III

[pg 050]IIIEvenings on the FarmI’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.Robert Frost.When we first planned to take up the farm we looked forward with especial pleasure to our evenings. They were to be the quiet rounding-in of our days, full of companionship, full of meditation.“We’ll do lots of reading aloud,”I said.“And we’ll have long walks. There won’t be much to dobutwalk and read. I can hardly wait.”And I chose our summer books with special reference to reading aloud.“Of course,”I said, as we fell to work at our packing,“we’ll have to do all sorts of things first. But the days are so long up there, and the life is very simple. And in the evenings[pg 051]you’ll help. We ought to be settled in a week.”“Or two—or three,”suggested Jonathan.“Three! What is there to do?”“Farm-life isn’t so blamed simple as you think.”“But whatisthere to do? Now, listen! One day for trunks, one day for boxes and barrels, one day for closets, that’s three, one for curtains, four, one day for—for the garret, that’s five. Well—one day for odds and ends that I haven’t thought of. That’s liberal, I’m sure.”“Better say the rest of your life for the odds and ends you haven’t thought of,”said Jonathan, as he drove the last nail in a neatly headed barrel.“Jonathan, why are you such a pessimist?”“I’m not, except when you’re such an optimist.”“If I’d begun by saying it would take a month, would you have said a week?”“Can’t tell. Might have.”“Anyway, there’s nothing bad about odds and ends. They’re about all women have much to do with most of their lives.”[pg 052]“That’s what I said. And you called me a pessimist.”“I didn’t call you one. I said, why were you one.”“I’m sorry. My mistake,”said Jonathan with the smile of one who scores.* * * * *And so we went.One day for trunks was all right. Any one can manage trunks. And the second day, the boxes were emptied and sent flying out to the barn. Curtains I decided to keep for evening work, while Jonathan read. That left the closets and the attic, or rather the attics, for there was one over the main house and one over the“new part,”—still“new,”although now some seventy years old. They were known as the attic and the little attic. I thought I would do the closets first, and I began with the one in the parlor. This was built into the chimney, over the fireplace. It was low, and as long as the mantelpiece itself. It had two long shelves shut away behind three glass doors through which the treasures within were dimly visible. When I swung these open it felt like opening a tomb—cold, musty[pg 053]air hung about my face. I brushed it aside, and considered where to begin. It was a depressing collection. There were photographs and photographs, some in frames, the rest of them tied up in packages or lying in piles. A few had names or messages written on the back, but most gave no clue; and all of them gazed out at me with that expression of complete respectability that constitutes so impenetrable a mask for the personality behind. Most of us wear such masks, but the older photographers seem to have been singularly successful in concentrating attention on them. Then there were albums, with more photographs, of people and of“views.”There was a big Bible, some prayer-books, and a few other books elaborately bound with that heavy fancifulness that we are learning to call Victorian. One of these was on“The Wonders of the Great West”; another was about“The Female Saints of America.”I took it down and glanced through it, but concluded that one had to be a female saint, or at least an aspirant, to appreciate it. Then there were things made out of dried flowers, out of hair, out of shells, out of pine-cones. There were[pg 054]vases and other ornamental bits of china and glass, also Victorian, looking as if they were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long day—one of the longest days of my life—browsing through the books, trying to sort the photographs, and glancing through a few old letters. I did nothing in particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day’s experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of it to Jonathan later.“It always tasted just that way to me when I was a boy,”he said,“but I never thought much about it—I thought it was just a closet-taste.”[pg 055]“And it isn’t only the taste,”I went on.“It does something to me, to my state of mind. I’m afraid to try the garret.”“Garrets are different,”said Jonathan.“But I’d leave them. They can wait.”“They’ve waited a good while, of course,”I said.And so we left the garrets. We came back to them later, and were glad we had done so. But that is a story by itself.* * * * *Meanwhile, in the evenings, Jonathan helped.“I’m afraid you were more or less right about the odd jobs,”I admitted one night.