The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 31

Just behind the barn he built me a lean-to shed, about seventy-five feet long, open toward the east, and shingled rainproof. It cost me $500, but every night every piece of farm machinery and every farm wagon went under it, and the mowing-machine was further covered with a tarpaulin.

For more than a year my shed was the only one of the kind in Bentford, and that next winter I used to see machinery standing behind barns, half buried in snow and ice, going to pieces for want of care. I verily believe that the New England farmer of to-day is the most shiftless mortal north of the Mason and Dixon line--and he hasn't hookworm for an excuse.

My next expenditure was for a cement root cellar, which scarcely needs defence, as I had no silo on the barn, and it would not pay to install one for only two cows. But the third item filled Mike with scorn. I had been making him milk the cows out of doors for some weeks, taking a tip from one of the big estates, and keeping an eye on him to see that he washed his hands properly and put on one of the white milking coats I had purchased. His utter contempt for that white rig was comical, but when I told him that I was going to have a cork and asphalt brick floor laid in the cow shed, he was speechless. He had endured the white ap.r.o.n, and the spectacle of the tuberculin test (the latter because the law made him), but an expensive floor in the barn was too much. He gave me one pitying look, and walked away.

The floor was laid, however, and when it was completed, and the drainage adjusted, Hard Cider trimmed up the supports of the barn cellar door and the two cellar window frames behind, and built in substantial screens.

I didn't tell Mike about them till they were all in. Then I showed them to him, and told him he was to keep them closed under penalty of his job, and he was further to sprinkle chloride of lime on the manure once a week.

"Well, I niver seen screens on a barn before," said he, "and I guess n.o.body else iver did. Shure, it's to be spendin' your money azy ye are.

Are yez goin' to put in a bathroom for the horse?"

Bert was almost as scornful of the screens as Mike, though he understood the cork-asphalt floor, having, in fact, unconsciously persuaded me to install it by telling me how the cows of a dairyman in the next town had been injured by slipping on a concrete floor. My floor had the advantages of concrete, but gave the cows a footing. There had never been screens on a barn in Bentford before, however, nor any chloride of lime used. This was too much for Bert. But Mrs. Bert was interested.

After our screens had been on ten days and the barn cellar had been limed, Mrs. Pillig pointed out that the number of flies caught on the fly paper on the kitchen door had decreased at least 400 per cent.

"And I think what's there now come down from your place," she added to Mrs. Bert. The next thing we knew, Bert was talking of screening his stable. Truth compels me to admit, however, that he never got beyond the talking stage.

In the face of these expenditures, our garden expenses were a mere song, yet we had begun to plant and plan for the following year as soon as the pool was done. We knew we were green, and we did not scorn the advice of books and still more of our best practical friend--the head gardener on one of the large estates, who knew the exactions of our climate and the conditions of our soil.

"Plant your perennial seeds in as rich and cool a place as you can,"

he told us, "and expect to lose at least three fourths of your larkspur.

When your foxglove plants are large enough to transplant, make long trenches in the vegetable garden, with manure at the bottom and four inches of soil on top, and set in the plants. Do it early in September if you can, so that they can make roots before our early frosts. Then you'll have fine plants for bedding in spring. If you buy any plants, get 'em from a nursery farther north if possible. They have to be very hardy here."

We went through the seed catalogues as one wanders amid manifold temptations, but we kept to our purpose of planting only the simpler, more old-fashioned blooms at present. In addition to the bulbs, which came later, we resolved to sow pansies, sweet William, larkspur, Canterbury bells, foxglove, peach bells, Oriental poppies, platicodon, veronica, mallow (for backing to the pool especially), hollyhocks, phlox (both the early variety, the divaricata, blooming in May, and, of course, the standard decussata. The May phlox we secured in plants).

All these seeds were carefully planted in the new beds between the pool and the orchard, where we could water them plentifully, and Stella, with the instincts of the true gardener, babied and tended those seedlings almost as if they were human. Without her care, probably, they would never have pulled through the dry, hot weeks which followed.

