The Jonathan Papers Part 5

"No, but they will be soon. I--why, I just thought I'd see what they were doing."

"So you dug them up?" he probed.

"Not them--just _it_--just one. That's why I marked the place. I didn't want to keep disturbing different ones. Now what _are_ you laughing at?

Wouldn't you have wanted to know? And you wouldn't want to dig up different ones all the time! I don't know much about gardening, but--"

"I'm not laughing," said Jonathan. "Of course I should have wanted to know. And it is certainly better not to dig up different ones. There!

Have I put your Mizpah back right?"

A few days later Jonathan wheeled into the yard and over near where I was kneeling by the phlox. "I saw a lady-slipper bud almost out to-day," he said.

"Did you? Look at my sweet alyssum. It's grown an inch since yesterday,"

I said. "Don't you think I could plant my cosmos and asters now?"

"Thunder!" said Jonathan; "don't you care more about the pink lady-slipper than about your blooming little sweet alyssum?"

"Why, yes, of course. I _love_ lady-slippers. You know I do," I protested; "only--you see--I can't explain exactly--but--it seems to make a difference when you plant a thing yourself. And, oh, Jonathan!

Won't you _please_ come here and tell me if these are young pansies or only plantain? I'm so afraid of pulling up the wrong thing. I do wish somebody would make a book with pictures of all the cotyledons of all the different plants. It's so confusing. Millie had an awful time telling marigold from ragweed last summer. She had to break off a tip of each leaf and taste it. Why do you just stand there looking like that?

Please come and help."

But Jonathan did not move. He stood, leaning on his wheel, regarding me with open amus.e.m.e.nt, and possibly a shade of disapproval.

"Lord!" he finally remarked; "you've got it!"

"Got what?" I said, though I knew.

"The garden germ."

Yes. There was no denying it. I had it. I have it still, and there is very little chance of my shaking it off. It is a disease that grows with what it feeds on. Now and then, indeed, I make a feeble fight against its inroads: I will not have another flower-bed, I will not have any more annuals, I will have only things that live on from year to year and take care of themselves. But--

"Alas, alas, repentance oft before I swore--but was I sober when I swore?

And then--and then--came spring--"

and the florist's catalogues! And is any one who has once given way to them proof against the seductions of those catalogues? Those asters!

Those larkspurs! Those foxgloves and poppies and Canterbury bells! All that ravishing company, mine at the price of a few cents and a little grubbing. Mine! There is the secret of it. Out in the great and wonderful world beyond my garden, nature works her miracles constantly.

She lays her riches at my feet; they are mine for the gathering. But to work these miracles myself,--to have my own little h.o.a.rd that looks to me for tending, for very life,--that is a joy by itself. My little garden bed gives me something that all the luxuriance of woods and fields can never give--not better, not so good, perhaps, but different.

Once having known the thrill of watching the first tiny shoot from a seed that I have planted myself, once having followed it to leaf and flower and seed again, I can never give it up.

My garden is not very big nor very beautiful. Perhaps the stretch of rocks and gra.s.s and weeds beside the house--an expanse which not even the wildest flight of the imagination could call a lawn--perhaps this might be more pleasing if the garden were not there, but it is there, and there it will stay. It means much grubbing. Just putting in seeds and then weeding is, I find, no mere affair of rhetoric. Moreover, I am introduced through my garden to an entirely new set of troubles: beetles and cutworms and moles and hens and a host of marauding creatures above ground and below, whose number and energy amaze me. And each summer seems to add to their variety and resourcefulness. Clearly, the pleasures of a garden are not commensurate with its pains. And yet--

But there is one kind of joy which it gives me at which even the Scoffer--to wit, Jonathan--does not scoff. It began with Aunt Deborah's phlox. Then came Christabel's larkspur. The next summer Mrs. Stone sent me over some of her hardy little fall asters--"artemishy," she called them. And Anne Stafford sent on some hollyhock seeds culled from Emerson's garden. And Great-Aunt Sarah was dividing her peony roots, and said I might take one. And Cousin Patty asked me if I wouldn't like some of her mother's old-fashioned pinks. And so it goes.