“They do seem to accumulate.”I was holding a candle while he set up a loose latch.“They’ve been accumulating a good many years,”said Jonathan.“Yes, that’s it. And so the doors all stick, and the latches won’t latch, and the shades are sulky or wild, and the pantry shelves—have you noticed?—they’re all warped so they rock when you set a dish on them.”“And the chairs pull apart,”added Jonathan.[pg 056]“Yes. Of course after we catch up we’ll be all right.”“I wouldn’t count too much on catching up.”“Why not?”I asked.“The farm has had a long start.”“But you’re a Yankee,”I argued;“the Yankee nature fairly feeds on such jobs—‘putter jobs,’ you know.”“Yes, I know.”“Only, of course, you get on faster if you’re not too particular about having the exact tool—”Considered as a Yankee, Jonathan’s only fault is that when he does a job he likes to have a very special tool to do it with. Often it is so special that I have never heard its name before and then I consider he is going too far. He merely thinks I haven’t gone far enough. Perhaps such matters must always remain matters of opinion. But even with this handicap we did begin to catch up, and we could have done this a good deal faster if it had not been for the pump.The pump was a clear case of new wine in an old bottle. It was large and very strong.[pg 057]The people who worked it were strong too. But the walls and floor to which it was attached were not strong at all. And so, one night, when Jonathan wanted a walk I was obliged instead to suggest the pump.“What’s the matter there?”“Why, it seems to have pulled clear of its moorings. You look at it.”He looked, with that expression of meditative resourcefulness peculiar to the true Yankee countenance.“H’m—needs new wood there,—and there; that stuff’ll never hold.”And so the old bottle was patched with new skin at the points of strain, and in the zest of reconstruction Jonathan almost forgot to regret the walk.“We’ll have it to-morrow night,”he said:“the moon will be better.”The next evening I met him below the turn of the road.“Wonderful night it’s going to be,”he said, as he pushed his wheel up the last hill.“Yes—”I said, a little uneasily. I was thinking of the kitchen pump. Finally I brought myself to face it.“There seems to be some trouble—with the pump,”I said apologetically. I felt that it was my fault, though I knew it wasn’t.[pg 058]“More trouble? What sort of trouble?”“Oh, it wheezes and makes funny sucking noises, and the water spits and spits, and then bursts out, and then doesn’t come at all. It sounds a little like a cat with a bone in its throat.”“Probably just that,”said Jonathan:“grain of sand in the valve, very likely.”“Shall I get a plumber?”“Plumber! I’ll fix it myself in three shakes of a lamb’s tail.”“Well,”I said, relieved:“you can do that after supper while I see that all the chickens are in, and those turkeys, and then we’ll have our walk.”Accordingly I went off on my tour. When I returned the pale moon-shadows were already beginning to show in the lingering dusk of the fading daylight. Indoors seemed very dark, but on the kitchen floor a candle sat, flaring and dipping.“Jonathan,”I called,“I’m ready.”“Well, I’m not,”said a voice at my feet.“Why, where are you? Oh, there!”I bent down and peered under the sink at a shape crouched there.“Haven’t you finished?”[pg 059]“Finished! I’ve just got the thing apart.”“I should say you had!”I regarded the various pieces of iron and leather and wood as they lay, mere dismembered shapes, about the dim kitchen.“It doesn’t seem as if it would ever come together again—to be a pump,”I said in some depression.“Oh, that’s easy! It’s just a question of time.”“How much time?”“Heaven knows.”“Was it the valve?”“It was—several things.”His tone had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics, as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a traveler who has learned to ask questions in a foreign tongue, but not to understand the answers.“Well, I’ll bring my sewing out here—or would you rather have me read to you? There’s something in the last number of—”“No—get your sewing—blast that screw! Why doesn’t it start?”[pg 060]Evidently sewing was better than the last number of anything. I settled myself under a lamp, while Jonathan, in the twilight beneath the sink, continued his mystic rites, with an accompaniment of mildly vituperative or persuasive language, addressed sometimes to his tools, sometimes to the screws and nuts and other parts, sometimes against the men who made them or the plumbers who put them in. Now and then I held a candle, or steadied some perverse bit of metal while he worked his will upon it. And at last the phœnix did indeed rise, the pump was again a pump,—at least it looked like one.