We used to walk down to see them every morning after breakfast, when Stella watered them, dipping the water from the pool and sending Antony and Cleopatra scurrying. Antony and Cleopatra were the goldfish which the Eckstroms, true to their promise, had sent us. The poor things were unnamed when they arrived, but their aspect--the one dark and sinuous, the other pompously golden--betrayed their ident.i.ty. Stella called a few days after their arrival, to convey our thanks--carefully waiting till she saw the Eckstroms driving out in their car! Their curiosity having been satisfied regarding us, and our thanks having been rendered to them, further intercourse lapsed. We have never tried to maintain relations with those of our neighbours who bore us, or with whom we have nothing in common. Life is too short.

Not only did Stella water the seedlings religiously, but she kept the soil mulched and the weeds out, working with her gloved hands in the earth. All the seeds came up well save the phlox, with which we had small luck, and the _Papaver Orientalis_, with which we had no luck at all. Not a seed came up, and not a seed ever has come up in our soil. We have had to beg the plants from other people. Even as the gardener predicted, the tender little larkspur plants mysteriously died. We ringed them with stiff paper, we surrounded them with coal ashes, we even sprayed them with Bordeaux and a.r.s.enate of lead. But still they were devoured at the roots or the tops, or mysteriously gave up the ghost with no apparent cause. We started with two hundred, and when autumn came we had just thirty left.

"Still," said Stella cheerfully, "thirty will make quite a brave show."

"If they survive the winter," said I gloomily. "I've not the patience to be a gardener."

"It _is_ a good deal like reform!" Stella replied.

As the busy autumn days came upon us, Twin Fires took on a new aspect, and one to us greenhorns indescribably thrilling. In the first place, our field of corn rustled perpetually as we walked past it, and down in the greenish-golden lanes beneath we could see the orange gleam of pungkins (I shall so spell the word lest it be misp.r.o.nounced by the ignorant). Great ears of the Stowell's evergreen were ripe, for Mike's prediction about the early frost had not come true, and we ate the succulent food clean to the cob every day at dinner, besides selling many dozens of ears to the market. In the long light of afternoon, Stella loved to go along the path by the hayfield wall and then turn in amid the corn, losing sight at once of all the universe and wandering in a new world of rustling leaves. She felt, she said, just as Alice must have felt after she had eaten the cake; and once a rabbit bounded across her foot, to her unspeakable delight. She looked to see if he had dropped his gloves!

Then there was the potato field. We were eating our own new potatoes now.

Often Stella dug them.

"It seems so funny to go and dig up a potato," she declared. "I've always felt that potatoes _just were_. But to see the whole process of growth is quite another matter. Oh, John, it makes them so much nicer!"

"Especially when you are getting seventy-five cents a bushel for them,"

I laughed.

The loaded tomato vines, too, with the red fruit hanging out from the wire frames and sending a pungent odour into the surrounding air, appealed to Stella endlessly. I used to see her now and then, as I glanced from the south room of a morning, eating a raw tomato like an apple, her head bent forward so that the juice would not spoil her dress.

And there were the apples! Already a red astrachan tree invited us on every trip to the brook, and other old trees were bearing fast reddening fruit. I had wanted to set out more orchard, but we agreed that we could not afford it that year, if we were to build chicken houses against the spring, so I reluctantly gave up the idea. But our old trees, in spite of (or perhaps because of) my spring pruning, were doing fairly well. We had enough for baked apples and cream all winter, anyhow, Stella reckoned, smacking her lips at the thought.

Every day, on our way to the pool, one or the other of us took a hoe along and sc.r.a.ped a tree for five minutes, gradually getting the old bark off, and making a final preparation for a thorough spraying the next winter just so much easier. I used to prune a bit, too, in spare moments, so that by the end of the summer considerable renovation had been accomplished.

And now came the foxglove transplanting. According to the gardener's directions, we took two long rows where the early peas had stood (and where Mike had disobeyed my instructions to spade the vines under, that being a form of green manuring your old-time gardener will not see the value of, I have discovered), trenched them, put in manure and soil, and set out at least 300 foxglove plants six inches apart. It was a cool, cloudy day, and they stood up as though nothing had happened. Then, as an experiment, we moved scores of tiny hollyhocks from the crowded seed beds into their permanent position as a screen between the south kitchen windows and the sundial lawn, and as a border on the west side of the same lawn. They, too, were quite unaffected by the change.

