Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

“But what _is_ there to do? Now, listen! One day for trunks, one day for boxes and barrels, one day for closets, that’s three, one for curtains, four, one day for—for the garret, that’s five. Well—one day for odds and ends that I haven’t thought of. That’s liberal, I’m sure.”

“Better say the rest of your life for the odds and ends you haven’t thought of,” said Jonathan, as he drove the last nail in a neatly headed barrel.

“Jonathan, why are you such a pessimist?”

“I’m not, except when you’re such an optimist.”

“If I’d begun by saying it would take a month, would you have said a week?”

“Can’t tell. Might have.”

“Anyway, there’s nothing bad about odds and ends. They’re about all women have much to do with most of their lives.”

“That’s what I said. And you called me a pessimist.”

“I didn’t call you one. I said, why were you one.”

“I’m sorry. My mistake,” said Jonathan with the smile of one who scores.

* * * * *

And so we went.

One day for trunks was all right. Any one can manage trunks. And the second day, the boxes were emptied and sent flying out to the barn. Curtains I decided to keep for evening work, while Jonathan read. That left the closets and the attic, or rather the attics, for there was one over the main house and one over the “new part,”—still “new,” although now some seventy years old. They were known as the attic and the little attic. I thought I would do the closets first, and I began with the one in the parlor. This was built into the chimney, over the fireplace. It was low, and as long as the mantelpiece itself. It had two long shelves shut away behind three glass doors through which the treasures within were dimly visible. When I swung these open it felt like opening a tomb—cold, musty air hung about my face. I brushed it aside, and considered where to begin. It was a depressing collection. There were photographs and photographs, some in frames, the rest of them tied up in packages or lying in piles. A few had names or messages written on the back, but most gave no clue; and all of them gazed out at me with that expression of complete respectability that constitutes so impenetrable a mask for the personality behind. Most of us wear such masks, but the older photographers seem to have been singularly successful in concentrating attention on them. Then there were albums, with more photographs, of people and of “views.” There was a big Bible, some prayer-books, and a few other books elaborately bound with that heavy fancifulness that we are learning to call Victorian. One of these was on “The Wonders of the Great West”; another was about “The Female Saints of America.” I took it down and glanced through it, but concluded that one had to be a female saint, or at least an aspirant, to appreciate it. Then there were things made out of dried flowers, out of hair, out of shells, out of pine-cones. There were vases and other ornamental bits of china and glass, also Victorian, looking as if they were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long day—one of the longest days of my life—browsing through the books, trying to sort the photographs, and glancing through a few old letters. I did nothing in particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day’s experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of it to Jonathan later.

“It always tasted just that way to me when I was a boy,” he said, “but I never thought much about it—I thought it was just a closet-taste.”

“And it isn’t only the taste,” I went on. “It does something to me, to my state of mind. I’m afraid to try the garret.”

“Garrets are different,” said Jonathan. “But I’d leave them. They can wait.”

“They’ve waited a good while, of course,” I said.

And so we left the garrets. We came back to them later, and were glad we had done so. But that is a story by itself.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the evenings, Jonathan helped.

“I’m afraid you were more or less right about the odd jobs,” I admitted one night. “They do seem to accumulate.” I was holding a candle while he set up a loose latch.

“They’ve been accumulating a good many years,” said Jonathan.

“Yes, that’s it. And so the doors all stick, and the latches won’t latch, and the shades are sulky or wild, and the pantry shelves—have you noticed?—they’re all warped so they rock when you set a dish on them.”

“And the chairs pull apart,” added Jonathan.

“Yes. Of course after we catch up we’ll be all right.”

“I wouldn’t count too much on catching up.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The farm has had a long start.”

“But you’re a Yankee,” I argued; “the Yankee nature fairly feeds on such jobs—‘putter jobs,’ you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Only, of course, you get on faster if you’re not too particular about having the exact tool—”

Considered as a Yankee, Jonathan’s only fault is that when he does a job he likes to have a very special tool to do it with. Often it is so special that I have never heard its name before and then I consider he is going too far. He merely thinks I haven’t gone far enough. Perhaps such matters must always remain matters of opinion. But even with this handicap we did begin to catch up, and we could have done this a good deal faster if it had not been for the pump.

