ever!"
She smiled faintly, still looking dubious. Stella went over to her.
"What he means is, that I'm a poor goose who doesn't know any more
about keeping house than Buster does about astronomy," she laughed.
"Of course you'll stay, Mrs. Pillig, and teach me."
"Thank you, Miss--I mean Missus," said Mrs. Pillig, backing out.
"Be careful," I warned. "If you let Mrs. Pillig think you're so very
green, she'll begin to boss you."
"That _would_ be a new sensation," laughed Stella. "I like new
sensations as much as Peter Pan did. Oh, it's a new sensation having
a home like this, and living in the country, and smelling good, cool air
and--and having _you_."
She was suddenly beside me on the settle. We heard Mrs. Pillig going up
to bed. The house was still. Outside the choral song of night insects
sounded drowsily. Buster came softly in and plopped down on the rug. We
were alone in Twin Fires, together, and she would not rise to go up the
road to Bert's. She would never go! So we sat a long, long while--and
the rest shall be silence.
Chapter XVIII
WE BUILD A POOL
It was the strangest, sweetest sensation I had ever known to wake in
the morning and hear soft singing in the room where a fresh breeze was
wandering. I saw Stella standing at the window, her hair about her
shoulders, looking out. She turned when I stirred, came over to kiss
me, while her hair fell about my face, and then cried, "Hurry! Hurry! I
must get out into the garden!"
Presently, hand in hand, we went over the new lawn to the sundial which
stood amid a ring of brilliant blooms--which, however, had become
unbelievably choked with weeds in the ten days of my absence. The
gnomon was throwing a long shadow westward across the VII. We filled the
bird bath, which Peter had neglected. We hurried through the orchard
to the brook, to see the flowers blooming there, and there, alas! we
found the volume of the stream shrunk to less than half its former size.
We ran to the rows of berry vines to see how many had survived, and
found the greater part of them sprouting nicely; we went up the slope
into the rows of vegetables and inspected them; we rushed to see if all
the roses were alive; we went to the barn where Mike had just begun
to milk, and sniffed the warm, sweet odour.
"Yes, it's better for any man to be married," I heard Mike saying to
her, as I moved back toward the door. Then he added something I could
not hear, and she came to me with rosy face. "The horrid old man!" She
was half laughing to herself.
The goods we had ordered began to arrive after breakfast, Bert bringing
them from the freight house in his large wagon. I took the day off, and
devoted the morning to laying a stair carpet, probably the hottest job I
ever tackled. Thank goodness, the stairs went straight up, without
curve or angle! As I worked, small feet pattered by me, up and down,
and garments from a big trunk in the lower hall brushed my face as they
were being carried past--brushed their faint feminine perfume into my
nostrils and made my hammer pause in mid-air. After the carpet was
laid, there were a thousand and one other things to do. There were
pictures of Stella's to be hung, and them we put in the hitherto vacant
room at the front of the house, next to the dining-room, where Stella's
wall desk was also placed, and a case of her books, and some chairs.
"Now I can work here when you want to create literature in your room,
or I can receive my distinguished visitors here when you are busy," she
laughed, setting some ornaments on the mantel. "My, but I've got a lot
of curtains to make! I never did so much sewing in my life."
Bureaus were carried upstairs with Mike's assistance, and the ivory
backs of a woman's toilet articles appeared upon them; open closets
showed me rows of women's garments; glass candlesticks were unpacked
and set upon the dining-table, and the new dining-chairs "dressed up"
the room remarkably. Everywhere we went Mrs. Pillig followed with dust
pan and broom, slicking up behind us. When night came it was still an
incomplete house--"Oh, a million things yet to get," cried Stella,
"just one by one, as we can afford it, which will be fun!"--but a house
that spoke everywhere of a dainty mistress. Outside, by the woodshed,
was a pile of packing-boxes and opened crates and excelsior.
"There's _your_ work, Peter," I said, pointing.
Peter looked rueful, but said nothing.
That evening I tried to work, but found it difficult, for watching my
wife sew.
"You've no technique," I laughed.
She made a little _moue_ at me, and went on hemming the curtains,
getting up now and then to measure them. "Why should I have?" she
said presently. "You knew I was a Ph. D. when you married me. These
curtains be on your own head! I'm doing the best I can."
There was suddenly the suspicion of moisture in her eyes, and I ran to
comfort her.
"I--I so want to make Twin Fires lovely," she added, pricking her
finger. "Oh, tell me I can, if I am only a highbrow!"
Of course the finger had to be kissed, and she had to be kissed, and the
hem had to be inspected and praised, and now, long, long afterward, I
smile to think how alike we all of us are on a honeymoon.
It was the next morning that we resolved to begin the pool. "I don't
expect to be married again for several years," said I, "and so I'm
going to take a holiday this week. We'll carry the vegetables to market
and bring back the cement, and begin on our water garden."
Mike loaded the wagon with peas, the last of the rhubarb, and ten quarts
of currants picked by Peter, and off we started.
"What is this horse's name?" asked Stella, taking the reins to learn
to drive.
"He has none, I guess. Mike calls him 'Giddup.'"
"No, it's Dobbin. He looks just like a Dobbin. He has a kind of
conventional, discouraged tail, like a Dobbin. Giddup, Dobbin!"
The horse started to trot. "There, you see, it _is_ his name!" she
laughed.
On Bentford Main Street we passed several motors and a trap drawn by a
prancing span, and all the occupants stared at us, or rather at Stella,
who was beaming from her humble seat on the farm wagon more like an
eighteenth century shepherdess than a New England farmer's wife. We
added over $3 more in the account book with the market, and read with
delight the grand total of $40.80 already in two weeks.
"Next year," said I, "I'll double it!"
Then I spent the $3, and some more, for Portland cement.
We got into our oldest clothes when we reached home, I put on rubber
boots, and we tackled the pool. Even with the brook as low as it was,
the engineering feat was not easy for our unskilful hands. Peter soon
joined us, and lent at least unlimited enthusiasm.
"Peter," said I, "you never worked this hard splitting kindlings."
Peter grinned. "Ho, I like to make dams," he said.
The first thing we did was to divert the brook by digging a new channel
above the spot where we were to build the dam, and letting the water flow
around to the left, close to one of the flower beds. Then, when the old
channel had dried out a little, I spaded a trench across it and two feet
into the banks on each side, and with Peter helping, filled the trench
nearly full of the largest, flattest stones we could find, which we all
then tramped upon to firm down. Then, a foot apart, we stood two boards
on edge across the space, to make a mould for the concrete above the
stones. I sent Peter with a wheelbarrow to pick up a load of small
pebbles in the road, of the most irregular shape he could find, and I
myself dug deeper in the hole where I had got the sand when we built
the bird bath, and brought loads of it to the brookside. We dumped
sand, pebbles, and cement into a big box, one pail of cement to one pail
of pebbles and three of sand, and Peter and Stella fought for the hoe to
mix them, while I poured in the water from a watering-pot, for I had
read and seen the reason for the fact that the success of the cement
depends upon every particle being thoroughly mixed. As fast as we had a
box full of mixture prepared, we dumped it into the mould between the
boards. It took an astonishing quantity of cement--quite all we had,
in fact--and to finish off the top smooth and level I had to get the
quarter bag left from my orchard work and the bird bath. It was evening
when we had it done, and Peter, who had deserted us soon after dinner
to play ball, returned to beg us to take the boards away, and grew
quite unreasonable when we refused.
That night there was a shower, and the brook rose a trifle. When we
hastened down through the orchard after breakfast the new channel had
curved itself still farther, as streams do when once they get started
off the straight line, and had washed the southeast flower bed half
away. Stella, with a cry of grief, ran down the brook into the pines,
and came back with sadly bedraggled _Phlox Drummondi_ plants in her
hands, their trailing roots washed white, their blooms broken. "Horrid
brook," she said. "Let's put it right back into its proper place. I
don't like it any more."
"A sudden change of habit is always dangerous," said I. "Put the
plants in the mud somewhere till we can set 'em in again."
We now took away the boards from the new dam, which had begun to harden
nicely. The next thing to do was to stake out the pool above it. As
the dam was 10 feet below the line between the proposed bench and the
front door of the house, the other end of the pool was marked off 20
feet upstream, and between the two extremes we dug out the soil into an
oval basin. This was easily accomplished by chopping out the turf with
a grub hoe, and then hitching Dobbin to the drag scraper. The soil was a
black, loamy sand, which came up easily, and was hauled over and dumped
for dressing on the site of our little lawn beyond the pool. When we had
the basin excavated to a depth of about a foot, all three of us (for
Peter was once more on the job) scattered to find stones to hold the
banks.
New England farms are traditionally stony--till you want stones. We
ended by taking some here and there from the stone walls after we had
scoured the pasture behind the barn for half a barrow load. When once the
circumference of the pool had been ringed with stones, stood up on
edge, we raked the bottom smooth, sprinkled clean sand upon it, and
were ready to let the water against the dam as soon as the concrete
hardened. We gave it one more day, and then shovelled away the temporary
dam, filled up the new channel where it turned out of the old, and stood
beside the dam while the current, with a first muddy rush, swirled
against it, eddied back, and began very slowly to rise.
"She holds, she holds!" I cried. "But we've forgotten to put stones
for the water to fall over upon. It will undermine the structure if we
don't."
"'Structure' is good," laughed Stella, regarding our little six-foot
long and eighteen-inch high piece of engineering.
We shouted for Peter, and ran to the nearest stone wall, tugging back
some flat stones which we placed directly below the dam for the overflow
to fall on. Then, while Stella sat on the bank and watched the water
rise, I shovelled some of the earth removed from the basin into the now
abandoned temporary channel, and packed it down.
