The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 6

Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a gra.s.s terrace, with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the other into the gra.s.sy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of the gla.s.s door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled, also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs.

Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.

That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done.

I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all day. I must give up my mornings to my ma.n.u.script reading.

"Well," thought I, "I'll do it--as soon as the orchard is finished."

As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to be painted, and cement work to be done.

"Good gracious!" thought I, "if I do all that, when will I plant, when will I make my lawn?"

Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn't afford to employ more labour. Besides, I didn't want to. I wanted to do the work myself.

But there was so much to do!

I stood stock still and pulled myself together. "Rome was not built in a day," I told myself. "You just take out the worst of the dead wood in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else at odd times during the summer."

Then one of those things called a still, small voice whispered in my ear: "But you should never begin a new job till you have finished the old.

Hoe out your row, my son!"

I recognized the latter words as the catch phrase of a moral story in an ancient reader used in my boyhood school days. Oh, these blighting dogmas taught us in our youth! I resisted the still, small voice, but I felt secretly ashamed. That day I finished the orchard by merely taking out unsightly dead wood and a few of the worst suckers; so that one half of it looked naked and one half bearded, even as the half-shaved hunchback in the "Arabian Nights." I knew I was doing right, yet I felt I was doing wrong, and in my heart of hearts I was never quite happy for a year, till I had that orchard finished.

Meanwhile, Hard Cider had finished the kitchen floor and cut out the new door frame into the dining-room, while the plumbers had mounted the boiler by the range and begun on the piping. Mike and Joe had been busy on the slope to the south, ploughing the most distant portion for the fodder crops and harrowing in load after load of old stable manure from the barn. The next day would bring them into the garden area, so I staked out my contemplated sundial lawn, allowing a liberal 250 feet, and ran the line westward till it came a trifle beyond the last woodshed, whence I ran it north to the shed for the grape arbour.

West of the arbour, on the half acre of slope remaining before the plateau was reached, I planned to set out a new orchard--some day. That same night I filled out an order for fifty rambler roses! "I'll grow 'em on poles, till I can build the trellises," said I. Then I sat down to my ma.n.u.scripts.

The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification of a h.o.a.ry superst.i.tion. Personally, I like best to work at night, and some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But you cannot drive your brain at night when you've been driving your body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming.

Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden and Mike sowing peas.

"Can I have the horse to-morrow?" said I.

"Yez cannot," said Mike. "Sure, we'll be another day at the least gettin' the garden ready."

"But I want to grade my lawn," I said. "The day after, then?"

"Maybe," said Mike. "Yez must make lawns when there's nothin' else at all to do."

"Yes, sir," I replied, and he grinned.

That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider to order the trellis lumber for me.

Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of carbolic solution, I gouged out a few--only a few--of the worst cavities in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of the work to a dentist's filling teeth. If every tree died, I told myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed, carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed, and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden.

Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled gra.s.s (for the orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the barrow back for it.

When six o'clock came I was still carting from the top of the orchard, and for an hour past I had been working with that grim automatism which characterizes the last lap of a two-mile race. There is no joy of creation in clearing up! It is just a grind. And yet it is a part of creation, too, the final stage in the achievement of garden beauty.

I wonder if any gardener exists, though, with the imagination so to regard it while he cleans? Certainly I am not the man. I then and there resolved to finish the job by installments, from day to day. Perhaps, taken a little at a time, it would not seem so boresome!

The next morning the smoke of my burning brush pile was coming over the hill as I drew near my farm. The harrow was at work in the garden.

Hard's hammer was ringing from the chamber over the dining-room, which he was converting into a bathroom so that the plumbers could get to work in it. The old orchard trees held up their cropped and denuded tops with a brave show of buds, and I debated with myself what I should do. "Spray!" I decided. So I got a hoe, and started to sc.r.a.pe the trees mildly on the trunks and large lower limbs, while my lime-sulphur mixture was boiling on the stove. I soon found that here, again, I had tackled a job which would require a day, not an hour, so I gave it up, and put the solution in my spraying barrel, summoned Joe to the pump, and sprayed for scale on the unsc.r.a.ped bark. I was by this time getting used to half measures. You have to, when you try to bring up a farm with limited labour!

The wiseacre has now, of course, foreseen that I killed all the young buds. Alas! I am again compelled to spoil a good story, and confess that I didn't kill any of them. I mixed the lime-sulphur one part to sixty, for I carefully read the warning in my spraying bulletin. I have my doubts whether it was strong enough to kill the scale, certainly not with the bark left on, but at least it was weak enough not to kill the buds, and it was fun applying it.

"There," I cried, as noon came, "the orchard may rest for the present!

Now for the next thing!"

Have you ever watched a small boy picking berries? He never picks a bush clean, but rushes after this or that big cl.u.s.ter of fruit which strikes his eye, covering half an acre of ground while you, perhaps, are stripping a single clump of bushes. And he is usually amazed when your pail fills quicker than his. Alas! I fear I was much like that small boy during my first season on the farm, or at any rate during the first month or two. There was little "efficiency" in my methods--but, oh, much delight!

I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me.

Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden coldframes along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my temporary seed beds there. Mike a.s.sented to the plan as a good one, and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and finally with my hands.

Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves.

Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves.

Surely, thought I, they miss something--the cool, moist feel of the loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o'clock I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with scrupulous care always said, "press the earth down firmly with a board." I was working with a flat mason's trowel, so I got up and found a board. It wasn't half so easy to work with, but I was taking no chances!

"There must," I grinned, "be some magic efficacy in that board."

The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by Professor Grey's a.s.sistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure.

Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues--like a second marriage, alas! too often "the triumph of hope over experience"--or else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.

But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun, beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to; very often I didn't know whether they could be transplanted. (As it turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait.

As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors' b.u.t.tons, love-in-a-mist, Drummond's phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently watered the hopeful earth.

Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was my farm, thence would come my profits--if profits there should be. But just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my dwelling a dream of gardens.

"After all," I thought, "a country place is but half realized without its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that.

I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a gardener--an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within; I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!"

I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.

"What are yez doin' that for?" he asked.

I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. "Just to be a kid, I guess," I laughed.

There are some things Mike couldn't understand. Perhaps I did not clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had waked the echo of their mood.

But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those memories came back with haunting clearness--a summer day, a long tramp, the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden pa.s.sion, the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!

The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit, too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a ma.n.u.script by a rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.

Chapter V

I AM HUMBLED BY A DRAG Sc.r.a.pER

One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul anyway (which no woman and possibly no wise man ever is where carpenters, builders, and plumbers are concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. He told me the plumbers were "doin' all right," and I believed him. That he himself was doing all right my own eyes told me, for he had by now reached the south rooms, removed the dividing part.i.tion, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the centre on either side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn.

I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with their plain-panelled old mantels.