“Suppose it doesn’t work,”I suggested.“Suppose it does,”said Jonathan.He began to pump furiously.“Pour in water there!”he directed.“Keep on pouring—don’t stop—never mind if she does spout.”I poured and he pumped, and there were the usual sounds of a pump resuming activity: gurglings and spittings, suckings and sudden spoutings; but at last it seemed to get its breath—a few more long strokes of the handle, and the water poured.“What time is it?”he asked.[pg 061]“Oh, fairly late—about ten—ten minutes past.”Instead of our walk, we stood for a moment under the big maples before the house and looked out into a sea of moonlight. It silvered the sides of the old gray barns and washed over the blossoming apple trees beyond the house. Is there anything more sweetly still than the stillness of moonlight over apple blossoms! As we went out to the barns to lock up, even the little hencoops looked poetic. Passing one of them, we half roused the feathered family within and heard muffled peepings and a smotheredclk-clk. Jonathan was by this time so serene that I felt I could ask him a question that had occurred to me.“Jonathan, how longisthree shakes of a lamb’s tail?”“Apparently, my dear, it is the whole evening,”he answered unruffled.The next night was drizzly. Well, we would have books instead of a walk. We lighted a fire, May though it was, and settled down before it.“What shall we read?”I asked, feeling very cozy.[pg 062]Jonathan was filling his pipe with a leisurely deliberation good to look upon. With the match in his hand he paused—“Oh, I meant to tell you—those young turkeys of yours—they were still out when I came through the yard. I wonder if they went in all right.”I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them“our turkeys,”but in the spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly youth, he is apt to allude to them as“those young turkeys of yours.”I rose wearily.“No. They never go in all right when they get out at this time—especially on wet nights. I’ll have to find them and stow them.”Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe.“You’ll need the lantern,”he said.We went out together into the May drizzle—a good thing to be out in, too, if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little turkeys who literally don’t know enough to go in when it rains, and when you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems different, the drizzle[pg 063]seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds, listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them, half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish prudence to fools.“Nine o’clock,”said Jonathan,“and we’re too wet to sit down. If you could just shut in those turkeys on wet days—”“Shut them in! Didn’t I shut them in! They must have got out since four o’clock.”“Isn’t the shed tight?”he asked.“Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is turkey-tight.”“They’re bigger than chickens.”“Not in any one spot they aren’t. They’re[pg 064]like coiled wire—when they stretch out to get through a crack they havenodimension except length, their bodies are mere imaginary points to hang feathers on. You don’t know little turkeys.”It might be said that, having undertaken to raise turkeys, we had to expect them to act like turkeys. But there were other interruptions in our evenings where our share of responsibility was not so plain. For example, one wet evening in early June we had kindled a little fire and I had brought the lamp forward. The pump was quiescent, the little turkeys were all tucked up in the turkey equivalent for bed, the farm seemed to be cuddling down into itself for the night. We sat for a moment luxuriously regarding the flames, listening to the sighing of the wind, feeling the sweet damp air as it blew in through the open windows. I was considering which book it should be and at last rose to possess myself of two or three.“Sh—h—h!”said Jonathan, a warning finger raised.I stood listening.“I don’t hear anything,”I said.[pg 065]“Sh—h!”he repeated.“There!”This time, indeed, I heard faint bird-notes.“Young robins!”He sprang up and made for the back door with long strides.I peered out through the window of the orchard room, but saw only the reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes.“Where are you?”I called into it.The whistle again, quite near me, apparently out of the air.“Bring a lantern,”came a whisper.I got it and came back and down the steps to the path, holding up my light and peering about in search of the voice.“Where are you? I can’t see you at all.”“Right here—look—here—up!”The voice was almost over my head.I searched the dark masses of the tree—oh, yes! the lantern revealed the heel of a shoe in a crotch, and above,—yes, undoubtedly, the rest of Jonathan, stretched out along a limb.