"Say, we can have fish in here," cried Peter, who was also watching
the water rise.
"You can have a four-legged fish," laughed Stella, as Buster came down
the bank with a gleeful bark and went splash into the pool, emerging to
shake himself and spray us all.
I had scarce finished filling in the temporary trench, and was setting
the poor uprooted plants back into the bed, with my back turned, when
I heard a simultaneous shout from Peter and Stella.
"One, two, three--and over she goes!" cried Stella.
I faced around just in time to see the first line of the water crawling
over the top of the dam, and a second later it splashed on the stones
below; behind it came the waterfall.
Stella was dancing up and down. "Oh, it's a real waterfall!" she
cried. "I've got a real waterfall all my own! Come on downstream and
look back at it!"
From the grove below it certainly did look pretty, flashing in the
morning sun. "And when there are iris blossoms, great Japanese iris,
nodding over it!" I exclaimed.
"Oh, can't we plant those right away?" she asked.
"No," said I. "Gardens are like Rome, I'm afraid."
We went back and surveyed our pool at close range. It was clearing now.
But the second pile of earth remained to be removed from the west side.
Peter and I carted that off in wheelbarrows at once, dumping part of
it into the hole where we had dug the sand, and the rest into a heap
behind some bushes upstream for future compost. Then we climbed the
orchard slope for dinner. Midway we looked back. There glistened our
pool, a twenty-foot brown crystal mirror, with the four flower beds
all askew about it, the ragged weeds and bushes pressing them close,
and beyond it only the rough ground I had cleared with a brush scythe,
and the scraggly trees by the wall.
"Alas" said I, "now we've built the pool, we've got to build a whole
garden to go with it!"
"But it tinkles! Hear it tinkle!" cried Stella.
We listened, hand in hand. The tiny waterfall was certainly tinkling, a
cool, delicate, plashy sound, which mingled with the sound of the breeze
in the trees above our heads, and the sweet twitterings of birds.
"Oh, John, it's a very nice dam, and a very nice world!" she
whispered, as we went through the door. "And, after all, it seems to me
the greatest fun of gardening is all the nice other things it makes you
want to do after you've done the first one."
"That," said I sententiously, "is perhaps the secret of all successful
living."
Chapter XIX
THE NICE OTHER THINGS
A pool of water twenty feet long shining in the sun, or glimmering deeply
in the twilight, that and nothing else save a few straggling annuals
wrongly placed about it--yet it made Twin Fires over, it caused us weeks
of toil, it got into our dreams, it got into our pockets, too.
"Now I know why sunken gardens are so called," said Stella, as she
figured out the cost of the fall bulb planting we had already planned.
"It's because you sink so much money in 'em!"
Of course there was little that we could do to the margin of the pool
that summer, but there was plenty to do beyond the margin. The first
thing of all was to place the flower beds differently. This took
considerable experimenting, and Stella, being ingenious, hit upon a
scheme for testing various possible arrangements. She filled all sorts
of receptacles, from tumblers to pitchers, with cut flowers, low and
high, and stood them in masses here and there, till the spot was found
where they looked the best. As the pool centred on the line between the
front door of the house and the yet-to-be-built garden bench against the
stone wall, and as the orchard came down to within forty feet of the
brook on the slope from the house, it was something of a problem to
lead naturally from a grassy orchard slope into a water feature and a
bit of almost formal gardening, without making the transition stiff and
abrupt. We finally solved it with the aid of a lawn mower, flower beds,
and imagination.
Going over the grass between the last apple trees and the brook again
and again with the mower, I finally reduced that section to something
like a lawn, and also kept mowed a straight path from the pool up to the
front door. Then, beginning just beyond the last shadows, we cut a
bed, thirty inches wide, on each side of the line of the path, running
parallel with it to within ten feet of the pool; then they swung to
left and right, following the curve of the bank until they flanked the
pool. By planting low flowers at the beginning, and gradually increasing
their height till we had larkspur and hollyhocks and mallow in the
flanking beds, we could both make the transition from orchard to water
feature, and also screen off the pool, increasing its intimacy, without,
however, hiding it from the front door, where it was glimpsed down a
path of trees and flowers. Of course we had no flowers now in mid-July
to put into those beds, save what few we could dig up from elsewhere,
setting poor little annual phloxes two feet apart; but we could, and
did, use them for seed beds for next year's perennials, and to the eye
of faith they were beautiful.
Now we were confronted by the problem of the other side of the pool,
which included the problem of how to get to the other side! Stella
suggested tentatively a tiny Japanese moon bridge above the pool, but I
would have none of it.
"The only way to build a Japanese garden in New England is to utilize
New England features," I insisted. "We won't copy anybody."
"All right," she answered, "then we want stepping-stones above the
pool, and some more down below the dam, where we can see the waterfall."
"More suitable--and much easier," I agreed.
Once more we robbed the stone wall, building our two flanking paths of
stepping-stones to the other side of the brook.
On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds in the open,
merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We would
clear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the centre of
the circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubbery
on the sides, which was chiefly the wild red osier dogwood (_cornus
stolonifera_). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe,
and a rake, and we went to work.
Work is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush and
the tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which was
hardly more than thirty feet in diameter, but to spade up the black
soil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witch
grass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of innumerable
little trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spread
evenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduce
it all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I had
bargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond her strength;
but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had it
ready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grass
seed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low,
moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to the bench.
"Gracious, you have to be everything to be a gardener, don't you?"
Stella laughed, as we tried to draw a sketch first, which should satisfy
us. "The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top of
the front door. But I'm sure I don't know how we're going to make it."
"Patience," said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensive
marble garden furniture. "Just a simple design of the classic period
will do. Colonial furniture was based on the Greek orders."
We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicated
in general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumber
dealer in the next town for two twenty-four-inch wide chestnut planks,
and was fairly staggered by the bill when it came. It appears that a
twenty-four-inch wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, or
some other distant point, and is rarer than charity, at least that is
what they told me.
"I think it would be cheaper in marble," said Stella. "And it looks to
me as if you could make the bench out of one plank."
"We want another bench on the sundial lawn," said I, wisely.
"You do _now_," said she.
"But if I hadn't got two planks," said I, "and had spoiled the first
one, then we'd have had to wait two or three days again."
"Oh, that was the reason!" she smiled.
I sawed one of the planks into one six-foot and two two-foot lengths,
and rounded the edges of the long piece for the top. Then, on the two
short lengths, we carefully drew from the picture the outline of the
supports on the marble original, and went to work with rip saw, hatchet,
and draw knife to carve them out. The seasoned chestnut worked hard,
and we were half a day about our task. The next day we put the three
pieces together with braces and long screws, planed and sandpapered
the wood till we had it smooth, and then painted it with white enamel
paint. While the first coat was drying, we made a deep foundation of
coal ashes and flat stones for the bench to rest on, and the next
afternoon, when the second coat, which Stella had applied before
breakfast, was nearly dry, I hove the heavy thing on a wheelbarrow, and
carted it around the road to the point where it was to go. We put a
little fresh cement on the foundation stones to hold the two legs, and
with Mike's aid the bench was lifted over the stone wall, through the
hedge of ash-leaf maples, put in place, and levelled. Stella hovered
near, with the can of paint, to cover our fingermarks and give the top
a final glistening coat.
"There," I cried, as the job was done, "we have our pool and our
garden bench! We have some of our flowers already planted for next year!
We have our bit of lawn! Let's go up the orchard to the front door
and see how it looks."
I left the wheelbarrow forgotten in the road, and we ran up the slope
together, turned at the door, and gazed back. The pool shimmered in the
afternoon sun. We could hear the water tinkling over the dam. Beyond
the pool was the dark semicircle of fresh mould that was to be green
grass backed by blossoms against the shrubbery, and finally, at the very
rear, now stood the white bench, from this distance gleaming like marble.
"Fine! It looks fine!" I cried.
Stella's eyes were squinted judicially. "Oh, dear," she said, "I wish
there was a cedar, a tall, slender, dark cedar, just behind the bench
at either end. And, John, do you know we ought to have some goldfish in
the pool?"
I sighed profoundly. "You are a real gardener," said I. "Nothing is
ever finished!"
"I'm afraid I am," she answered. "But we will have the goldfish,
won't we?"
"Yes, and the cedars, too," I replied. "I'll ask Mike when is the
best time to put 'em in."
Mike was sure that spring was the best time, and there were some good
ones up in our pasture.
"Oh, dear, spring is the best time for _everything_, it seems to me,
and here it's only July!" cried Stella. "Well, anyhow, I'm going to
draw a plan of the pool garden, and hang it over my desk."
She got paper and pencil and drew the plan, while I lay under an orchard
tree listening to the tinkle of the waterfall and watching her while
Buster came and licked my face.
The plan appears on the following page:
"I think your arrangement of iris on the edge is rather formal," I was
saying, "and it would be rather more decorous, if not decorative, for
you to sit upon the bench, and----" when we heard a motor rumble over
the bridge at the brook, and the engine stop by our side door.
[Illustration:]
Chapter XX
CALLERS
"Heavens!" cried Stella, leaping to her feet, "do you suppose it's
callers?"
She looked ruefully at her paint-stained fingers, at her old, soiled
khaki garden skirt which stopped at least six inches from the ground, and
then at my get-up, which consisted of a very dirty soft-collared shirt,
no necktie, khaki trousers that beggared description, and soil-crusted
boots. Some passengers from the motor were unquestionably coming up our
side path--they were coming around the corner by the lilac bush to the
front door--they were around the lilac bush--they were upon us!