The pump was a clear case of new wine in an old bottle. It was large and very strong. The people who worked it were strong too. But the walls and floor to which it was attached were not strong at all. And so, one night, when Jonathan wanted a walk I was obliged instead to suggest the pump.

“What’s the matter there?”

“Why, it seems to have pulled clear of its moorings. You look at it.”

He looked, with that expression of meditative resourcefulness peculiar to the true Yankee countenance. “H’m—needs new wood there,—and there; that stuff’ll never hold.” And so the old bottle was patched with new skin at the points of strain, and in the zest of reconstruction Jonathan almost forgot to regret the walk. “We’ll have it to-morrow night,” he said: “the moon will be better.”

The next evening I met him below the turn of the road. “Wonderful night it’s going to be,” he said, as he pushed his wheel up the last hill.

“Yes—” I said, a little uneasily. I was thinking of the kitchen pump. Finally I brought myself to face it.

“There seems to be some trouble—with the pump,” I said apologetically. I felt that it was my fault, though I knew it wasn’t.

“More trouble? What sort of trouble?”

“Oh, it wheezes and makes funny sucking noises, and the water spits and spits, and then bursts out, and then doesn’t come at all. It sounds a little like a cat with a bone in its throat.”

“Probably just that,” said Jonathan: “grain of sand in the valve, very likely.”

“Shall I get a plumber?”

“Plumber! I’ll fix it myself in three shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Well,” I said, relieved: “you can do that after supper while I see that all the chickens are in, and those turkeys, and then we’ll have our walk.”

Accordingly I went off on my tour. When I returned the pale moon-shadows were already beginning to show in the lingering dusk of the fading daylight. Indoors seemed very dark, but on the kitchen floor a candle sat, flaring and dipping.

“Jonathan,” I called, “I’m ready.”

“Well, I’m not,” said a voice at my feet.

“Why, where are you? Oh, there!” I bent down and peered under the sink at a shape crouched there. “Haven’t you finished?”

“Finished! I’ve just got the thing apart.”

“I should say you had!” I regarded the various pieces of iron and leather and wood as they lay, mere dismembered shapes, about the dim kitchen.

“It doesn’t seem as if it would ever come together again—to be a pump,” I said in some depression.

“Oh, that’s easy! It’s just a question of time.”

“How much time?”

“Heaven knows.”

“Was it the valve?”

“It was—several things.”

His tone had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics, as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a traveler who has learned to ask questions in a foreign tongue, but not to understand the answers.

“Well, I’ll bring my sewing out here—or would you rather have me read to you? There’s something in the last number of—”

“No—get your sewing—blast that screw! Why doesn’t it start?”

Evidently sewing was better than the last number of anything. I settled myself under a lamp, while Jonathan, in the twilight beneath the sink, continued his mystic rites, with an accompaniment of mildly vituperative or persuasive language, addressed sometimes to his tools, sometimes to the screws and nuts and other parts, sometimes against the men who made them or the plumbers who put them in. Now and then I held a candle, or steadied some perverse bit of metal while he worked his will upon it. And at last the phœnix did indeed rise, the pump was again a pump,—at least it looked like one.

“Suppose it doesn’t work,” I suggested.

“Suppose it does,” said Jonathan.

He began to pump furiously. “Pour in water there!” he directed. “Keep on pouring—don’t stop—never mind if she does spout.” I poured and he pumped, and there were the usual sounds of a pump resuming activity: gurglings and spittings, suckings and sudden spoutings; but at last it seemed to get its breath—a few more long strokes of the handle, and the water poured.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Oh, fairly late—about ten—ten minutes past.”