“Oh! What are you doing up there?”“Get me a long stick—hoe—clothes-pole—anything[pg 066]I can poke with. Quick! The cat’s up here. I can hear her, but I can’t see her.”I found the rake and reached it up to him. From the dark beyond him came a distressed mew.“Now the lantern. Hang it on the teeth.”He drew it up to him, then, rake in one hand and lantern in the other, proceeded to squirm out along the limb.“Now I see her.”I saw her too—a huddle of yellow, crouched close.“I’ll have her in a minute. She’ll either have to drop or be caught.”And in fact this distressing dilemma was already becoming plain to the marauder herself. Her mewings grew louder and more frequent. A few more contortions brought the climber nearer his victim. A little judicious urging with the rake and she was within reach. The rake came down to me, and a long, wild mew announced that Jonathan had clutched.“I don’t see how you’re going to get down,”I said, mopping the rain-mist out of my eyes.[pg 067]“Watch me,”panted the contortionist.I watched a curious mass descend the tree, the lantern, swinging and jerking, fitfully illumined the pair, and I could see, now a knee and an ear, now a hand and a yellow furry shape, now a white collar, nose, and chin. There was a last, long, scratching slide. I snatched the lantern, and Jonathan stood beside me, holding by the scruff of her neck a very much frazzled yellow cat. We returned to the porch where her victims were—one alive, in a basket, two dead, beside it, and Jonathan, kneeling, held the cat’s nose close to the little bodies while he boxed her ears—once, twice; remonstrant mews rose wild, and with a desperate twist the culprit backed out under his arm and leaped into the blackness.“Don’t believe she’ll eat young robin for a day or two,”said Jonathan.“Is that what they were? Where were they?”“Under the tree. She’d knocked them out.”“Could you put this one back? He seems all right—only sort of naked in spots.”[pg 068]“We’ll half cover the basket and hang it in the tree. His folks’ll take care of him.”Next morning early there began the greatest to-do among the robins in the orchard. They shrieked their comments on the affair at the top of their lungs. They screamed abusively at Jonathan and me as we stood watching.“They say we did it!”said Jonathan.“I call that gratitude!”I wish I could record that from that evening the cat was a reformed character. An impression had indeed been made. All next day she stayed under the porch, two glowing eyes in the dark. The second day she came out, walking indifferent and debonair, as cats do. But when Jonathan took down the basket from the tree and made her smell of it, she flattened her ears against her head and shot under the porch again.But lessons grow dim and temptation is freshly importunate. It was not two weeks before Jonathan was up another tree on the same errand, and when I considered the number of nests in our orchard, and the number of cats—none of them really our cats—on the place, I felt that the position of overruling[pg 069]Providence was almost more than we could undertake, if we hoped to do anything else.* * * * *These things—tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in the orchard and among the poultry—filled our evenings fairly full. Yet these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples either. They were the sort of things that happened oftenest, the common emergencies incidental to the life. But there were also the uncommon emergencies, each occurring seldom but each adding its own touch of variety to the tale of our evenings.For instance, there was the time of the great drought, when Jonathan, coming in from a tour of the farm at dusk, said,“I’ve got to go up and dig out the spring-hole across the swamp. Everything else is dry, and the cattle are getting crazy.”“Can I help?”I asked, not without regrets for our books and our evening—it was a black night, and I had had hopes.“Yes. Come and hold the lantern.”We went. The spring-hole had been trodden by the poor, eager creatures into a useless[pg 070]jelly of mud. Jonathan fell to work, while I held the lantern high. But soon it became more than a mere matter of holding the lantern. There was a crashing in the blackness about us and a huge horned head emerged behind my shoulder, another loomed beyond Jonathan’s stooping bulk.“Keep ’em back,”he said.