We looked at them--at a large, ample female in a silk gown anything but
ample, at a young woman elaborately dressed, at a smallish man with white
hair, white moustache, and ruddy complexion, clad in a juvenile Norfolk
jacket and white flannels.
"They are coming to call!" whispered Stella. "The Lord help us! John,
I'm scared!"
We advanced to meet them, and as I glanced at my wife, and then at the
ample female, I was curiously struck with their resemblance to a couple
of strange dogs approaching each other warily. I fully expected to see
the stout lady sniff; she had that kind of a nose.
"How do you do," said she. "I'm Mrs. Eckstrom. I presume this is Mr.
and Mrs. Upton?"
Stella nodded.
"We are your neighbours," she continued, with an air which said, "You
are very fortunate to have us for neighbours." "We live in the first
place toward the village. This is Mr. Eckstrom, and my daughter, Miss
Julia."
"We can hardly offer our hands," said Stella. "Will you forgive us?
You see, we are making a garden, and it's rather messy work."
"You like to work in the garden yourself, I see," said Mrs. Eckstrom.
"I, too, enjoy it. I frequently pick rose bugs. I pick them before
breakfast, very early, while they are still sleepy. I find it is the
only way to save my tea roses."
"The early gardener catches the rose bug--I'll remember that," Stella
laughed. "Perhaps you would care to see the beginnings of our little
garden?"
We moved down through the orchard and surveyed the pool. I suppose it did
look bare and desolate to the outsider, who did not see it, as we did,
with the eye of faith--the bare soil green with grass, the lip ringed
with iris blades, the shrubbery bordered with a mass of blooms. At any
rate, the Eckstroms betrayed no enthusiasm.
[Illustration: We are your neighbours ... you are very fortunate to have
us for neighbours]
"Mr. Upton spaded all that lawn up himself, and we made the bench
together," cried Stella.
"Well, well, you _must_ like to work," said Mr. Eckstrom. "It's so
much simpler to sic a few men on the job. Besides, they can usually do
it better."
Stella and I exchanged glances, and she cautioned me with her eyes. But
politeness was never my strong point.
"Sometimes," said I, "it happens that a chap who wants a garden lacks
the means to sic a few men on the job. Under those conditions he may
perhaps be pardoned for labouring himself."
There was a slight silence broken by Stella, who said that we were going
to get some goldfishes soon.
"We can give them some out of our pool, can't we, father?" the other
girl said, with an evident effort to be neighbourly. "We really have
too many."
"Certainly, certainly; have Peter bring some over to-night," her father
replied.
"Oh, thank you!" Stella cried. "And will you have Peter tell us their
names?"
"Their what?" exclaimed Mrs. Eckstrom.
"Oh, haven't they names? The poor things!" Stella said. "I shall name
them as soon as they come."
"What a quaint idea," the girl said, with a smile. "Do you name all
the creatures on the place?"
"Certainly," said Stella. "Come, I'll show you Epictetus and Luella."
This was a new one on me, but I kept silent, while she led us around the
house, and lifted the plank which led up from the sundial lawn to the
south door. Under it were two enormous toads and two small ones.
"Those big ones are Epictetus and Luella," she announced, "and, dear
me, two children have arrived to visit them since morning! Let me see."
She dropped on her knees and examined the toads carefully, while they
tried to burrow into the soil backward, to escape the sun. Our callers
regarded her with odd expressions of mingled amusement and amazement--or
was it pity?
"A son and daughter-in-law," she announced, rising. "They are Gladys
and Gaynor."
A polite smile flickered on the faces of our three visitors, and died
out in silence. Stella once more shot a glance at me.
We turned toward the house. "If you will excuse me for a few moments, I
will make myself fit to brew you some tea," said my wife, holding open
the door.
"That is very kind, but we'll not remain to-day, I think," Mrs.
Eckstrom replied. "We will just glance at what you have done to this
awful old house. It was certainly an eyesore before you bought it."
"I _liked_ it all gray and weathered," Stella answered. "In fact,
I didn't want it painted. But apparently you have to paint things to
preserve them. Still, the Lord made wood before man made paint."
"He also made man before man made clothes," said I.
A polite smile from the girl followed this remark. Her father and mother
seemed unaware of it. They gave our beautiful living-room a casual
glance, and the man took in especially the books--in bulk.
"You are one of these literary chaps, I hear," he said. "I suppose
you need all these books in your business?"
"Well, hardly all," I answered. "Some few I read for pleasure. Will
you smoke?"
I offered him a cigar.
"Thanks, no," said he. "Doctor's orders. I can do nothing I want to.
Diet, and all that. Damn nuisance, too. Why, once I used to----"
"Father," said the girl, "don't you want to see if the car is ready?"
The look of animation which had come over the man's face when he began
to talk about his ill health vanished again. He started toward the door.
"Let me," said I, springing ahead of him.
The car, of course, was waiting, the chauffeur sitting in it gazing
vacantly down the road, with the patient stare of the true flunkey. I
came back and reported. With a polite good-bye and an invitation to
call and see their garden, our guests departed.
Stella and I stood in the south room and listened to the car rumble over
the bridge. Then we looked at one another in silence.
Presently she picked up what appeared like a whole pack of calling cards
from the table, and glanced at them.
"John," she said, "it's begun. They've called on me. I shall have
to return the call. Are all the rest like them, do you suppose? Are they
all so deadly dumb? Have they no playfulness of mind? I tried 'em out
on purpose. They don't arrive."
"They're rich," said I. "Almost all rich people are bores. We bored
them. The old man, though, seemed about to become quite animated on the
subject of his stomach."
Stella laughed. "I'm _glad_ we were in old clothes," she said. "And
aren't Epictetus and Luella darlings?"
"By the way," I cried, "why haven't I met them before?"
"I just discovered them this noon," she answered. "You were working
at the time. I was saving them for a surprise after supper. I'm glad
Gladys and Gaynor brought no grandchildren, though. It would have been
hard to name so many correctly right off the bat, and it's terrible to
start life with a wrong name."
"As Mike would say, it is surely," I answered. "That is why they were
careful to call you Stella."
"Do you like the name?" she whispered, creeping close to me. "Oh,
John, I'm glad we're not rich like them"--with a gesture toward the
pack of calling cards--"I'm glad we can work in the garden with our
own hands and play games with toads and just be ourselves. Let's _never_
be rich!"
"I promise," said I, solemnly.
Then we laughed and went to hear the hermit thrush.
Chapter XXI
AUTUMN IN THE GARDEN
I SPENT considerably more money in July and August. Some of the items
would be regarded as necessities even by our rural standards; some
my farming neighbours would deem a luxury, if not downright folly. I
was a green farmer then; I am a green farmer still; but as I began
to get about the region a little more that first summer, especially at
haying time, I was struck with the absurd waste of machinery brought
about by insufficient care and lack of dry housing, and I began to do
some figuring. All my rural neighbours, even Bert, left their ploughs,
harrows, hay rakes, mowers, and even their carts, out of doors in
rain and sun all summer, and many of them all winter. A soaking rain
followed by a scorching sun seemed to me, in my ignorance, a most
effective way of ruining a wagon, of shrinking and splitting hubs, of
loosening the fastenings of shafts even in iron machinery. Neither
do rusted bearings wear so long as those properly protected. I began to
understand why our farmers are so poor, and I sent for Hard Cider.
Just behind the barn he built me a lean-to shed, about seventy-five feet
long, open toward the east, and shingled rainproof. It cost me $500, but
every night every piece of farm machinery and every farm wagon went
under it, and the mowing-machine was further covered with a tarpaulin.
For more than a year my shed was the only one of the kind in Bentford,
and that next winter I used to see machinery standing behind barns,
half buried in snow and ice, going to pieces for want of care. I verily
believe that the New England farmer of to-day is the most shiftless
mortal north of the Mason and Dixon line--and he hasn't hookworm for an
excuse.
My next expenditure was for a cement root cellar, which scarcely needs
defence, as I had no silo on the barn, and it would not pay to install
one for only two cows. But the third item filled Mike with scorn. I had
been making him milk the cows out of doors for some weeks, taking a
tip from one of the big estates, and keeping an eye on him to see that
he washed his hands properly and put on one of the white milking coats I
had purchased. His utter contempt for that white rig was comical, but
when I told him that I was going to have a cork and asphalt brick
floor laid in the cow shed, he was speechless. He had endured the
white apron, and the spectacle of the tuberculin test (the latter
because the law made him), but an expensive floor in the barn was
too much. He gave me one pitying look, and walked away.
The floor was laid, however, and when it was completed, and the drainage
adjusted, Hard Cider trimmed up the supports of the barn cellar door and
the two cellar window frames behind, and built in substantial screens.
I didn't tell Mike about them till they were all in. Then I showed
them to him, and told him he was to keep them closed under penalty
of his job, and he was further to sprinkle chloride of lime on the
manure once a week.
"Well, I niver seen screens on a barn before," said he, "and I guess
nobody else iver did. Shure, it's to be spendin' your money azy ye are.
Are yez goin' to put in a bathroom for the horse?"
Bert was almost as scornful of the screens as Mike, though he understood
the cork-asphalt floor, having, in fact, unconsciously persuaded me to
install it by telling me how the cows of a dairyman in the next town
had been injured by slipping on a concrete floor. My floor had the
advantages of concrete, but gave the cows a footing. There had never
been screens on a barn in Bentford before, however, nor any chloride of
lime used. This was too much for Bert. But Mrs. Bert was interested.
After our screens had been on ten days and the barn cellar had been
limed, Mrs. Pillig pointed out that the number of flies caught on the
fly paper on the kitchen door had decreased at least 400 per cent.
