Dwellers in Arcady Part 10

_No animal except man digs and plants_

It was only a little after Christmas that we began planning for our spring garden. As commuters, we had once possessed a garden--a bit of ground, thirty-five feet square, but fruitful beyond belief. Now we had broad, enriched s.p.a.ces that in our fancy we saw luxuriant with vegetable and bright with flower.

I suppose one of the most deeply seated of human instincts is to plant and till the soil. It is the thing that separates us most widely from other animal life. The beasts and birds and insects build houses, lay up food, and some of them, even if unwittingly, change the style of their clothing with the seasons. But no animal except man digs and plants and cultivates the flower and fruit and vegetable that nourish his body and soul. It is something that must date back to creation, for in the deepest winter, when the ground is petrified and the skies are low and gray, the very thought of turning up the earth, and raking and planting, awakens a thrill in the innermost recesses of the normal human heart, while a new seed-catalogue, filled with gay pictures and gaudy promises, becomes a poem, nothing less.

What gardens we antic.i.p.ate when the snow lies deep and we pore over those seductive lists by a blazing fire! Never a garden this side of Paradise so fair as they. For there are no weeds in our gardens of antic.i.p.ation, nor pests, nor drought, nor any blight. The sun always shines there, and purple flowers are waving in the wind. No real garden will ever be so beautiful, because it will never quite be bathed in the tender light, never wave with quite the loveliness of those fair, frail gardens of our dreams.

We planted many dream gardens that winter. Splendid catalogues came every little while, and each had its magic of color and special offers--"Six rare roses for a dollar," "Six papers of seeds for ten cents"--six of anything to make the heart happy, for a ridiculously small sum. The rich level behind the barn was to us no longer hard with frost and buried beneath the drifts, but green and waving. Some days we walked out to look over the ground a little and pick the places where we would have things, but our imagination seemed to work better in the house by the big fireplace, especially when we rattled the buff-and-green seed-packets that presently began to come and were kept handy in the sideboard drawer.

Our former garden had been so small that we feared we should not have enough for these new areas, and almost daily we increased certain staples and discovered something we had overlooked, some "New Wonder"

tomato, or "Murphy's Miracle" melon. Being strong for melons, I pinned my faith to Murphy's Miracle, and ordered several packets of the seeds that would produce it. Then I began to have doubts. I said if half those seeds sprouted and did half as well as the catalogue promised, the level behind the barn would fall a prey to Murphy and become just a heap of melons. Elizabeth suggested that I add another acre and devote my summer vacation to peddling them.

Elizabeth was mainly for salads. Anything that could be served with French dressing or mayonnaise found a place on her list. She got a new copy of her favorite Iowa catalogue, and when she found in it a special combination offer of "Twelve new things to eat raw" (it had formerly been nine) she was moved almost to tears.

In the matter of sweet corn and beans our souls were as one--a sort of spiritual succotash, as it were--and we encouraged one another in any new departure that would increase or prolong this staple supply. Flowers we would have pretty much every-where--hollyhocks in odd corners; delphinium and foxglove along the stone walls; bunches of calliopsis and bleeding-heart and peonies; borders of phlox and alyssum; beds of sweet-williams and corn-flowers and columbines--all those lovely, old-fashioned things, with the loveliest old-fashioned names in the world. Where did they get those names, I wonder? for they are among the most wonderful in the language--each one a strain of word music. We ordered hollyhock roots and hollyhock seed, and delphinium roots and delphinium seed, and all the others in roots and seeds that could be had in both ways, and roses and roses and roses, till I found it desirable to lay aside the fascinating catalogues now and then for certain industries in the little room behind the chimney, which I called my study, in order to be able to provide the "inclosed stamps or check, in payment for the same."

But I believe there is no money that one spends so willingly as that invested in garden seeds. That is because the normal human being is a visionary, a speculator in futures, a dealer in dreams. For every penny he spends in winter he pictures an overflowing return in beauty or substance, in flower and fruit, the glorious harvest of radiant summer days.

IV

_Then came Bella--and Gibbs_

We had other entertainments. I have not thus far mentioned the domestic service that followed Lazarus. There was a hiatus of brief duration, and then came Bella--Bella and Gibbs. Bella was from town and of literary a.s.sociation. We inherited her from authors whose ideals perhaps did not accord with hers--I do not know. At all events, she tried ours for a period. I know that she was considerably middle-aged, hard of hearing, and short of sight, and that when I tried to recall her name I could not think of anything but "Hunka-munka." Heaven knows why--it must have expressed her, I suppose.

But Hunka-munka--Bella, I mean--had resources. Her specialties were Kipling and deep-dish apple pie. We could have worried along without Kipling, but her deep-dish pie with whipped cream on it was a poem that won our hearts. I must be fair. Hunka-munka's cooking was all good, as to taste, and if her vision had been a bit more extended it might have been of better appearance. I suppose the steam collected on her super-thick gla.s.ses and she had to work somewhat by guess. Never mind--I still recall her substantial and savory dinners with deep grat.i.tude, especially the pie of the deep dish with whipped cream atop.