“They’ll have it all trodden up again—Hi! You! Ge’ back ’ere!”There is as special a lingo for talking to cattle as there is for talking to babies. I used it as well as I could. I swung the lantern in their faces, I brandished the hoe-handle at them, I jabbed at them recklessly. They snorted and backed and closed in again,—crazy, poor things, with the smell of the water. It was an evening’s battle for us. Jonathan dug and dug, and then laid rails, and the precious water filled in slowly, grew to a dark pool, and the thirsty creatures panted and snuffed in the dark just outside the radius of the hoe-handle, until at last we could let them in. I had forgotten my books, for we had come close to the earth and the creatures of the earth. The cows were our sisters and the steers our brothers that night.[pg 071]Sometimes the emergency was in the barn—a broken halter and trouble among the horses, or perhaps a new calf. Sometimes a stray creature,—cow or horse,—grazing along the roadside, got into our yard and threatened our corn and squashes and my poor, struggling flower-beds. Once it was a break in the wire fence around Jonathan’s muskmelon patch in the barn meadow. The cows had just been turned in, and if it wasn’t mended that evening it meant no melons that season, also melon-tainted cream for days.Once or twice each year it was the drainpipe from the sink. The drain, like the pump, was an innovation. Our ancestors had always carried out whatever they couldn’t use or burn, and dumped it on the far edge of the orchard. In a thinly settled community, there is much to be said for this method: you know just where you are. But we had the drain, and occasionally we didn’t know just where we were.“Coffee grounds,”Jonathan would suggest, with a touch of sternness.“No,”I would reply firmly;“coffee grounds are always burned.”[pg 072]“What then?”“Don’t know. I’ve poked and poked.”A gleam in the corner of Jonathan’s eye—“What with?”“Oh, everything.”“Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?”“Why—hair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then button-hook—you needn’t smile. Button-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out—”Jonathan was laughing by this time—“Well, I have to use what I have, don’t I?”“Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?”“After that—oh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod.”“The devil you did!”“Not at all. It wasn’t hurt a bit. It just wouldn’t go down, that’s all. So then I thought I’d wait for you.”“And now what do you expect?”“I expect you to fix it.”Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it. Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a[pg 073]whole evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst through—and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a sight, and there was—undoubtedly there was—a strong smell of coffee. Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its position, while the rest[pg 074]of us cleared up the kitchen,—it’s astonishing what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,—and as our friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in“Hamlet,”shouted,“Hold ’em! There’s half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can finish.”Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn’t have to pack it down. We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot, in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering, through his sleep,“Who’s sick now?”How could they know it was only a plumbing party?As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the year. It isn’t so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction in the world, that we meant, on[pg 075]that particular evening, to have a plumbing party, with the drain as thepièce de résistance. Toward this our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs broke out of the pen, about nine o’clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs. Hiram needed our help to get them in—there was no use in pretending that we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game, but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the only way to keep one’s temper at all is to regard it, for the time being, as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own rewards. But the attitude is difficult to maintain, especially late at night.On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the house, I could[pg 076]not refrain from saying, with some edge,“I never wanted to keep pigs anyway.”“Who says we’re keeping them?”remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and laughed.“You needn’t think I’m laughing because you said anything specially funny,”I said.“It’s only because I’m tired enough to laugh at anything.”The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I finally broke out,“Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!”“I’ll have the thing together now in a jiffy,”said Jonathan.“Jiffy! There’s no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night,”I snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked.“Why can’t we find a really simple way of living? This isn’t simple. It’s highly complex and very difficult.”“You cut those washers very well,”suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I was not prepared to be soothed.[pg 077]“It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we’ve done this evening! We’ve shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog’s chain, and now we’ve fixed the pump—and it won’t stay fixed at that!”“Fair evening’s work,”murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.“Yes, as work. But all I mean is—it isn’tsimple. Farm life has a reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesn’t seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of a—I don’t know what!”“I like your climaxes,”said Jonathan, and we both laughed.“There! I’m done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and chicken-houses.”* * * * *And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and quiet things—books and firelight and moonlight and talk;[pg 078]many in retrospect full of things quite different—drains and latches and fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the“critters”were at rest. Evenings when we sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and searched for a philosophy to cover them.“I’m beginning to see that it will never be any better,”I said.“Probably not,”said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.“You seem contented enough about it.”“I am.”“I don’t know that I’m contented, but perhaps I’m resigned. I believe it’s necessary.”“Of course it’s necessary.”Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on,“You see, we’re right down close to[pg 079]the earth that is the ultimate basis of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we have to make immediate adjustments to them.”“And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings.”“Now if we’re in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those adjustments for us. We’re like the princess with seventeen mattresses between her and the pea.”“She felt it, though,”said Jonathan.“It kept her awake.”“I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn’t been there.”“True,”said Jonathan.“Farm life is the pea without the mattresses—”I went on.“Sounds a little cheerless,”said Jonathan.“Well—of course, it isn’t really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy. It’s full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment.”“That was the way the princess felt about her pea.”[pg 080]“The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn’t call her soul her own a minute, I suppose.”“Perhaps that was why she ran away,”suggested Jonathan.“Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn’t find it.”“No. She found the pea—even with all those mattresses.”“And we’ve run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses,”said Jonathan.“Let’s not get confused—”“I’m not confused,”said Jonathan.“Well, I shall be in a minute if I don’t look out. You can’t follow a parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of complexity you run into another kind.”“What are you going to do about it?”“I’m going to like it all,”I answered,“and make believe I meant to do it.”After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again.“You know your trick of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?”“Yes.”[pg 081]“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t do that with our souls.”“That suggests to me a rather curious picture,”said Jonathan.“Well—you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass stays quiet.”“Well—”“Well, I don’t see why—only, of course, our souls aren’t really anything like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of carrying them around carefully like that.”“Perhaps you’d better back out of that figure of speech,”suggested Jonathan.“Go back to your princess. Say,‘every man his own mattress.’”“No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers you, and if you don’t notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking.”“And yet you can’t think without them.”[pg 082]“No, you can’t think without them.”“Well—where are we, anyway?”he asked placidly.“I don’t know at all. Only I feel sure that leading the simple life doesn’t depend on the things you do itwith. Feeding your own cows and pigs and using pumps and candles brings you no nearer to it than marketing by telephone and using city water supply and electric lighting. I don’t know what does bring you nearer, but I’m sure it must be something inside you.”“That sounds rather reasonable,”said Jonathan;“almost scriptural—”“Yes, I know,”I said.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.Robert Frost.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);