"And I think what's there now come down from your place," she added
to Mrs. Bert. The next thing we knew, Bert was talking of screening his
stable. Truth compels me to admit, however, that he never got beyond the
talking stage.
In the face of these expenditures, our garden expenses were a mere song,
yet we had begun to plant and plan for the following year as soon as the
pool was done. We knew we were green, and we did not scorn the advice
of books and still more of our best practical friend--the head gardener
on one of the large estates, who knew the exactions of our climate and
the conditions of our soil.
"Plant your perennial seeds in as rich and cool a place as you can,"
he told us, "and expect to lose at least three fourths of your larkspur.
When your foxglove plants are large enough to transplant, make long
trenches in the vegetable garden, with manure at the bottom and four
inches of soil on top, and set in the plants. Do it early in September
if you can, so that they can make roots before our early frosts. Then
you'll have fine plants for bedding in spring. If you buy any plants,
get 'em from a nursery farther north if possible. They have to be very
hardy here."
We went through the seed catalogues as one wanders amid manifold
temptations, but we kept to our purpose of planting only the simpler,
more old-fashioned blooms at present. In addition to the bulbs, which
came later, we resolved to sow pansies, sweet William, larkspur,
Canterbury bells, foxglove, peach bells, Oriental poppies, platicodon,
veronica, mallow (for backing to the pool especially), hollyhocks, phlox
(both the early variety, the divaricata, blooming in May, and, of
course, the standard decussata. The May phlox we secured in plants).
All these seeds were carefully planted in the new beds between the
pool and the orchard, where we could water them plentifully, and
Stella, with the instincts of the true gardener, babied and tended those
seedlings almost as if they were human. Without her care, probably,
they would never have pulled through the dry, hot weeks which followed.
We used to walk down to see them every morning after breakfast, when
Stella watered them, dipping the water from the pool and sending Antony
and Cleopatra scurrying. Antony and Cleopatra were the goldfish which
the Eckstroms, true to their promise, had sent us. The poor things
were unnamed when they arrived, but their aspect--the one dark and
sinuous, the other pompously golden--betrayed their identity. Stella
called a few days after their arrival, to convey our thanks--carefully
waiting till she saw the Eckstroms driving out in their car! Their
curiosity having been satisfied regarding us, and our thanks having
been rendered to them, further intercourse lapsed. We have never tried
to maintain relations with those of our neighbours who bore us, or
with whom we have nothing in common. Life is too short.
Not only did Stella water the seedlings religiously, but she kept the
soil mulched and the weeds out, working with her gloved hands in the
earth. All the seeds came up well save the phlox, with which we had
small luck, and the _Papaver Orientalis_, with which we had no luck at
all. Not a seed came up, and not a seed ever has come up in our soil. We
have had to beg the plants from other people. Even as the gardener
predicted, the tender little larkspur plants mysteriously died. We
ringed them with stiff paper, we surrounded them with coal ashes, we
even sprayed them with Bordeaux and arsenate of lead. But still they
were devoured at the roots or the tops, or mysteriously gave up the
ghost with no apparent cause. We started with two hundred, and when
autumn came we had just thirty left.
"Still," said Stella cheerfully, "thirty will make quite a brave
show."
"If they survive the winter," said I gloomily. "I've not the patience
to be a gardener."
"It _is_ a good deal like reform!" Stella replied.
As the busy autumn days came upon us, Twin Fires took on a new aspect,
and one to us greenhorns indescribably thrilling. In the first place,
our field of corn rustled perpetually as we walked past it, and down
in the greenish-golden lanes beneath we could see the orange gleam of
pungkins (I shall so spell the word lest it be mispronounced by the
ignorant). Great ears of the Stowell's evergreen were ripe, for Mike's
prediction about the early frost had not come true, and we ate the
succulent food clean to the cob every day at dinner, besides selling
many dozens of ears to the market. In the long light of afternoon,
Stella loved to go along the path by the hayfield wall and then turn in
amid the corn, losing sight at once of all the universe and wandering
in a new world of rustling leaves. She felt, she said, just as Alice
must have felt after she had eaten the cake; and once a rabbit bounded
across her foot, to her unspeakable delight. She looked to see if he had
dropped his gloves!
Then there was the potato field. We were eating our own new potatoes now.
Often Stella dug them.
"It seems so funny to go and dig up a potato," she declared. "I've
always felt that potatoes _just were_. But to see the whole process of
growth is quite another matter. Oh, John, it makes them so much nicer!"
"Especially when you are getting seventy-five cents a bushel for them,"
I laughed.
The loaded tomato vines, too, with the red fruit hanging out from the
wire frames and sending a pungent odour into the surrounding air,
appealed to Stella endlessly. I used to see her now and then, as I
glanced from the south room of a morning, eating a raw tomato like an
apple, her head bent forward so that the juice would not spoil her dress.
And there were the apples! Already a red astrachan tree invited us on
every trip to the brook, and other old trees were bearing fast reddening
fruit. I had wanted to set out more orchard, but we agreed that we
could not afford it that year, if we were to build chicken houses against
the spring, so I reluctantly gave up the idea. But our old trees, in
spite of (or perhaps because of) my spring pruning, were doing fairly
well. We had enough for baked apples and cream all winter, anyhow,
Stella reckoned, smacking her lips at the thought.
Every day, on our way to the pool, one or the other of us took a hoe
along and scraped a tree for five minutes, gradually getting the old
bark off, and making a final preparation for a thorough spraying the
next winter just so much easier. I used to prune a bit, too, in spare
moments, so that by the end of the summer considerable renovation had
been accomplished.
And now came the foxglove transplanting. According to the gardener's
directions, we took two long rows where the early peas had stood (and
where Mike had disobeyed my instructions to spade the vines under, that
being a form of green manuring your old-time gardener will not see the
value of, I have discovered), trenched them, put in manure and soil, and
set out at least 300 foxglove plants six inches apart. It was a cool,
cloudy day, and they stood up as though nothing had happened. Then,
as an experiment, we moved scores of tiny hollyhocks from the crowded
seed beds into their permanent position as a screen between the south
kitchen windows and the sundial lawn, and as a border on the west side
of the same lawn. They, too, were quite unaffected by the change.
Meanwhile, we ordered our bulbs--hyacinths, daffodils (which in our
climate refuse to take the winds of March with beauty, cowardly waiting
till May), a few crocuses, _Narcissus poeticus_, Empress narcissus,
German iris, Japanese iris, and Darwin tulips. We ordered the iris and
tulips in named varieties.
"They have such nice names," said Stella, "especially the Japanese
iris--Kimi-no-megumi, Shirataki, Momochiguma! The tulips are nice, too.
Here is Ariadne and Kate Greenaway hobnobbing with Professor Rauwenhoff!
What's the use of having plants that aren't named? We must show them
as much respect as Antony and Cleopatra, or Epictetus and Luella!"
We also experimented with lilies--lemon lilies for the shady north side
of the house, tigers for the border beyond the pool, and two or three of
the expensive Myriophyllums, just to show that we, too, could go in for
the exotic, like our neighbours on the big estates.
When the bulbs came, in October, we looked at the boxes sadly.
"Whew!" said Stella, "you can't be lazy and have a garden, can you?"
"I don't work to-morrow, I guess," said I. "Shall we ask Mike's Joe
to help us?"
"Never!" said my wife. "We'll put these bulbs in ourselves. If I had
any help, I should feel like the Eckstroms, which God forbid!"
So the next day at seven-thirty we began. We ringed the pool with
German and Japanese iris, alternated for succession, and planted a
few Japanese both below and above the pool, close to the brook. We set
the _Narcissus poeticus_ bulbs where, if they grew, the flowers could
look at themselves in the mirror below the dam. The Empress narcissus we
placed on both sides of the pool just beyond the iris. On each side of
the bench we placed a bulb of our precious Myriophyllums, and put the
tigers into the borders close to the shrubbery on both sides. The
hyacinths went into the sundial beds, the Darwins into the beds at the
base of the rose aqueduct, a few crocuses into the sundial lawn, and
the daffodils here and there all over the place, where the fancy struck
us and the ground invited.
"Now, I'm going to label everything, and put it on a map besides,"
cried Stella, "except the daffodils. I want to forget where they are. I
want surprises in the spring. Oh, John, do you suppose they'll come up?"
"Yes, I suppose they will," I laughed, "some of them. But do you
suppose we'll ever get the kinks out of our backs?"
"I'm willing to go doubled up the rest of my life, for a garden of
daffodils all my own," she cried.
"'And then my heart with pleasure thrills
And dances with the daffodils----'
It was very thoughtful of old Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and Masefield,
and all the rest to write nice things about the daffodils, wasn't it,
John? I wonder if gardens would be so wonderful if it weren't for all
their literary suggestions, and the lovely things they remind you of?
Gardens have so much atmosphere! Oh, spring, spring, hurry and come!"
I forgot my lame back in her enthusiasm, and later, when the apples were
gathered, the potatoes dug, the beets and carrots in the root cellar,
our own sweet cider foamed in a glass pitcher on our table, and the
first snow spits of December whistled across the fields, we put a little
long manure over the irises and other bulbs, and pine boughs over the
remaining perennials, and wrapped the ramblers in straw, with almost as
much laughing tenderness as you would put a child to bed.