Instead of our walk, we stood for a moment under the big maples before the house and looked out into a sea of moonlight. It silvered the sides of the old gray barns and washed over the blossoming apple trees beyond the house. Is there anything more sweetly still than the stillness of moonlight over apple blossoms! As we went out to the barns to lock up, even the little hencoops looked poetic. Passing one of them, we half roused the feathered family within and heard muffled peepings and a smothered _clk-clk_. Jonathan was by this time so serene that I felt I could ask him a question that had occurred to me.

“Jonathan, how long _is_ three shakes of a lamb’s tail?”

“Apparently, my dear, it is the whole evening,” he answered unruffled.

The next night was drizzly. Well, we would have books instead of a walk. We lighted a fire, May though it was, and settled down before it. “What shall we read?” I asked, feeling very cozy.

Jonathan was filling his pipe with a leisurely deliberation good to look upon. With the match in his hand he paused—“Oh, I meant to tell you—those young turkeys of yours—they were still out when I came through the yard. I wonder if they went in all right.”

I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them “our turkeys,” but in the spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly youth, he is apt to allude to them as “those young turkeys of yours.”

I rose wearily. “No. They never go in all right when they get out at this time—especially on wet nights. I’ll have to find them and stow them.”

Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe. “You’ll need the lantern,” he said.

We went out together into the May drizzle—a good thing to be out in, too, if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little turkeys who literally don’t know enough to go in when it rains, and when you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems different, the drizzle seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.

We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds, listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them, half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish prudence to fools.

“Nine o’clock,” said Jonathan, “and we’re too wet to sit down. If you could just shut in those turkeys on wet days—”

“Shut them in! Didn’t I shut them in! They must have got out since four o’clock.”

“Isn’t the shed tight?” he asked.

“Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is turkey-tight.”

“They’re bigger than chickens.”

“Not in any one spot they aren’t. They’re like coiled wire—when they stretch out to get through a crack they have _no_ dimension except length, their bodies are mere imaginary points to hang feathers on. You don’t know little turkeys.”

It might be said that, having undertaken to raise turkeys, we had to expect them to act like turkeys. But there were other interruptions in our evenings where our share of responsibility was not so plain. For example, one wet evening in early June we had kindled a little fire and I had brought the lamp forward. The pump was quiescent, the little turkeys were all tucked up in the turkey equivalent for bed, the farm seemed to be cuddling down into itself for the night. We sat for a moment luxuriously regarding the flames, listening to the sighing of the wind, feeling the sweet damp air as it blew in through the open windows. I was considering which book it should be and at last rose to possess myself of two or three.

“Sh—h—h!” said Jonathan, a warning finger raised.

I stood listening.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Sh—h!” he repeated. “There!”

This time, indeed, I heard faint bird-notes.

“Young robins!” He sprang up and made for the back door with long strides.

I peered out through the window of the orchard room, but saw only the reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes.

“Where are you?” I called into it.

The whistle again, quite near me, apparently out of the air.

“Bring a lantern,” came a whisper.

I got it and came back and down the steps to the path, holding up my light and peering about in search of the voice.

“Where are you? I can’t see you at all.”

“Right here—look—here—up!” The voice was almost over my head.

I searched the dark masses of the tree—oh, yes! the lantern revealed the heel of a shoe in a crotch, and above,—yes, undoubtedly, the rest of Jonathan, stretched out along a limb.

“Oh! What are you doing up there?”

“Get me a long stick—hoe—clothes-pole—anything I can poke with. Quick! The cat’s up here. I can hear her, but I can’t see her.”

I found the rake and reached it up to him. From the dark beyond him came a distressed mew.

“Now the lantern. Hang it on the teeth.” He drew it up to him, then, rake in one hand and lantern in the other, proceeded to squirm out along the limb.

“Now I see her.”

I saw her too—a huddle of yellow, crouched close.

“I’ll have her in a minute. She’ll either have to drop or be caught.”

And in fact this distressing dilemma was already becoming plain to the marauder herself. Her mewings grew louder and more frequent. A few more contortions brought the climber nearer his victim. A little judicious urging with the rake and she was within reach. The rake came down to me, and a long, wild mew announced that Jonathan had clutched.

“I don’t see how you’re going to get down,” I said, mopping the rain-mist out of my eyes.