And so it will go, I hope, to the end of the long day. Each year my garden has in it more of my friends, and as I look at it I can adopt poor Ophelia's pretty speech in a new meaning, and say, "Larkspur--that's for remembrance; hollyhocks--that's for thoughts."

Remembrance of all those dear other gardens which I have come to know, and in whose beauties I am coming to have a share; thoughts of all those dear other gardeners upon whom, as upon me, the miracle of the seed has laid a spell from which they can never escape.

VI

The Farm Sunday

I have never been able to discover why it is that things always happen Sunday morning. We mean to get to church. We speak of it almost every Sunday, unless there is a steady downpour that puts it quite out of the question. But, somehow, between nine and ten o'clock on a Sunday morning seems to be the farm's busiest time. If there are new broods of chickens, they appear then; if there is a young calf coming, it is his birthday; if the gray cat--an uninvited resident of the barn--must go forth on marauding expeditions, he chooses this day for his evil work, and the air is rent with shrieks of robins, or of cat-birds, or of phoebes, and there is a wrecked nest, and scattered young ones, half-fledged, that have to be gathered into a basket and hung up in the tree again by our united efforts. And always there is the same conversation:

"Well, what about church?"

"Church! It's half-past ten now."

"We can't do it. Too bad!"

"Now, if it hadn't been for that cat!"--or that hen--or that calf!

There are many Sunday morning stories that might be told, but one must be told.

It was a hot, still Sunday in July. The hens sought the shade early, and stood about with their beaks half open and a distant look in their eyes, as if they saw you but chose to look just beyond you. It always irritates me to see the hens do that. It makes me feel hotter. Such a day it was. But things on the farm seemed propitious, and we said at breakfast that we would go.

"I've just got to take that two-year-old Devon down to the lower pasture," said Jonathan, "and then I'll harness. We ought to start early, because it's too hot to drive Kit fast."

"Do you think you'd better take the cow down this morning?" I said, doubtfully. "Couldn't you wait until we come back?"

"No; that upper pasture is getting burned out, and she ought to get into some good gra.s.s this morning. I meant to take her down last night."

"Well, do hurry." I still felt dubious.

"Oh, it's only five minutes' walk down the road," said Jonathan easily.

"I'm all ready for church, except for these shoes. I'll have the carriage at the door before you're dressed."

I said no more, but went upstairs, while Jonathan started for the barnyard. A few minutes later I heard from that direction the sounds of exhortation such as are usually employed towards "critters." They seemed to be coming nearer. I glanced out of a front window, and saw Jonathan and his cow coming up the road past the house.

"Where are you taking her?" I called. "I thought you meant to go the other way."

"So I did," he shouted, in some irritation. "But she swung up to the right as she went out of the gate, and I couldn't head her off in time.

Oh, there's Bill Russell. Head her round, will you, Bill? There, now we're all right."

"I'll be back in ten minutes," he called up at my window as he repa.s.sed.

I watched them go back up the road. At the big farm gate the cow made a break for the barnyard again, but the two men managed to turn her. Just beyond, at the fork in the road, I saw Bill turn down towards the cider-mill, while Jonathan kept on with his convoy over the hill. I glanced at the clock. It was not yet nine. There was plenty of time, of course.

At half-past nine I went downstairs again, and wandered out toward the big gate. It seemed to me time for Jonathan to be back. In the Sunday hush I thought I heard sounds of distant "hi-ing." They grew louder; yes, surely, there was the cow, just appearing over the hill and trotting briskly along the road towards home. And there was Jonathan, also trotting briskly. He looked red and warm. I stepped out into the road to keep the cow from going past, but there was no need. She swung cheerfully in at the big gate, and fell to cropping the long gra.s.s just inside the fence.

Jonathan slowed down beside me, and, pulling out his handkerchief, began flapping the dust off his trousers while he explained:--

"You see, I got her down there all right, but I had to let down the bars, and while I was doing that she went along the road a bit, and when she saw me coming she just kicked up her heels and galloped."