The cows were back in the stable, and Mike had revised his opinion
of cork-asphalt floors when he realized the ease of cleaning with a
hose; the potatoes and apples and onions and beets and carrots for
our family use were stored in barrels and bins in the cellar, or spread
on shelves, or buried in sand. The vegetable garden was newly ploughed,
and manure spread on the hayfield. Antony and Cleopatra had been
captured and brought into the dining-room, where they were to spend
the winter in a glass bowl. Epictetus and Luella and Gladys and Gaynor
had all burrowed out of sight into the ground. The pageant of autumn on
our hills was over, only an amethyst haze succeeding at sunset time.
Wood fires sparkled on our twin hearths. The summer residents had
departed. Our first Thanksgiving turkey had been eaten, though a great
stone crock of Mrs. Pillig's incomparable mincemeat still yielded up
its treasures for ambrosial pies.
"And now," said Stella, "I'm going to find out at last what a country
winter is like!"
"And your friends are pitying you down in town," said I. "Don't you
want to go back to them till spring?"
Stella looked at the fires, she looked out over the bare garden and
the ploughed fields to the dun hillsides, she listened a moment to the
whistle of the bleak December wind, she looked at me.
In her eyes I read her answer.
Chapter XXII
IN PRAISE OF COUNTRY WINTER
Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all.
From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before
the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the
winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies,
of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet,
close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into "a
tumultuous privacy of storm."
Our first winter began one bleak November day when the lone pine in the
potato field was outlined black against a gray sky, and over the long
mountain wall to the northwest came suddenly a puff of white vapour,
like the beginning of artillery fire, and then the shrapnel of the
snow descended upon us. Wrapped against it, we ran about the farm,
marvelling at the transformations it wrought. First it filled up the
furrows on the ploughed land, making our field like a zebra's back.
Then it whitened the sundial lawn, reminding us to take the wooden
dial post in for the winter. Then it whitened the brown earth around
the pool, where our July-sown grass had failed to make a catch, and
presently the pool was a black mirror on a field of white.
Then, as a crowning touch, it powdered the pines, and we ran among them.
Under their thick shelter the wind was not felt. We could hear the flakes
hissing against the needles overhead. All about us the white powder was
sifting down. A peep into the outside world showed all distances blotted
out by the storm. By evening the grove was a powdered Christmas card,
the naked farm fields mantles of white laid upon the earth, the lamps in
our house beacons of warmth gleaming behind us.
That snow melted, but others followed it, and by Christmas we were, as
Mike put it, snowed in for the winter. In the barn was the warm smell
of cattle. The motors had disappeared from our roads, and we went to
the village in a pung, meeting other pungs on the way. It was as if
we had slipped back a whole generation in time. Curiously enough, too,
life became more leisurely, more familiar. The great summer estates were
boarded up, the hotels closed. Only the real village people sat in
church or waited at the post-office. We who in summer had known but few
of our townsfolk now became acquainted with them all. We, too, left
our pung in the horse sheds every Sabbath morning, listened to the
nasal drone of the village choir, and joined in the social quarter-hour
which followed the service. It was an altogether different world we live
in from the summer world, and we liked it even better.
What walks we had! Either with stout boots along the roads or with
snowshoes into the deep woods, we took our exercise almost daily by
tramping, and to us the countryside was a perpetual revelation. Almost
the first thing which impressed us was the colourful quality of the
winter landscape. Even on our own thirty acres that was apparent. At
sunset of a still, peaceful day we could look forth from our south
windows across the white lawn to the dark green pines and beyond them the
exquisite iron-rust tamaracks, soft and feathery. The eastern sky
would be mother of pearl at that hour, the southern sky blue, the
western sky warm salmon, green, and gold, and the encircling hills a
soft gray. Then, as the sun sank lower, a veil of amethyst would steal
mysteriously into the feathery tamaracks and over the gray hills,
all the upper air would blush to rose, and for a brief ecstatic ten
minutes nature would sound a colour chord like a Mozartian andante.
Out on the roads we were charmed by the tawny tiger colour of the
willow shoots and the delicate lavender of the blackberry vines rising
from the snow beside a gray roadside wall. On the edge of the woods a
white birch trunk, naked of leaves, would tell like a lightning stab
against the wall of pines, while in the woods themselves, where the
sunlight flickered through, the brook would wander black as jet beneath
beautifully curved banks of snow, and a laurel bush or fern would stand
out a vivid green in a shaft of sunlight; or even a spot of brown
leaves, where a pheasant or partridge had scratched, would disclose
in its centre the vivid red of a partridge berry, a tiny woodland
colour note that we loved.
And how close our wild neighbours came in the winter! We kept out a
constant supply of suet and sunflower seeds on two or three downstair
window ledges, and while we were dining, or reading in the south room,
we could look up at any time and see chickadees or juncos or nuthatches
just beyond the pane. The pheasants, too, came to our very doors in
winter, leaving their unmistakable tracks, for they are walking birds
and set their feet in a single line.
It was not long before we began to find tracks of four-footed wild
things, a mink by the brook, a deer in the pasture, and finally a
fox which, unlike Buster, tracked with one footprint in the other,
leaving apparently but two marks. We followed him a long way on our
snowshoes--up through our pasture and across Bert's to Bert's chicken
house, and then out across the fields and into the woods. Stella had
never tracked before, and she was as keen on the scent as a Boy Scout,
reconstructing the animal's actions in her imagination as she went
along. We lost the trail finally where it crossed a road, but we picked
up deer tracks instead, and found a spot where they had eaten from the
sumach bushes, and another where they had pawed up the snow for frozen
apples in an old abandoned orchard.
"Oh, if they'd only come into _our_ orchard!" cried Stella.
It was not long afterward, one moonlight night, that I chanced to be
sitting up late, and before retiring I glanced from the window. There
was something--there were two somethings--moving about amid the
apple trees. I looked closer and ran to awake Stella. Wrapped in a
dressing-gown, she came with me to the window and peered out. There, in
the full moonlight which flooded the white world with a misty silver
radiance, were two deer pawing for apples in our orchard. Buster, by
some sixth sense, suddenly scented them, and we heard him set up an alarm
in the kitchen. The buck shot up his head and listened, a beautiful
sight which made Stella gasp for breath. We heard the horse stamp in
the stable, and Buster continued his yelps. But the buck was evidently
satisfied of his safety, for he lowered his muzzle into the snow again.
However, as we watched, there came a different sound to his ears, though
not to ours, for suddenly he gave a leap, and with the doe after him
took the stone wall at a bound, the wall across the road at another,
and vanished up our pasture. A moment later we, too, heard the sound; it
was the jingle of approaching sleigh-bells.
Stella sighed happily as she went back to bed. "All my dreams are coming
true!" she whispered.
I wonder if any pleasure in this world is quite comparable with that of
coming back to your own snug dwelling after a long tramp through the
snowy woods, returning when the green sunset is fading in the west and
the amethyst shadows are creeping up the hills and the cold night
stillness is abroad, and seeing from afar the red window-squares of home
gleaming over the snow? Our favourite method of return was to climb the
stone wall by the frozen tamarack swamp and enter the pines, where
the ice-covered brook crept like a flowing black ribbon through the
white, with the snow on the banks curled over it in the most exquisite
and fantastic of tiny cornices. We could see our south windows through
the branches, just before the path emerged, and Mrs. Pillig had orders to
light the lamps before our return so that they might glow a welcome.
We always stood a moment, hand in hand, regarding them, before we
climbed the slope and entered the door.
Ah, the warmth that greeted us when we stepped inside! The good smell of
burning apple wood on the twin hearths! The cheerful bark of Buster, if
he had not gone to walk with us! The prophetic rattle of dishes and
the kettle song from the kitchen! We had a kettle of our own, too, now,
in the long room. It hung on a crane in the west fireplace, and was
delightfully black, and often made the tea taste smoky, like camp tea.
Quickly we left our wraps in the hall, quickly Stella brought out cups
and tea caddy to a little tabouret before the western fireplace, and
sitting on our settle in the chimney nook, with the last wan light of
sunset competing with the evening lamps, we warmed our hands before
the blaze, and drank our tea, and felt that delicious drowse steal over
us which comes only after brisk exercise in the mountain air of winter.
And then the evenings, the long winter evenings by the twin fires,
when we were supposed by our friends in town to be pining for the
opera or the theatre, and were in reality blissfully unaware of either!
Stella's first duty after supper was to hear Peter's lessons, while
Buster lay on the hearth and I sprawled in a Morris chair with my
cigar, and read the morning paper. That is another delightful feature
of country life. You never have time to read the morning paper till
evening, and then you read it comfortably all through, if you like.
Peter was going far ahead of his class as a result of this individual
instruction, and had actually begun to develop a real interest in the
acquisition of knowledge--a thing that did not exist as a rule in the
pupils of Bentford, which, perhaps, was not the pupils' fault. So far
as I have observed, it is not characteristic of most of our public
schools in America. Perhaps that is a penalty of democracy; certainly
it is a penalty of too large classes and too low salaries paid for
teaching. We make the profession of teacher a stop-gap for girls between
the normal school and matrimony.
When Peter's lesson was over, and we were left alone, we had the best
books in the world, the best music in the world, to choose from. We
could have a play if we liked, the kind too seldom seen on Broadway. We
could have Mozart, or so much of him as Stella could render. We had
letters to write, also, a task always left till evening. Sometimes I
had tag ends of my morning labours to finish up. Any writing of my own
I brought forth in the evening for Stella to read, and to criticise as
mercilessly as she chose--which was sometimes very mercilessly; and we
thrashed it over together. Sometimes, even, I agreed with her!
Once a week we gathered in several high school pupils who lived near
by--Mike's Nora, a boy, and three other girls--and read Shakespeare.