“Watch me,” panted the contortionist.

I watched a curious mass descend the tree, the lantern, swinging and jerking, fitfully illumined the pair, and I could see, now a knee and an ear, now a hand and a yellow furry shape, now a white collar, nose, and chin. There was a last, long, scratching slide. I snatched the lantern, and Jonathan stood beside me, holding by the scruff of her neck a very much frazzled yellow cat. We returned to the porch where her victims were—one alive, in a basket, two dead, beside it, and Jonathan, kneeling, held the cat’s nose close to the little bodies while he boxed her ears—once, twice; remonstrant mews rose wild, and with a desperate twist the culprit backed out under his arm and leaped into the blackness.

“Don’t believe she’ll eat young robin for a day or two,” said Jonathan.

“Is that what they were? Where were they?”

“Under the tree. She’d knocked them out.”

“Could you put this one back? He seems all right—only sort of naked in spots.”

“We’ll half cover the basket and hang it in the tree. His folks’ll take care of him.”

Next morning early there began the greatest to-do among the robins in the orchard. They shrieked their comments on the affair at the top of their lungs. They screamed abusively at Jonathan and me as we stood watching. “They say we did it!” said Jonathan. “I call that gratitude!”

I wish I could record that from that evening the cat was a reformed character. An impression had indeed been made. All next day she stayed under the porch, two glowing eyes in the dark. The second day she came out, walking indifferent and debonair, as cats do. But when Jonathan took down the basket from the tree and made her smell of it, she flattened her ears against her head and shot under the porch again.

But lessons grow dim and temptation is freshly importunate. It was not two weeks before Jonathan was up another tree on the same errand, and when I considered the number of nests in our orchard, and the number of cats—none of them really our cats—on the place, I felt that the position of overruling Providence was almost more than we could undertake, if we hoped to do anything else.

* * * * *

These things—tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in the orchard and among the poultry—filled our evenings fairly full. Yet these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples either. They were the sort of things that happened oftenest, the common emergencies incidental to the life. But there were also the uncommon emergencies, each occurring seldom but each adding its own touch of variety to the tale of our evenings.

For instance, there was the time of the great drought, when Jonathan, coming in from a tour of the farm at dusk, said, “I’ve got to go up and dig out the spring-hole across the swamp. Everything else is dry, and the cattle are getting crazy.”

“Can I help?” I asked, not without regrets for our books and our evening—it was a black night, and I had had hopes.

“Yes. Come and hold the lantern.”

We went. The spring-hole had been trodden by the poor, eager creatures into a useless jelly of mud. Jonathan fell to work, while I held the lantern high. But soon it became more than a mere matter of holding the lantern. There was a crashing in the blackness about us and a huge horned head emerged behind my shoulder, another loomed beyond Jonathan’s stooping bulk.

“Keep ’em back,” he said. “They’ll have it all trodden up again—Hi! You! Ge’ back ’ere!” There is as special a lingo for talking to cattle as there is for talking to babies. I used it as well as I could. I swung the lantern in their faces, I brandished the hoe-handle at them, I jabbed at them recklessly. They snorted and backed and closed in again,—crazy, poor things, with the smell of the water. It was an evening’s battle for us. Jonathan dug and dug, and then laid rails, and the precious water filled in slowly, grew to a dark pool, and the thirsty creatures panted and snuffed in the dark just outside the radius of the hoe-handle, until at last we could let them in. I had forgotten my books, for we had come close to the earth and the creatures of the earth. The cows were our sisters and the steers our brothers that night.

Sometimes the emergency was in the barn—a broken halter and trouble among the horses, or perhaps a new calf. Sometimes a stray creature,—cow or horse,—grazing along the roadside, got into our yard and threatened our corn and squashes and my poor, struggling flower-beds. Once it was a break in the wire fence around Jonathan’s muskmelon patch in the barn meadow. The cows had just been turned in, and if it wasn’t mended that evening it meant no melons that season, also melon-tainted cream for days.