Meanwhile, we ordered our bulbs--hyacinths, daffodils (which in our climate refuse to take the winds of March with beauty, cowardly waiting till May), a few crocuses, _Narcissus poeticus_, Empress narcissus, German iris, j.a.panese iris, and Darwin tulips. We ordered the iris and tulips in named varieties.

"They have such nice names," said Stella, "especially the j.a.panese iris--Kimi-no-megumi, Shirataki, Momochiguma! The tulips are nice, too.

Here is Ariadne and Kate Greenaway hobn.o.bbing with Professor Rauwenhoff!

What's the use of having plants that aren't named? We must show them as much respect as Antony and Cleopatra, or Epictetus and Luella!"

We also experimented with lilies--lemon lilies for the shady north side of the house, tigers for the border beyond the pool, and two or three of the expensive Myriophyllums, just to show that we, too, could go in for the exotic, like our neighbours on the big estates.

When the bulbs came, in October, we looked at the boxes sadly.

"Whew!" said Stella, "you can't be lazy and have a garden, can you?"

"I don't work to-morrow, I guess," said I. "Shall we ask Mike's Joe to help us?"

"Never!" said my wife. "We'll put these bulbs in ourselves. If I had any help, I should feel like the Eckstroms, which G.o.d forbid!"

So the next day at seven-thirty we began. We ringed the pool with German and j.a.panese iris, alternated for succession, and planted a few j.a.panese both below and above the pool, close to the brook. We set the _Narcissus poeticus_ bulbs where, if they grew, the flowers could look at themselves in the mirror below the dam. The Empress narcissus we placed on both sides of the pool just beyond the iris. On each side of the bench we placed a bulb of our precious Myriophyllums, and put the tigers into the borders close to the shrubbery on both sides. The hyacinths went into the sundial beds, the Darwins into the beds at the base of the rose aqueduct, a few crocuses into the sundial lawn, and the daffodils here and there all over the place, where the fancy struck us and the ground invited.

"Now, I'm going to label everything, and put it on a map besides,"

cried Stella, "except the daffodils. I want to forget where they are. I want surprises in the spring. Oh, John, do you suppose they'll come up?"

"Yes, I suppose they will," I laughed, "some of them. But do you suppose we'll ever get the kinks out of our backs?"

"I'm willing to go doubled up the rest of my life, for a garden of daffodils all my own," she cried.

"'And then my heart with pleasure thrills And dances with the daffodils----'

It was very thoughtful of old Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and Masefield, and all the rest to write nice things about the daffodils, wasn't it, John? I wonder if gardens would be so wonderful if it weren't for all their literary suggestions, and the lovely things they remind you of?

Gardens have so much atmosphere! Oh, spring, spring, hurry and come!"

I forgot my lame back in her enthusiasm, and later, when the apples were gathered, the potatoes dug, the beets and carrots in the root cellar, our own sweet cider foamed in a gla.s.s pitcher on our table, and the first snow spits of December whistled across the fields, we put a little long manure over the irises and other bulbs, and pine boughs over the remaining perennials, and wrapped the ramblers in straw, with almost as much laughing tenderness as you would put a child to bed.

The cows were back in the stable, and Mike had revised his opinion of cork-asphalt floors when he realized the ease of cleaning with a hose; the potatoes and apples and onions and beets and carrots for our family use were stored in barrels and bins in the cellar, or spread on shelves, or buried in sand. The vegetable garden was newly ploughed, and manure spread on the hayfield. Antony and Cleopatra had been captured and brought into the dining-room, where they were to spend the winter in a gla.s.s bowl. Epictetus and Luella and Gladys and Gaynor had all burrowed out of sight into the ground. The pageant of autumn on our hills was over, only an amethyst haze succeeding at sunset time.

Wood fires sparkled on our twin hearths. The summer residents had departed. Our first Thanksgiving turkey had been eaten, though a great stone crock of Mrs. Pillig's incomparable mincemeat still yielded up its treasures for ambrosial pies.

"And now," said Stella, "I'm going to find out at last what a country winter is like!"

"And your friends are pitying you down in town," said I. "Don't you want to go back to them till spring?"

Stella looked at the fires, she looked out over the bare garden and the ploughed fields to the dun hillsides, she listened a moment to the whistle of the bleak December wind, she looked at me.

In her eyes I read her answer.

Chapter XXII