It took them two months to read one play in school, but we read a
play in two or three evenings, each of us taking a part. I showed them
pictures of the ancient playhouses, and explained as best I could the
conditions of stage productions in various periods. Stella supplied the
necessary philology. We had a real course in Shakespeare, and yet one
which interested the children, for they were reading the plays aloud, and
visualizing them. One evening we dressed up in costume, so far as we
could, amid much laughter, and acted a scene from "As You Like It,"
with Nora as Rosalind (she wore my knickerbockers and a long cape of
Stella's, and blushed adorably), and Mrs. Pillig and Peter called in
as audience.
Before the winter was over, two or three other children from the village
had begged to come to the class, and made the long, cold trip out to the
farm on foot every week. We had cake and chocolate when the lessons were
over. As Stella and I stood in the door listening to the young voices die
away down the road, we used to look at one another happily.
"Oh," she once cried, "how much you can do for folks in the country!
In town we'd pay $4 to see Shakespeare, played by professionals, and
then go selfishly home. Here we can help give him to these children, with
all that means. And some of them so need it! Why, look at Joe Bostwick!
When he first began to come he had the manners of a bear, and read like
a seven-year-old child. I don't believe he'd _ever_ read out loud, or
been of an evening among nice people. Now he's getting to know how
to behave in company, poor fellow, and he reads almost intelligently!"
"You don't want to go back to the city, then?" I smiled.
"Oh, John, I never want to go back to the city," she answered. "I want
to live here forever. I want to do more and more for these people. I
want to do more and more for Twin Fires. I want to know more and more
what I've never known--the sense of being rooted to the land, of having
a home. Our grandfathers used to know that, but in our modern cities
we have forgotten. I want to die in the house I've always lived in."
"It's a little soon to plan for that," said I, as we entered the south
room again, but I knew what she meant.
The hour was late for us in the country--almost eleven. We put away
the cups and plates, and went through our nightly ceremony of locking
up. First, we peeped out of the window at the thermometer, which
registered two degrees above zero, and I set it down in my diary, for
the temperature and the weather are important items to record when
you are a farmer. Then we locked all the doors, giving Buster a pat as
he lay on his old quilt in a corner of the kitchen. The kitchen lamp
was out, and the room was lighted only by the moon, but the kettle was
singing softly. Then we returned to the south room and banked the fires
carefully, so that the fresh logs would catch in the morning, on top of
the noble piles of ashes. Finally we blew out the lamps. Cold moonlight
stole in across the floor from the glass door and windows, and met midway
the warm red glow from the fires. The world was very still. The great
room, so homelike, so friendly, so full of beautiful things and yet so
simple, seemed sleeping. We tiptoed from it with a last loving glance and
climbed the stairs. In our dressing-room, which was an extra chamber,
an open fire burned, but in our chamber there was no heat. The shades
were up and the moonlight showed the fairy frost patterns on the
panes. We took a last look out across the silvery world before we
retired, a last deep breath of the stinging cold air as the windows
were opened, and jumped beneath the covering, with heavy blankets
beneath us as well as above.
"It is a very nice old world," said Stella sleepily. "Winter or
summer, it is lovely. I think New York is but a dream--and I hope it
won't be mine!"
I heard her breathing steadily a few minutes later, and from far off
somewhere in the outer world the mournful whistle of a screech owl came
to my ears, the andante of the winter night. It seemed to intensify
the freezing silence. I thought how at college I used to hear from my
chamber the screech of trolley cars rounding a curve and biting my
nerves. I thought of that lonely chamber, of all my life there, of
Stella's life in the triple turmoil of New York. And I put out my hand
and took hers into it, while she stirred in her sleep, her fingers
unconsciously closing over mine. So we awoke in the morning, with the
sunshine smiting the snow into diamonds and a chickadee piping for
breakfast.
Chapter XXIII
SPRING IN THE GARDEN
The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be
equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its
excitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrill
of the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it was
Stella's initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south wind
walking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the second
place, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds were
an experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were an
experiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put upon
the soil (more or less to Mike's disgust) were an experiment. We were
learning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that of
learning.
The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but cold
nasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers on
March 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we could
spade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant early
peas, which I inoculated with nitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mike
looked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing process
of legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.
"Bugs!" he said. "Puttin' bugs in the soil! No good never came o'
that. Manure's the thing."
About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the
south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for,
owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as
Stella said, the piles "steamed expensively," like small volcanoes,
as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were
all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil
temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting
in his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one of
our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and
tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into
one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum,
asters, stock, _Phlox Drummondi_, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope,
and _Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca_, a plant chosen by Stella because she
said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed
that that was about its only appeal.
While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly
cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be
uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to be
accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be
watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course,
the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grass
seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.
"Oh, I don't know which is the real sign of spring," said Stella, one
evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard
the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. "Sometimes I think it's
the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it's the fox
sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 A.M. while you
were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes I
think it's the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes
I think it's a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it's the steaming manure
piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old
Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet
painting."
"Lump them," I suggested. "It's all of them combined. In New York
it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush
counter."
"New York!" sniffed Stella. "There _is_ no such place!"
April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our
brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the
year before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come through
the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant
of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager
for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas
went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build
our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape
arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain
chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the
beds fertilized and trimmed.
About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put
early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box.
When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my
seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike's
disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly.
In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally
planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which
I thinned out to the strongest stalks.
"Now, Mike," said I, "I'll beat you and the town in the market."
"Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don't know nothin'
about farmin' can do some things," he said, regarding my corn with
comical amazement.
"That's because we are willing to learn," said I, and left him still
looking at the six-inch high stalks.
(Incidentally, I may remark that I did beat everybody in the market, and
made about $15 extra by my simple experiment.)
But Stella's chief joy in the garden was in the surprises of the
blooms: in the stately clumps of Darwins against the pillars of the rose
aqueduct; in the golden bursts of daffodils here and there where we had
sown a few bulbs and forgotten the spot; in the _Narcissus poeticus_,
which were in their element close to the brook and did verily look at
themselves in the tiny pool below the dam; in the pale gold ring of
the great Empress narcissus bordering the iris spears around the large
pool; above all, perhaps, in the maroon of the trilliums which we had
brought home from that first wonderful walk in the woods. Not alone
her heart, but her feet, danced with the daffodils, and I could hear
her of a morning as I worked, out in the garden singing or bringing in
great bunches of blooms to decorate the house.
On several afternoons we made further trips to the deep woods after
wild-flower plants, and set them in along our brook. The thrush had
returned, the apple blossoms had made all the garden fragrant while
the plants were budding (this year they were carefully sprayed twice,
for, though it cost nearly as much to spray them as the entire value of
the apples, one thing I cannot stand on my farm is poor or neglected
fruit; besides, the improved aspect of the trees themselves was worth
the price). Now that their petals had fallen came the new fragrance,
subtler but no less exquisite, of many flowers after May rain, of a
spring brook running under pines, and near the house the pungent aroma
of lilacs.
Then came the German irises, like soldiers on parade, around the pool,
and the bright lemon lilies in the shady dooryard. Scarce had the irises
begun to fall when the foxgloves began to blossom, and all suddenly one
morning after a very warm night the sundial was surrounded by a stately
conclave of slender queens dressed in white and lavender, while more
queens marched down from the orchard to the pool, and yet more stood
against the shrubbery beyond it, or half hid the bare newness of our
grape arbour.
"I don't need to take digitalis internally for a heart stimulant!"
cried Stella. "Oh, the lovely things! Quick, vases of them below the
Hiroshiges! Quick, your camera! Quick, come and look at them, come and
see the bees swinging in their bells!"
"I suppose they are breakfast bells," said I.
"This is no time for bad puns," she answered, dragging me swiftly down
through the orchard, and up again to the sundial.
Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing the
white dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribable
air of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous with
bees. Again and again that morning I looked up from my work and saw
them there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, saw
beyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on the
farm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the far
hills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throated
sparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxgloves
turn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songs
die away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle of
our brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night.
"The spring melts into summer," said Stella, "as gently as the little
brook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John,
couldn't we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool of
spring forever in our garden?"
"We shall have to make that pool within our hearts," said I.
Chapter XXIV
SOME RURAL PROBLEMS
There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelor
before he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new range
of social relations and impulses which follow a happy union. I do not
mean social relations with a capital S. About such I know little and
care less. Presumably marriage may bring them, also, into the life of a
man who chooses the wrong wife. In fact, Stella and I have seen more
than one case of it in Bentford, where we dwell near enough to the
fringes of Society to observe the parasitic aspirations of several ladies
with more fortune than "position." Mrs. Eckstrom, we have discovered
since her call, is such a one. We, of course, were of no use to her,
and she had not troubled us since, though two gold fish did arrive that
night, as I have told. We are grateful for Antony and Cleopatra.
No, what I mean by social relations and impulses are the opportunities
for service and the impulses to jump in and help others, which matrimony
discloses and breeds. Who can say why this is so? Who can say why the
bachelor is generally negatively--if not actively--selfish, while the
same man when he has achieved a good wife, opened a house of his own,
begun to employ labour directly instead of through the medium of a club
or bachelor apartment hotel, is suddenly aware of wrong conditions
in the world about him and a new desire to help set them right? It
cannot entirely be due to the woman, for very often her maiden life has
been as barren of social service as his own. It is inherent in the state
of matrimony, and to me it seems one of the glories of that state.
Those couples who have not felt it, I think, have been but sterilely
mated, though they have reproduced their kind never so many times.
