Frenzied Fiction Part 24

Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.

But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberate preparedness. It was rather an ill.u.s.tration of the primitive instinct that is in all of us and that will out in "war time." Any man worth the name would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him.

Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference to wearing patent braces. The makers of the ties know this. That is why they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if any manufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp rim and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat guaranteed to be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certified to have been walked over by a herd of cattle--that man will make and deserve a fortune.

These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where are they now?

The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. They have put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They are shaving again, not merely on Sat.u.r.day night, but every day. They are sinking back into civilization.

Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them.

Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. My neighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on the left was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, little columns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where our wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By six o'clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nine o'clock office.

"How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?" I asked of one of my neighbours during this glad period of early spring before I left for the country. "Time!" he exclaimed. "Why, my dear fellow, I don't have to be down at the warehouse till eight-thirty."

Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked with weeds. "Your garden," I said, "is in poor shape." "Garden!" he said indignantly. "How on earth can I find time for a garden? Do you realize that I have to be down at the warehouse at eight-thirty?"

When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure seems hard indeed to understand. It is only when I survey the whole garden movement in melancholy retrospect that I am able to see some of the reasons for it.

The princ.i.p.al one, I think, is the question of the season. It appears that the right time to begin gardening is last year. For many things it is well to begin the year before last. For good results one must begin even sooner. Here, for example, are the directions, as I interpret them, for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece of ground, preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen, go out three years ago and plough or dig deeply. Remain a year inactive, thinking. Two years ago pulverize the soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last year comes set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing nothing.

The asparagus will then be ready to work at _this_ year.

This is the rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were men of sufficient means to spend several years in quiet thought waiting to begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems, the only way to begin. Asparagus demands a preparation of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries requires three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans, and lettuce the instructions inevitably read, "plough the soil deeply in the preceeding autumn." This sets up a dilemma. _Which_ is the preceeding autumn? If a man begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he begins in the autumn he is again too late; he has missed this summer's crop. It is, therefore, ridiculous to begin in the autumn and impossible to begin in the spring.

This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from the question of the soil itself. All the books and instructions insist that the selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the need of "a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen." This I have never seen.

My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth.

I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam.

There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of mind that I don't know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and I all talked freely of the desirability of "a loam." My own opinion is that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speaking from experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud and dirt. There are no others.

But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregard it. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loam was the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus, if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbages will grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is _one_. You will find as a matter of practical experience that however many cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ that will really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as _the _cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars finally finish their existence) will look but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage will be a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact it would ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage, such as you buy for ten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eat it when it is still only half-grown.

This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and to the one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeble green-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen. They get eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live and sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grown without going out and tearing it off the stem.

Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. The most peculiar thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shoots not large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they are young peas; after that they are old peas. Cuc.u.mbers are the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.

If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they could grow no more.

But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summer operations. They took their coats off and applied college methods. They ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateral spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with a theodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots of their land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through one Sat.u.r.day afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiar ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never--so they agreed--uses his head. He never--I think I have their phrase correct--stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it never occurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given s.p.a.ce. If a farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent the maximum of s.p.a.ce enclosable in a given perimeter, and that a circle is merely a function of its own radius, what a lot of time he would save.

These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashion with little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint of the whole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. The yield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact that some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called "a coefficient of error." By means of this and by reducing the variation of autumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already in the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half a bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fifty acres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market value that they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could produce so much.

Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. The thing amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it ought to have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoe their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy.

To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been working under a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time he could every Sat.u.r.day. It was left to every man's honour to do what he could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there.

In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it was also a new departure in social co-operation. The first Sat.u.r.day that those young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five of them driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Sat.u.r.day there were fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week after that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell upon the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and the choo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.

But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at food production. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returning to the city, is to find the enormous quant.i.ties of produce of all sorts offered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring, by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a large basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry away there need be no further fear of a food famine.

And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soap box with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-six pounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months'

arduous toil in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that I shall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during the rigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainly won't eat the rotten things myself.

XV. The Perplexity Column as Done by the Jaded Journalist

INSTANTANEOUS ANSWERS TO ALL QUESTIONS

(All questions written out legibly with the name and address of the sender and accompanied by one dollar, answered immediately and without charge.)

Harvard Student asks:

Can you tell me the date at which, or on which, Oliver Cromwell's father died?

Answer: No, I can't.

Student of Mathematics asks:

Will you kindly settle a matter involving a wager between myself and a friend? A. bet B. that a pedestrian in walking downhill over a given s.p.a.ce and alternately stepping with either foot, covers more ground than a man coasting over the same road on a bicycle. Which of us wins?

Answer: I don't understand the question, and I don't know which of you is A.

Chess-player asks:

Is the Knight's gambit recognized now as a permissible opening in chess?

Answer: I don't play chess.

Reuben b.o.o.b asks:

For some time past I have been calling upon a young lady friend at her house evenings and going out with her to friends' nights. I should like to know if it would be all right to ask to take her alone with me to the theatre?

Answer: Certainly not. This column is very strict about these things.

Not alone. Not for a moment. It is better taste to bring your father with you.

Auction asks:

In playing bridge please tell me whether the third or the second player ought to discard from weakness on a long suit when trumps have been twice round and the lead is with dummy.

Answer: Certainly.

Lady of Society asks:

Can you tell me whether the widow of a marquis is ent.i.tled to go in to dinner before the eldest daughter of an earl?

Answer: Ha! ha! This is a thing we know--something that we _do_ know.

You put your foot in it when you asked us that. We have _lived_ this sort of thing too long ever to make any error. The widow of a marquis, whom you should by rights call a marchioness dowager (but we overlook it--you meant no harm) is ent.i.tled (in any hotel that we know or frequent) to go in to dinner whenever, and as often, as she likes. On a dining-car the rule is the other way.

Va.s.sar Girl asks:

What is the date of the birth of Caracalla?

Answer: I couldn't say.