The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 7

"Mr. Howard," said I, "those mantels are about as plain as you could make 'em, and yet they are very handsome, somehow, dingy as they are."

"It's the lines," said Hard Cider. "Jest the right lines. Lower 'em six inches, and whar'd they be?"

"Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the centre, making it the back of a double settle?" I asked.

"I'm a carpenter," Hard replied laconically.

"Could you draw me what it would look like first?"

"I ain't said I wuz an artist," he answered. "Draw it yerself."

I took his proffered pencil, and sketched what I wanted on a clean board.

"Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o' them settles," he said judicially. "Ain't no curves in your mantels. You want 'em square, with a panel like them over your fireplaces."

He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick, neat, accurate sketch of just what I instantly saw I did want.

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

I shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead!" said I. "What did you ask me to draw it for in the first place?"

"Folks likes to think they hev their own idees," he answered.

I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The pergola was not commenced. In fact, I had decided not to build it till the following spring. Those beastly painters whom I had forgotten were going to eat up too much of my slender capital. Before me stretched the 250 feet of ploughed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of it was my line of stakes where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last, to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, clumsily put on his harness, for I was not used to horses, led him to the shed where my tools were stored, hitched him to my new drag sc.r.a.per, and drove him to the slope.

As I have said, the ground here sloped down eastward toward the brook, and if I was to have a level lawn south of my house, I should have to remove at least two feet of soil from the western end and deposit it on the eastern end. I wisely decided to start close to the house. Hauling at the handles of the heavy sc.r.a.per and yelling "Back up, there!" at the horse, I got the steel scoop into the ground at the line of my proposed grape arbour, tipped down the blade, and cried, "Giddup!" I hung to the reins as best I could, twisting them about my wrist, and the horse started obediently forward. The scoop did its work very nicely. In fact, it was quite full after we had gone six feet, and I had only to let the horse drag it the remaining ninety-four feet of the proposed width of the lawn, and empty it. Then I went back, and repeated the process. After five repet.i.tions of the same process, the perspicacious reader will have reckoned that I had shaved off something less than half the width of my lawn, on one furrow, and was still a long, long way from being down to the required depth of two feet at the higher end. My arms already ached. As the sc.r.a.per covered a furrow but two feet wide, that meant 125 furrows to sc.r.a.pe my entire lawn as planned, and at least twenty trips to the furrow. I did some rapid multiplication as I paused to wipe my brow. "Twenty times 125 is 2,500," thought I. I dropped the reins and moved toward my stakes. I saw that Joe and Mike were looking at me.

"I think," said I, with some dignity, as I began to pull the stakes up, "that this lawn will look better square. As it's a hundred feet broad, a hundred feet will be far enough to extend it from the house."

"Sure," said Mike, "the big road sc.r.a.per 'll be over here to-morrow, sc.r.a.pin' the road, and it do be easier an' quicker to borry that."

In some ways, I consider this remark of Mike's, under the circ.u.mstances, one of the most gentlemanly I ever heard! And I jumped at his suggestion.

"Mike," said I, "I'll admit this job is bigger than I thought. How can I borrow the road sc.r.a.per?"

"Sure, ain't me frind Dan Morrissy one o' the selictmen?" said Mike, "and ain't he the road boss, and ain't he willin' to earn an extra penny for--for the town?"

"H'm," said I; "for the town! Well, I've got to have this lawn! You get your friend Dan in the morning. Just the same, I don't love the town so much that I want a 250-foot lawn."

I took my line of stakes back 150 feet, and replanted them. That gave me a more intimate lawn, like a large outdoor south room, I thought. It also increased my vegetable garden acreage. I returned to the sc.r.a.per and the patient horse with a new humbleness, a new realization of what one man cannot do in a day. That, perhaps, is one of the first and most important lessons of farming and gardening. Once you have learned it, you are either discouraged or fired anew with the persistence of patience. I was not discouraged. Besides, I had Mike's friend Dan, the selectman, to fall back on! It is always well to be friends with Tammany Hall. First, I decided not to grade even my smaller lawn to a dead level, but merely to smooth it off, letting that process counteract the slope as much as it would. Then I started to scoop again, bringing down the soil from the higher western side directly to the south face of my house and dumping it there, to be packed into a terrace which next season should be the floor of my pergola.