At any rate, it was not long after the Eckstrom invasion that Stella and
I went to play golf, carrying a load of lettuce heads and cauliflowers
to market on our way. As all Bert's cauliflowers are sold in bulk to a
New York commission merchant, I found I had the local market pretty
much to myself, and was getting 15 cents a head for my plants. Mike
dearly loved cauliflowers, and babied ours as a flower gardener babies
his hybrid tea roses. They were splendid heads, and were bringing me in a
dollar a day or more. I had visions of greatly increasing my output
another season, for I could easily supply the two hotels as well.
We left our farm wagon in the church horse-sheds and went down to the
links. There was a crowd of caddies of all ages sitting on the benches
reserved for them, and half a dozen came rushing toward us. I chose
a large boy, because I am one of those idiots who carries around at
least seven more clubs than he ever uses, and Stella picked a smaller boy
because she liked his face. As golf is not an engrossing game when you
are playing with your wife, and she's a beginner into the bargain
(matrimony has its drawbacks, too!) we fell to talking with our caddies.
"You must be in the high school, eh?" said I to mine.
"I went last year," he replied, "but I ain't goin' no more. Goin'
to work."
"Work at your age? What are you going to do?" asked Stella.
"I dunno--somethin'," he answered.
"Why don't you keep on at school?" I said.
"Aw, what's the use?" said he. "They don't learn you
nothin'--algebra and English and stuff like that."
"A little English wouldn't hurt you at all, young man," said Stella.
"You don't like to study, do you?"
The boy looked sheepish, but admitted that he didn't.
"What do you like to do?" I asked. "You don't like to caddy very
well, because you don't keep your eye on the ball, and you've made
the little fellow take out the pin on every hole so far."
The boy flushed at this, and went up to the next pin himself.
"I'd like to work in a garden," he said, as we were walking to the
next tee.
"You want to be a gardener, eh?" said I. "Has anybody ever taught you
how to start a hotbed?"
"No, sir."
"Ever run a wheel hoe?"
"No, sir."
"Would you know what date to plant early peas, and corn, and lima
beans?"
"No, sir."
"Ever graft an apple tree?"
"No, sir."
"Well, you're not very well fitted to take a job as a gardener yet,
are you?" said I.
He admitted that he wasn't.
"Would you keep on going to school if they taught you how to be a
gardener?" asked Stella, carrying on the line of questioning.
"You bet," he replied. "But, gee! they don't teach nothin' like
that. Only bookkeepin' and typewritin', and then you have to go away
to a business college somewhere before you can get a job."
"We seem to have stumbled on a civic problem," I remarked to my wife
as we teed up. "I don't believe an educational survey would do this
town any harm."
"And the finger of destiny points to us?" she smiled.
"Probably," said I. "You'd hardly expect the Eckstroms to tackle the
job!"
That night we began by consulting Bert. Bert is one of the best men I
know, and he applies the latest methods to growing cauliflowers; but
he's a New England farmer, none the less, and he has the true "rural
mind."
"'Vocational education!'" he exclaimed. "We got more education than
we kin afford now. Taxes are way up, an' the school appropriation's
the biggest one we have--$19,000, to only $7,000 for the roads! And then
you talk about more! We got along pretty well without it so far."
"Have you, though?" said Stella. "You've got a high school, but how
many boys have you got in it?"
"I dunno," said Bert.
"That's it. You don't know. You don't know anything about what your
schools are doing. You must be on the school committee!"
Bert grinned at this. "No, I ain't," he said, "but I guess I'm ez
good ez them that are. They do say Buckstone--you know, the man who runs
the meat market--engages teachers on their looks."
"Not a bad idea," said Stella; "looks mean a lot to children."
"Not the kind Buckie's after, I reckon," said Bert. "But you two go
run your farm an' don't worry about this town. We'll git along."
Bert spoke good naturedly, but we felt, none the less, as if he were
rebuking us.
"He thinks we are butting in," said Stella, as we walked home. "I
suppose you have to live in a New England town thirty years before you
are really a citizen. Well, I'm getting my mad up. Let's butt!"
We next consulted Mrs. Pillig on the subject, and found her as stiffly
opposed to vocational education as Bert, but on entirely different
grounds.
"I don't want my boy educated as if he wa'n't as good as anybody
else's," she said. "Just because I'm poor is no reason why my boy
shouldn't be fitted to go to college same as young Carl Swain."
Carl Swain was the son of the village bank president. He, I happened to
know, had been obliged to go to Phillips Andover for a year after his
graduation from our high school before he could get into college.
"In the first place," I answered, "your high school doesn't fit for
college now. In the second place, is Peter going to college?"
"Of course he ain't," said Mrs. Pillig.
"Then why not educate him in some way that will really fit him to make
a better living, and be a better man?" said Stella.
"I want he should have what the rest have," the mother stoutly
maintained.
Stella shook her head. "It's hopeless," she whispered.
I mentioned the matter next to Mr. Swain, when I was in the bank. He,
too, was a true New Englander, of a different class from Bert, but with
the fundamental conservatism--to give it the pleasantest name possible.
"There's too much fol-de-rol in the school now," he said. "If they'd
just try to teach 'em Greek and Latin and the things you need for a
liberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn't
have had to send my boy to Andover."
"Your boy, yes," I answered. "How many other boys and girls in his
class are going to college?"
"Well, there's another one," he replied.
"Out of a class of how many?"
"Twenty," said he.
"Hm--you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?"
He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew at
human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn't
believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague
and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his
opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are
grounded in the fetish of the old "humanist" curriculum (which when
it originated was strictly vocational). He didn't believe that trade
instruction educated. There was no "culture" in it. I left him,
wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn't done as much harm as good in the
world.
After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We
brought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchard
afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a
grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.
"Yes," he said, "there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the
high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are
in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you've got to get your
arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can
have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy,
they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than
we do in rural New England!"
I didn't quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a Bentford
Town Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuing
autumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list of
voters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort in
Bentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerable
summer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of our
taxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (however
desultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a total
voting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twenty
were directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers on
the estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part time
farmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of a
similar nature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged in
manual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roads
or trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred and
one, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position to
benefit by agricultural education--a truly tremendous proportion. At the
same time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higher
institutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and a
slightly greater number of girls--most of the latter to normal school.
It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promise
of state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce the
expenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schools
and I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the town
at the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation.
Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriation
committee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going to
cost $9,000 for roads that year.
This would be rather amusing if it weren't, as Stella points out, so
terribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do not
employ a road superintendent, and don't know how to build them
right, still employing the ancient American method of scraping back
the gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil,
furthermore, is now so saturated with oil that it makes a pudding
whenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the money
evaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the great
grafting institution till I moved to a New England small town. There
I learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I've told how
selectman Morrissy scraped my lawn--admitting I was party to the
crime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel to
the town at 50 cents a load, from a gravel bed the town already owned,
and, as selectman, O. K'd his own bill! I have seen how our "honest
farmers" rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soon
as Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the time
it isn't needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teams
on the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home at
night an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spent
before July, so there is nothing to repair roads with in the autumn.
Of course some roads do have to be repaired in the autumn, so the
selectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was so
much the poorer, and couldn't afford an extra $500 to educate its
children properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but we
still lack the $500.
If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a road
contract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he is
taking away the bread from town labour, and the next year he is so
snowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He is
snowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labour
up to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquor
license. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, even
when they don't know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people--the
richest taxpayers, who are summer residents--don't care anyhow, so
long as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, these
rich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declare
a half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are left
are, as the expressive phrase goes, "up against it."
That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. I
was blue, despondent, ready to give up.
"Twenty-five per cent. who really cared," said she, "could reform the
universe. Reform is like the dictionary--it takes infinite patience. The
first thing is to get the 25 per cent. together."
"You're right!" I cried, taking heart again. "There's plenty of
work for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mere
upstarts because we've lived here only a year or two. But that is just
why we can see so many things which must be altered. We've got to keep
our batteries on the firing line. We've got plenty of work besides
getting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncovering
our perennials."
We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by the
woodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used the
spring before.
It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. If
we couldn't have real vocational instruction, at least we might have
school gardens, with volunteer instruction and prizes awarded, perhaps,
by the Grange. I sent away that evening for bulletins on the subject,
and presently took the matter up with the school superintendent and
the master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that,
after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, what
similar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of coöperation among those
working for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of a
piece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfully
volunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as an
incentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the large
estates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen)
volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at five
o'clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from the
district sent quantities of government seeds, and more were donated
by one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land,
nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty little
squares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boy
toiling. We had the beginnings of vocational instruction. It had been
entirely accomplished by voluntary coöperation among the minority
who saw the need for it.
I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, an
Irish-American who had practically grown up into the management of one
of the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his natural
strength of character had been developed by responsibility.
"The trouble is," he said, "that we organize for political parties,
for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don't
organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of
twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what
the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring
together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight
of numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club.
It would be for the town, not for a party."
He carried out his idea, too, and the Bentford Town Club was the result.
It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hitherto
scattered and ineffectual minority.
It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I
remarked one day that the town didn't get more than 60 cents' worth
of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: "Well, if we
didn't pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or
to break out the snowdrifts in winter, we'd have to pay for their keep
in some other way. They would be 'on the town.'"
"On the town!" The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf
links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent
balls, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece,
past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and
saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard
slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn,
the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the
green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a
pleasant land, be "on the town?" Why should some of us own acres
upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the
land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white
men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants
of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our
washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once
stood in her ancestor's name. Why had the acres slipped away in the
intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay
for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no
doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the
best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities--to make
New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle
with fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till
something perilously close to degeneracy resulted.
"On the town!" The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers,
all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, all
independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves
"poor worms" on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were
gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of
the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly
saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had
swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the
cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century
with a new problem on our hands.