Once or twice each year it was the drainpipe from the sink. The drain, like the pump, was an innovation. Our ancestors had always carried out whatever they couldn’t use or burn, and dumped it on the far edge of the orchard. In a thinly settled community, there is much to be said for this method: you know just where you are. But we had the drain, and occasionally we didn’t know just where we were.

“Coffee grounds,” Jonathan would suggest, with a touch of sternness.

“No,” I would reply firmly; “coffee grounds are always burned.”

“What then?”

“Don’t know. I’ve poked and poked.”

A gleam in the corner of Jonathan’s eye—“What with?”

“Oh, everything.”

“Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?”

“Why—hair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then button-hook—you needn’t smile. Button-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out—” Jonathan was laughing by this time—“Well, I have to use what I have, don’t I?”

“Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?”

“After that—oh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod.”

“The devil you did!”

“Not at all. It wasn’t hurt a bit. It just wouldn’t go down, that’s all. So then I thought I’d wait for you.”

“And now what do you expect?”

“I expect you to fix it.”

Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it. Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a whole evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst through—and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a sight, and there was—undoubtedly there was—a strong smell of coffee. Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its position, while the rest of us cleared up the kitchen,—it’s astonishing what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,—and as our friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in “Hamlet,” shouted, “Hold ’em! There’s half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can finish.” Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn’t have to pack it down. We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot, in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering, through his sleep, “Who’s sick now?” How could they know it was only a plumbing party?

As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the year. It isn’t so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction in the world, that we meant, on that particular evening, to have a plumbing party, with the drain as the _pièce de résistance_. Toward this our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!

Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs broke out of the pen, about nine o’clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs. Hiram needed our help to get them in—there was no use in pretending that we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game, but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the only way to keep one’s temper at all is to regard it, for the time being, as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own rewards. But the attitude is difficult to maintain, especially late at night.

On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the house, I could not refrain from saying, with some edge, “I never wanted to keep pigs anyway.”

“Who says we’re keeping them?” remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and laughed.

“You needn’t think I’m laughing because you said anything specially funny,” I said. “It’s only because I’m tired enough to laugh at anything.”

The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I finally broke out, “Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!”

“I’ll have the thing together now in a jiffy,” said Jonathan.

“Jiffy! There’s no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night,” I snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked. “Why can’t we find a really simple way of living? This isn’t simple. It’s highly complex and very difficult.”

“You cut those washers very well,” suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I was not prepared to be soothed.

“It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we’ve done this evening! We’ve shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog’s chain, and now we’ve fixed the pump—and it won’t stay fixed at that!”

“Fair evening’s work,” murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.

“Yes, as work. But all I mean is—it isn’t _simple_. Farm life has a reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesn’t seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of a—I don’t know what!”

“I like your climaxes,” said Jonathan, and we both laughed. “There! I’m done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and chicken-houses.”

* * * * *

And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and quiet things—books and firelight and moonlight and talk; many in retrospect full of things quite different—drains and latches and fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the “critters” were at rest. Evenings when we sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and searched for a philosophy to cover them.

“I’m beginning to see that it will never be any better,” I said.

“Probably not,” said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.

“You seem contented enough about it.”

“I am.”

“I don’t know that I’m contented, but perhaps I’m resigned. I believe it’s necessary.”

“Of course it’s necessary.”

Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on, “You see, we’re right down close to the earth that is the ultimate basis of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we have to make immediate adjustments to them.”

“And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings.”

“Now if we’re in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those adjustments for us. We’re like the princess with seventeen mattresses between her and the pea.”

“She felt it, though,” said Jonathan. “It kept her awake.”

“I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn’t been there.”

“True,” said Jonathan.

“Farm life is the pea without the mattresses—” I went on.

“Sounds a little cheerless,” said Jonathan.

“Well—of course, it isn’t really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy. It’s full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment.”

“That was the way the princess felt about her pea.”

“The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn’t call her soul her own a minute, I suppose.”

“Perhaps that was why she ran away,” suggested Jonathan.

“Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn’t find it.”

“No. She found the pea—even with all those mattresses.”