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Gibbs came when we acquired Lord Beaconsfield and the furnace. My gifts do not run to the care of a horse and an egg-coal fire. I don t know where Gibbs had matriculated, but he professed to have taken high degrees in those functions, and thus became a part of our establishment.

I think he overestimated his powers in the directions named, but he was not without talents. He could wash and wipe dishes and, incredible as it may seem, he was also literary. Like attracts like, by some law past understanding. To me it still seems a wonderful thing that this little waif of a man with a taste for Tolstoy and a pa.s.sion for long words should have just then landed upon us.

Gibbs had a warm and fairly snug room in the barn--"a veritable bijou of an apartment," he called it, though it was, I think, something less, and he declared that the aroma of the hay and the near presence of Lord Beaconsfield gave him a "truly bucolic emotion" that was an inspiration.

Nevertheless, Gibbs could not resist Bella and her domain. This was proper enough. He was convenient to hand her things, to help with the dishes and to discuss deeply and at length their favorite authors. When our meals were in preparation or safely over there was more literature, five to one, in the kitchen than in any other part of the house.

Sometimes the drift of it came to us. It was necessary for Gibbs to speak up pretty smartly to get his remarks into Hunka-munka's consciousness. Once in the heat of things we heard him say: "One may not really compare or contrast the literary emanations of Tolstoy and Kipling except as to the net human residuum. Difference in environment would preclude any cosmic psychology of interrelationship."

As this n.o.ble sentence came hurtling through the door I felt poor and disheartened. Never could I hope to reach such a height. And here was Gibbs washing dishes and tossing off those things without a thought.

Hunka-munka's reply was lost on us. Like many persons of defective hearing, she had the habit of speaking low, but I do not think her remarks were in the gaudy cla.s.s of her a.s.sociate's.

Their discussions were not entirely of Tolstoy and Kipling. There was a neighborhood library and they took books from it--books which I judge became more romantic as the weeks went by. I judge this because Gibbs grew more careful in the matter of dress, and when the days became pleasanter the two walked down to the bridge across the brook and looked over into the water, after the manner of heroes and heroines in the novels of Mrs. Southworth and Bertha M. Clay.

What might have been the outcome of the discussions, the dish-washings, the walks, the leanings over the bridge at the trysting-place, we may only speculate now. For a time the outlook for this "romance of real life" seemed promising, then came disillusion. Gibbs, alas, had a bent which at first we did not suspect, but which in time became only too manifest. It had its root in a laudable desire--the desire to destroy anything resembling strong drink. Only, I think he went at it in the wrong way. His idea was to destroy it by drinking it up. He miscalculated his capacity. It took no great quant.i.ty of strong waters to partially destroy Gibbs, and at such times he was neither literary nor romantic, no fit mate for Hunka-munka, who had a tidy sum in savings laid away and did not wish to invest it in the destroying process. I do not know what she said to him, at last, but there came a day when he vanished from our sight and knowledge, and the kitchen after dinner was silent. I suppose the change was too much for Hunka-munka, for she saddened and lost vigor. Her deep-dish pies became savorless, the whipped cream smeary and sad of taste. She went the way of all cooks, and if it had not been spring, with the buds breaking and the birds calling and the trout leaping in the brook, we should have grieved as over a broken song.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

I

_We planted a number of things_

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The whistle of a bird means spring; the poking through of the skunk-cabbage in low ground, the growing green mist upon the woods. But there is one thing that has more positive spring in it than any of these--more of the stir and throb of awakening, something identified with that earliest impulse that prompted some remote ancestor to make the first garden. I mean the smell of freshly turned earth with the sun on it. Nothing else is like that; there is a kind of madness in it.

Elizabeth said it was a poem. It is that and something more--a paean, a marching song--a summons to battle.

Luther Merrill came up to plow the s.p.a.ce back of the barn. When he had turned up a furrow or so to the warm April sun, and I got a whiff of it, reason fled. I began capering about with a rake and a hoe, shouting to Elizabeth to bring the seeds--all the seeds--also the catalogues, so that we might order more. Why, those little packages were only a beginning! We must have pounds, quarts, bushels. And we must have other things--sweet-potatoes, for instance, and asparagus--we have overlooked those.

Elizabeth came, and was bitten by that smell, too, but she partially kept her balance. She was in favor of the asparagus and sweet-potatoes, but she said she thought we had better plant what we had of the other things and see how far they would go, before ordering more. She said the seed-houses would probably have enough to go around even a week or so later, and we could use what we had on hand in making what the catalogues referred to as the "first sowing." I was not entirely satisfied, but I submitted. I was too much excited, too glad, to oppose anything. Luther Merrill plowed around and around, and then harrowed and cross-harrowed, while we sorted the yellow packets and picked the earliest things and were presently raking and marking on beds and rows, warm with the fever of tillage.