Did you ever try to handle a drag sc.r.a.per and drive the horse at the same time, dear reader? It requires more muscle and as much patience as golf. Joe offered to come and drive for me, but I preferred him to plant, and kept on by myself. It is amazing how much dirt you can dump in one place without increasing the pile perceptibly. The only thing more amazing is the amount of dirt you can take out of one place without perceptibly increasing the depth of your hole. I ran the scoop along the edge of my proposed grape arbour time after time, dumping the contents in front of my new south door, but still that first furrow didn't sink more than six inches, and still the sills of my house rose above the piles. Noon came and found me with aching arms and strained shoulder sockets. I had brought some lunch, to save the walk back to Mrs. Temple's, and I took it into my big south room to eat it.

Hard was in there eating his. The plumbers were eating theirs in the new kitchen, already completed.

Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, which was just the height of the mantels. He had been preparing the top moulding with his universal plane when noon came, and the sweet shavings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while Hard Cider regarded me scornfully.

"I'm going to have great times in this room!" I exclaimed. "Books between the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures, including my Hiroshiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window, and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty good in this room, eh?"

Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. "I don't know nothin' about writin'," he said, "but it 'pears to me a feller could write most anywhar pervided he had somethin' ter say."

Whereupon Hard concluded by biting into a large piece of prune pie.

The Yankee temperament is occasionally depressing! I went outdoors again, eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool hush of them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed in the bath of their peace, and for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just blissfully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, marvellously rested.

I scooped till three o'clock, led the horse back to the barn, got a shovel and rake, and began to spread my terrace. As this south end of my house (and accordingly my big south room) was but thirty-three feet long, the task was not very severe, particularly as the upper, or western, end, did not require much grading. I built the terrace out about twelve feet from the wall, stamped up and down on it to pack it, and raked it smooth. I realized that it would settle, of course, and I should need more earth yet upon it before it was sown down to gra.s.s, or, if I could afford it, bricked; but in order to hold the bank, I got some gra.s.s seed and planted the edge, and also got a couple of planks to stretch from the south door across the terrace and down to the lawn, until I could build my proposed brick path and steps. It was six o'clock when I had finished. Palm-sore and weary, I drank a great tin dipperful of water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard's bookcase, which had already been built out the required five feet into the room along the line of the old part.i.tion, fourteen inches wide to hold books on both sides, tried the doors to see that they were locked, and tramped up the dusty road to supper.

Mrs. Temple was beaming when I came down from my bath.

"Why so happy?" said I.

"Well," said she, "in the first place, I've got you the housekeeper I want."

"By which I infer that she's the one _I_ want, too?" I asked.

"Of course," said Mrs. Temple, on whom irony had no effect. "She's Mrs. Pillig, from Slab City, and she's an artist in pies."

"Go on; you interest me strangely!" I cried. "Is her husband dead, and has she got a small boy?" (Here I winked at Bert.)

"Pillig ain't dead, worse luck," said Mrs. Temple, "but he's whar he won't trouble you. I guess Peter won't trouble you none, neither.

He's a nice boy, and he'll be awful handy round the place."

"Peter Pillig!" I exclaimed. "There ain't no such animal! If there is, d.i.c.kens was his grandfather. How old is Peter?"

"Peter's eleven," Mrs. Bert replied. "He's real nice and bright.

His mother's brought him up fine. Anyhow, she was a Corliss."

"But, eugenically speaking, Peter may have a predisposition to follow in father's footsteps, which I infer led toward the little green swinging doors," I protested.

"Speakin' U. S. A., tommyrot!" said Mrs. Temple. "Anyhow, it's the door o' the drugstore in this town. They sell more'n sody water down to Danforth's."

"What am I to pay the author of Peter and the pies?" I asked.

"Well, seein's how you keep Peter, as it were, and Mrs. Pillig calc'lates she can rent her house up to Slab City, she's goin' to come to you for $20 a month. She's wuth it, too. You'll have the best kept and cleanest house in Bentford."

I rose from the table solemnly. "Mrs. Temple," said I, "I accept Mrs.

Pillig, Peter, and the pies at these terms, but only on one condition: _She is never to clean my study!_"

"Why?" asked Mrs. Temple.

"Because," said I, "you can never tell where an orderly woman will put things."

Bert chuckled as he filled his pipe. Mrs. Temple grinned herself. I was about to make a triumphant exit, when these words from Mrs. Temple's lips arrested me:

"Bert," she said, "did you clean the buggy to-day? You know you gotter go over ter the deepot to-morrow an' git that boarder."

"That _what?_" I cried.

Mrs. Bert's eyes half closed with a purely feminine delight. "Oh, ain't I told you?" she said innocently. "We're goin' ter hev another boarder, a young lady. From Noo York, too. Her health's broke down, she says, only that's not the way she said it, and somehow she heard of us. We ain't never taken many boarders, but I guess our name's in that old railroad advertisin' book. I wouldn't hev took her, only I thought maybe you wuz kind o' lonesome here with jest us."