“And we’ve run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses,” said Jonathan.

“Let’s not get confused—”

“I’m not confused,” said Jonathan.

“Well, I shall be in a minute if I don’t look out. You can’t follow a parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of complexity you run into another kind.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to like it all,” I answered, “and make believe I meant to do it.”

After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again. “You know your trick of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t do that with our souls.”

“That suggests to me a rather curious picture,” said Jonathan.

“Well—you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass stays quiet.”

“Well—”

“Well, I don’t see why—only, of course, our souls aren’t really anything like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of carrying them around carefully like that.”

“Perhaps you’d better back out of that figure of speech,” suggested Jonathan. “Go back to your princess. Say, ‘every man his own mattress.’ ”

“No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers you, and if you don’t notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking.”

“And yet you can’t think without them.”

“No, you can’t think without them.”

“Well—where are we, anyway?” he asked placidly.

“I don’t know at all. Only I feel sure that leading the simple life doesn’t depend on the things you do it _with_. Feeding your own cows and pigs and using pumps and candles brings you no nearer to it than marketing by telephone and using city water supply and electric lighting. I don’t know what does bring you nearer, but I’m sure it must be something inside you.”

“That sounds rather reasonable,” said Jonathan; “almost scriptural—”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

IV

After Frost

It is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season, _will_ there be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.

“Too much wind for frost,” says he.

“Sure? I’d hate to lose my nasturtiums quite so early.”

“You won’t lose ’em. Look at the thermometer if you don’t believe me. If it’s above forty you’re safe.”

I look, and try to feel reassured. But I am not quite easy in my mind until next morning when, running out before breakfast, I make the rounds and find everything untouched.

But a few days later the alarm comes again. There is no wind this time, and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and meadow. “Why is everything so still?” I ask myself. “Oh, of course—the katydids aren’t talking—and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y things. Ah! That means business! My poor garden!”

“Jonathan!” I call, as I feel rather than see his shape whirling noiselessly in at the big gate after his ride up from the station. “Help me cover my nasturtiums. There’ll be frost to-night.”

“Maybe,” says Jonathan’s voice.

“Not maybe at all—surely. Listen to the katydids!”

“You mean, listen to the absence of katydids.”

“Very well. The point is, I want newspapers.”

“No. The point is, I am to bring newspapers.”

“Exactly.”

“And tuck up your nasturtiums for the night in your peculiarly ridiculous fashion—”

“I know it looks ridiculous, but really it’s sensible. There may be weeks of summer after this.”

And so the nasturtiums are tucked up, cozily hidden under the big layers of sheets, whose corners we fasten down with stones. To be sure, the garden _is_ rather a funny sight, with these pale shapes sprawling over its beds. But it pays. For in the morning, though over in the vegetable garden the squash leaves and lima beans are blackened and limp, my nasturtiums are still pert and crisp. I pull off the papers, wondering what the passers-by have thought, and lo! my gay garden, good for perhaps two weeks more!

But a day arrives when even newspaper coddling is of no avail. Sometimes it is in late September, sometimes not until October, but when it comes there is no resisting.

The sun goes down, leaving a clear sky paling to green at the horizon. A still cold falls upon the world, and I feel that it is the end. Shears in hand, I cut everything I can—nasturtiums down to the ground,—leaves, buds, and all,—feathery sprays of cosmos, asters by the armful. Those last bouquets that I bring into the house are always the most beautiful, for I do not have to save buds for later cutting. There will, alas, be no later cutting.

So I fill my bowls and vases, and next morning I go out, well knowing what I shall see. It is a beautiful sight, too, if one can forget its meaning. The whole golden-green world of autumn has been touched with silver. In the low-lying swamp beyond the orchard it is almost like a light snowfall. The meadows rising beyond the barns are silvered over wherever the long tree-shadows still lie. And in my garden, too, where the shadows linger, every leaf is frosted, but as soon as the sun warms them through, leaf and twig turn dark and droop to the ground. It is the end.