And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then
ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when
I see the road work being done by "town labour," I think of what that
means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the
terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the
country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I
reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of
the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which
floats in the blue above our dwelling.
Chapter XXV
HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS
But this story is, after all, an idyl, and the idyl is drawing to its
close. Even as the Old Three Decker carried tired people to the Islands
of the Blest, my little tale can only end with "and they lived happy
ever after." Into the sweet monotony of such happy years what reader
wants to follow? The reader sees his fellow passengers, the characters,
disembark, waves them good-bye--and turns to sail for other isles! So
please consider that the hawsers are being loosed, the farewells being
spoken.
That second summer at Twin Fires, of course, showed us many things yet
to be done. Neither Rome nor the humblest garden was ever built in a day.
Our ramblers did their duty well, but the grape arbour and the pergola
would not be covered properly in a season. There were holes in the
flower beds to be filled by annuals, and mistakes made in succession, so
that July found us with many patches destitute of any bloom. Out in
the vegetable area there were first cutworms and then drought and
potato blight to be contended with. In our ignorance we neglected to
watch the hollyhocks for red rust till suddenly whole plants began to
die, and we had to spray madly with Bordeaux and pull off a great heap of
infected leaves, to save any blooms at all. There were clearings to
be made in the pines for ferny spots, and constant work to be done
about the pool to keep the wild bushes from coming back. There were
chickens to be looked after now, also, and new responsibilities in
the village for both of us. We had neither attempted nor desired to
avoid our full share of civic work. We lived a busy life, with not an
hour in the day idle, and few hours in the evening. We lived so full a
life, indeed, that it was only by preserving an absolute routine for my
own bread-winning labours, from nine A.M. till one, that I was able to
resist the siren call of farm and garden, and get my daily stint
accomplished.
The preceding summer I had made about $200 out of my produce, which
in my first naïve enthusiasm pleased me greatly. But it was surely a poor
return on my investment, reckoned merely in dollars and cents, and
the second season showed a different result. Having two cows and a small
family, I managed to dispose of my surplus milk and cream to a farmer
who ran a milk route. This brought me in $73 a year. As I further saved
at least $100 by not having to buy milk, and $60 by Peter's efforts at
the churn, and could reckon a further profit from manure and calves,
my cows were worth between $300 and $400 a year to me. Now that we had
hens and chickens, we could reckon on another $100 saved in egg and
poultry bills. To this total I was able to add at the end of the
summer more than $500 received from the sale of fruit and vegetables,
not only to the market but to the hotels. I was the only person in
Bentford who had cultivated raspberries for sale, for instance, and the
fact that I could deliver them absolutely fresh to the hotels was
appreciated in so delicate a fruit. Stella and Peter were the pickers.
I also supplied the inns with peas, cauliflowers, and tomatoes. Thus
the farm was actually paying me in cash or saving at least $1,000 a
year--indeed, much more, since we had no fruit nor vegetable bills the
year through, Mrs. Pillig being an artist in preserving what would not
keep in the cellar. But we will call it $1,000, and let the rest go
as interest on the investment represented by seeds and implements. To
offset this, I paid Mike $600 a year, and employed his son Joe at
$1.75 a day, for twenty weeks. This left me a profit of about $200 on
my first full season at Twin Fires, which paid my taxes and bought my
coal. Out of my salary, then, came no rent, no bills for butter, eggs,
milk, poultry, nor vegetables. I had to pay Mrs. Pillig her $20 a month
therefrom, I had to pay the upkeep of the place, and grocery and meat
bills (the latter being comparatively small in summer). But with the
great item of rent eliminated, and my farm help paying for itself,
it was astonishing to me to contemplate what a beautiful, comfortable
home we were able to afford on an income which in New York would coop us
in an Upper West Side apartment. We had thirty acres of beautiful land,
we had a brook, a pine grove, an orchard, a not too formal garden, a
lovely house in which we were slowly assembling mahogany furniture
which fitted it. We had summer society as sophisticated as we cared to
mix with, and winter society to which we could give gladly of our own
stores of knowledge or enthusiasm and find joy in the giving. We had
health as never before, and air and sunshine and a world of beauty
all about us to the far blue wall of hills.
Above all, we had the perpetual incentive of gardening to keep our eyes
toward the future. A true garden, like a life well lived, is forever
becoming, forever in process, forever leading on toward new goals. Life,
indeed, goes hand in hand with your garden, and never a fair thought
but you write it in flowers, never a beautiful picture but you paint
it if you can, and with the striving learn patience, and with the half
accomplishment, the "divine unrest."
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
reads the ancient motto on our dial plate, and as I look back on the
years of Twin Fires' genesis, or forward into the future, the hours
that are not sunny are indeed not marked for me. I am writing now at
a table beneath the pergola. The floor is of brick, laid (somewhat
irregularly) by Stella and me, for we still are poor, as the Eckstroms
would reckon poverty, and none of what Mrs. Deland has called "the
grim inhibitions of wealth" prevents us from doing whatever we can
with our own hands, and finding therein a double satisfaction. Over
my head rustle the thick vines--a wistaria among them, which may or may
not survive another winter.
It is June again. The ghost of Rome in roses is marching across the
lawn beyond the white sundial, and there are arches in perspective
now beneath the level superstructure. The little brick bird bath is
covered with ivy, and last year's self-sown double Emperor Williams
are already blue about it. The lawn is a thick, rich green. To the
west the grape arbour rises above a white bench of real marble, and I
can see dappled shadows beneath the whitish young leaves. I know that
around the pool stately Japanese iris are budding now, great clumps of
them revelling in the moisture they so dearly love, soon to break into
blooms as large as plates, and beyond them is a little lawn, with the
bench our own hands made against a clump of cedars, and on each side a
small statue of marble on a slender chestnut pedestal, carved and painted
to balance the bench.
I know also that a path now wanders up the brook almost to the road,
amid the wild tangle, and ends suddenly in the most unexpected nook
beneath a willow tree, where irises fringe a second tiny pool. I know
that the path still wanders the other way into the pines--pines larger
now and more murmurous of the sea--past beds of ferns and a lone cardinal
flower that will bloom in a shaft of sunlight. Somewhere down that path
my wife is wandering, and she is not alone. A little form (at least
she says it has form!) sleeps beside her, while she sits, perhaps,
with a book or more likely with sewing in her busy fingers, or more
likely still with hands that stray toward the sleeping child and ears
that listen to the sea-shell murmur of the pines whispering secrets
of the future. Is he to be a Napoleon or a Pasteur? No less a genius,
surely, the prophetic pines whisper to the listening mother!
My own pen halts in its progress and the ink dries on the point.
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
--that indeed we desire for our children, for our loved ones! Dim,
forgotten perils of adolescence come to my mind, as a cloud obscures
the summer sun. Then the cloud sweeps by. I see the white dial post
focussing the sunlight once again on the green lawn, amid its ring of
stately queens, and the thought comes over me not that I possess these
thirty acres of Twin Fires, but that they possess me, that they are
mine only in trust to do their bidding, to hand them on still fairer than
I found them to the new generation of my stock. They are the Upton
home--forever.
Already we have bought a tall grandfather's clock, with little Nat's
name and birth date on a plate inside the door. I can hear it ticking
somnolently now, out in the hall. Already the quaint rubbish is
accumulating in our attic which in twenty years will be a dusty,
historical record of many things, from sartorial styles to literary
fashions. Some day little Nat will rummage them for forgotten books of
his childhood, and come upon my derby, now in the latest fashion, to
wonder that men ever wore such outlandish headgear.
But the garden will never be out of fashion! Looking forth again from
the window, I can see our best discovery of last season beginning to
scatter its bits of sky on the ground, as it does every day before noon.
It is flax, which blooms every day at sunrise the season through, sheds
all its petals when the sun is high, and renews them all with the next
day's dew. It is perfectly hardy and reproduces itself in great
quantity. No blue is quite like it save the sky, and at seven o'clock of
a fresh June morning you will go many a mile before you find anything
so lovely as our garden borders. A little later, too, the first sowing
of our schyzanthus will begin to flower, against a backing of white
platycodons, and that will be an old-fashioned feature of delicate bloom
perpetually new, for the little butterfly flower, as it used to be
called, covering the entire graceful plant with orchidlike blossoms, is
one of those shyer effects that the professional gardeners never
strive for, but which we amateurs who are poor enough to be our own
gardeners achieve, to put the great expensive formal gardens to shame.
Another bed we are proud of is filled with love-in-a-mist rising out
of sweet alyssum--all feathery blue and white, like our own skies.
But we, too, have the showier effects. Already the best of them is
coming--about a hundred feet of larkspur along the west wall of the
garden, and at its base pink Canterbury bells. Unfortunately, the bells
will be passing as the larkspur comes to its fullest flower, but for
about four or five days in ordinary seasons that particular border of
pink and blue is a rare delight.
I wonder, by the way, if Stella has watered the schyzanthus plants
this morning. They are down in the borders by the pool. Perhaps I had
better go and see. A moment's respite from my toil will do me good. I
will listen to the tinkle of the brook, as I will follow the path that
wanders beside it through the maples to the pines, where our garden is
but the reproduction in little of our fair New England woods. At the
spot where first we heard the hermit sing I shall find my wife and
child, I shall find them for whom all my strivings are, who give meaning
to my life, who, when all is said, are the sunshine of its serene hours.
What a blue sky overhead where the cloud ships ride! What a burst of
song from the oriole! What a pleasant sound from the field beyond the
roses--the soft chip of Mike's hoe between the onions! And hark, from
the pines a tiny cry! Can he want his father?
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REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas Wiggin.
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NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin.
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REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell.
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