The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 2

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 a.s.signed his chief a.s.sistant 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-cla.s.s 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 d.a.m.n 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 cla.s.ses, 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 n.o.ble 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 j.a.panese print. Standing off a way, however, the pine stood out sharply against the hills and the sky, a n.o.ble 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.suring me that my cows had been tested, and both were sound.

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

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 t.i.tle of the lost ambrosia of Olympus. They were so hot that the b.u.t.ter 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 Ess.e.x or Middles.e.x counties," she said, "if you've et brown bread Joes before."

"Ess.e.x," said I.

"Ess.e.x!" she cried. "Well, well! I came from Georgetown. Bert, he's Middles.e.x. I dunno what we're doing out here in these unG.o.dly, 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 pa.s.sing 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 Caesar'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.

"h.e.l.lo, Mike," said Bert, "this is Mr. John Upton, who's bought Milt n.o.ble'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 Caesar 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?"