We did not always agree as to the order of planting. In our small commuter garden we had been restricted by s.p.a.ce limitations and had fallen into the habit of planting rows a good deal closer together than the directions on the packets said--an economy of ground, but not of toil. I had frequently weeded the beds, and had found that my feet were not suited to working between rows six inches apart, while even a baby-sized hoe had to be handled with great care. I said, now that we had the s.p.a.ce, we would separate our rows of beets and radishes and salad full ten to fourteen inches, as advised by the authorities who had written the package directions, and thus give both the plants and the gardener more room.

But Elizabeth had acquired the economy habit. She declared that such rows gave more room for the weeds and that it was too bad to waste the rich ground in that way. I had to draw the most pathetic picture of myself bending over in the hot sun, working with a toy hoe, and pulling weeds with my fingers, through long July days, to effect a compromise.

Experience had taught me that this was the best way to get concessions from Elizabeth. Little could be gained by polemic argument. Besides, it was dangerous. She would resign, and a good deal more than half the joy would go out of that precious employment if I was left to finish it alone. Women are so volatile. It is their main attraction.

The Joy helped us. That is, she had a little hoe and insisted on digging with it in the very places where we were raking and marking and sowing and patting down the fragrant earth that was presently to wax green with fruitfulness. She was not satisfied to go off in a remote corner and make a garden of her own. She was strong for community life, and required close watching. It was necessary, at last, to let her plant a crooked little row without direction or artistic balance. Then she suddenly remembered that she was not a gardener, but a horse, and plowed and harrowed back and forth across the mellow ground.

We planted a number of things that first day of our gardening in Brook Ridge--long rows of lettuce and radishes and pease--the last named two kinds, the bush and dwarf varieties. Pease cannot be sown too early, nor the other things, for that matter. I have known the ground to freeze solid after lettuce and radishes had begun to sprout, without serious resulting damage. We put in some beets, too, and some onions, but we postponed the corn and bean planting. There is nothing gained by putting those tender things in too early. Even if they sprout, they do not thrive unless the weather is really warm, while a light frost lays them low. More than once I have tried very early corn-planting, but never with much result. Once I had quite a patch of it up about three inches high when the wind suddenly went to the north and it was certain that the night would bring frost. I gathered up all the old cans and boxes and hats on the premises and covered every hill of it. That was a good scheme, and most of my corn survived, but six weeks later, when it was green and waving, a neighbor's cow got in and ate it to the last piece.

No, fate is against early corn-planting.

We had seed enough for all we wanted to plant that first day, and a good deal more than enough of some things. It's remarkable how many lettuce seeds there are in a buff packet. I sowed and sowed without being able to use up two packets. I don't see how they can raise and gather so many for five cents. It was the same with most of the other things. I did not need to reorder, and by night I did not particularly want to. It had been a pretty long day of raking and digging and patting down, and I had got over some of the intoxication of the earth smell. Also, I was lame.

I could see that tending a garden of the size we had planned--along, say, in July--was going to be a ch.o.r.e. No one as yet had come to replace our ex-domestic staff: if no one came that ch.o.r.e would fall to me. In the gray of the evening my enthusiasm was at rather low ebb. It was all I could do to make out an order for asparagus and sweet-potato plants.

A cool, quiet bed, in a spring land where frogs are peeping in the moist places, is sweet after such a day.

II

_Out of the blue_

We were not permanently abandoned, however. Bella and Gibbs, our literary forces, were presently replaced by Lena and William. Lena and William were not literary. William was just plain Tipperary, and Lena was a Finn. I extracted Lena one day from a "Norsk Employment Agency,"

selecting her chiefly for her full-moon smile and her inability to speak any English word. The smile had a permanent look, and I reasoned that an inability to speak English would be a bar to her getting away. We should not mind it much ourselves. Having had everything from a Pole to a Patagonian, we were experts on sign language, and rather favored it after the flow of English we had just survived. I personally conducted Lena to the train and landed her safely at Brook Ridge.

William came to us out of the blue. One morning I drew a tin pail of water, bright and splashing from the well, and turned to pour a little of it into the birds drinking-trough, a stone hollowed out at the top. I did not do so, however, for a good reason--a man was sitting on the stone. He had not been there a moment before, and I had heard no sound.

He was gaunt, pale, and dilapidated, and looked as if he had been in a sort of general dog fight. He had a wild cast in his eyes and was in no way prepossessing. His appearance suggested a burglar on sick-leave.

I confess I was startled by this apparition. I set down the pail rather weakly.

"Why, good morning!" I said.

He replied in a high-keyed Irish intonation, at the moment rather feeble in volume.

"C'u'd ye give a man a bite to eat fer some worrk, now?" he asked.