Except, indeed, for my brave marigolds and calendulas and little button asters. It is for this reason that I have given them space all summer, nipping them back when they tried to blossom early, for they seem a bit crude compared with the other flowers. But now that frost is here, my feelings warm to them. I cannot criticize their color and texture, so grateful am I to them for not giving up. And when last night’s cuttings have faded, I shall be very glad of a glowing mass of marigold beside my fireplace, and of the yellow stars of calendula, like embodied sunshine, on my dining-table.

Well, then, the frost has come! And after the first pang of realization, I find that, curiously enough, the worst is over. Since it has come, let it come! And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.

I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! Down again to the good brown earth!

It is with positive satisfaction that I stand and survey my beds, great bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.

There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and the successes shall be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to look them up—yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half covered with honeysuckle.

Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted, but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept seeds of this year’s poppies—funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure that even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.

Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for next year but for the year after. Next year’s bloom is secured—unless they winter-kill—in this year’s young plants, growing since spring, or even since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer’s beauty. But for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then need the early start given by fall sowing.

As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures—young plants, seedlings from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust to the youngsters to fill their places. These, and English daisies, I let grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.

When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!

My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.

Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in August, a few years ago, I discovered under the shade of an old crab tree, two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.

Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of all is it on moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with their intermittent burring of furry wings.

Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and, with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space. Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year, or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious, either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds for itself.

There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its foliage. I take them up and set them out near the main phlox masses, and wait for the next season’s blossoming before I give them their final place.

This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.

As I am thus occupied,—digging, planting, thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant Antæus for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.

But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.

For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young foxgloves, I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I thin my forget-me-not I see it—in my mind’s eye—in a blue mist of spring bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me afresh—after frost.

V

The Joys of Garden Stewardship

I sometimes think I am coming to classify my friends according to the way they act when I talk about my garden. On this basis, there are three sorts of people.

First there are those who are obviously not interested. Such as these feel no answering thrill, even at the sight of a florist’s spring catalogue. A weed inspires in them no desire to pull it. They may, however, be really nice people if they are still young; for, except by special grace, no one under thirty need be expected to care about gardens—it is a mature taste. But in the mean time I turn our talk in other channels.

Then there are the people who, when I approach the subject, brighten up, look intelligent, even eager, but in a moment make it clear that what they are eager for is a chance to talk about their own gardens. Mine is merely the stepping-stone, the bridge, the handle. This is better than indifference, yet it is sometimes trying. One of my dearest friends thus tests my love now and then when she walks in my garden.

“Aren’t those peonies lovely?” I suggest.

“Yes,” dreamily; “you know I can’t have that shade in my garden because—” and she trails off into a disquisition that I could, just at that moment, do without.

“Look at the height of that larkspur!” I say.

“Yes—but, you know, it wouldn’t do for me to have larkspur when I go away so early. What I need is things for April and May.”

“Well, I am not trying to _sell_ you any,” I am sometimes goaded into protesting. “I only wanted you to say they are pretty—pretty right here in _my_ garden.”

“Yes—yes—of course they are pretty—they’re lovely—you have a lovely garden, you know.” She pulls herself up to give this tribute, but soon her eyes get the faraway look in them again, and she is murmuring, “Oh, I must write Edward to see about that hedge. Tell me, my dear, if you had a brick wall, would you have vines on it or wall-fruit?”

It is of no use. I cannot hold her long. I sometimes think she was nicer when she had no garden of her own. Perhaps she thinks I was nicer when I had none.

But there is another kind of garden manners—a kind that subtly soothes, cheers, perhaps inebriates. It is the manner of the friend who may, indeed, have a garden, but who looks at mine with the eye of adoption, temporarily at least. She walks down its paths, singling out this or that for notice. She suggests, she even criticizes, tenderly, as one who tells you an “even _more_ becoming way” to arrange your little daughter’s hair. She offers you roots and seeds and seedlings from her garden, and—last touch of flattery—she begs seeds and seedlings from yours.

For garden purposes, give me the manners of this third class. And, indeed, not for garden purposes alone. They are useful as applied to many things—children, particularly, and houses.