I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.

When we first planned to take up the farm we looked forward with especial pleasure to our evenings. They were to be the quiet rounding-in of our days, full of companionship, full of meditation.“We’ll do lots of reading aloud,”I said.“And we’ll have long walks. There won’t be much to dobutwalk and read. I can hardly wait.”And I chose our summer books with special reference to reading aloud.

“Of course,”I said, as we fell to work at our packing,“we’ll have to do all sorts of things first. But the days are so long up there, and the life is very simple. And in the evenings[pg 051]you’ll help. We ought to be settled in a week.”

“Or two—or three,”suggested Jonathan.

“Three! What is there to do?”

“Farm-life isn’t so blamed simple as you think.”

“But whatisthere to do? Now, listen! One day for trunks, one day for boxes and barrels, one day for closets, that’s three, one for curtains, four, one day for—for the garret, that’s five. Well—one day for odds and ends that I haven’t thought of. That’s liberal, I’m sure.”

“Better say the rest of your life for the odds and ends you haven’t thought of,”said Jonathan, as he drove the last nail in a neatly headed barrel.

“Jonathan, why are you such a pessimist?”

“I’m not, except when you’re such an optimist.”

“If I’d begun by saying it would take a month, would you have said a week?”

“Can’t tell. Might have.”

“Anyway, there’s nothing bad about odds and ends. They’re about all women have much to do with most of their lives.”

“That’s what I said. And you called me a pessimist.”

“I didn’t call you one. I said, why were you one.”

“I’m sorry. My mistake,”said Jonathan with the smile of one who scores.

* * * * *

And so we went.

One day for trunks was all right. Any one can manage trunks. And the second day, the boxes were emptied and sent flying out to the barn. Curtains I decided to keep for evening work, while Jonathan read. That left the closets and the attic, or rather the attics, for there was one over the main house and one over the“new part,”—still“new,”although now some seventy years old. They were known as the attic and the little attic. I thought I would do the closets first, and I began with the one in the parlor. This was built into the chimney, over the fireplace. It was low, and as long as the mantelpiece itself. It had two long shelves shut away behind three glass doors through which the treasures within were dimly visible. When I swung these open it felt like opening a tomb—cold, musty[pg 053]air hung about my face. I brushed it aside, and considered where to begin. It was a depressing collection. There were photographs and photographs, some in frames, the rest of them tied up in packages or lying in piles. A few had names or messages written on the back, but most gave no clue; and all of them gazed out at me with that expression of complete respectability that constitutes so impenetrable a mask for the personality behind. Most of us wear such masks, but the older photographers seem to have been singularly successful in concentrating attention on them. Then there were albums, with more photographs, of people and of“views.”There was a big Bible, some prayer-books, and a few other books elaborately bound with that heavy fancifulness that we are learning to call Victorian. One of these was on“The Wonders of the Great West”; another was about“The Female Saints of America.”I took it down and glanced through it, but concluded that one had to be a female saint, or at least an aspirant, to appreciate it. Then there were things made out of dried flowers, out of hair, out of shells, out of pine-cones. There were[pg 054]vases and other ornamental bits of china and glass, also Victorian, looking as if they were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long day—one of the longest days of my life—browsing through the books, trying to sort the photographs, and glancing through a few old letters. I did nothing in particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show for my day’s experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of it to Jonathan later.

“It always tasted just that way to me when I was a boy,”he said,“but I never thought much about it—I thought it was just a closet-taste.”

“And it isn’t only the taste,”I went on.“It does something to me, to my state of mind. I’m afraid to try the garret.”

“Garrets are different,”said Jonathan.“But I’d leave them. They can wait.”

“They’ve waited a good while, of course,”I said.

And so we left the garrets. We came back to them later, and were glad we had done so. But that is a story by itself.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the evenings, Jonathan helped.

“I’m afraid you were more or less right about the odd jobs,”I admitted one night.“They do seem to accumulate.”I was holding a candle while he set up a loose latch.

“They’ve been accumulating a good many years,”said Jonathan.

“Yes, that’s it. And so the doors all stick, and the latches won’t latch, and the shades are sulky or wild, and the pantry shelves—have you noticed?—they’re all warped so they rock when you set a dish on them.”

“And the chairs pull apart,”added Jonathan.

“Yes. Of course after we catch up we’ll be all right.”

“I wouldn’t count too much on catching up.”

“Why not?”I asked.

“The farm has had a long start.”

“But you’re a Yankee,”I argued;“the Yankee nature fairly feeds on such jobs—‘putter jobs,’ you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Only, of course, you get on faster if you’re not too particular about having the exact tool—”

Considered as a Yankee, Jonathan’s only fault is that when he does a job he likes to have a very special tool to do it with. Often it is so special that I have never heard its name before and then I consider he is going too far. He merely thinks I haven’t gone far enough. Perhaps such matters must always remain matters of opinion. But even with this handicap we did begin to catch up, and we could have done this a good deal faster if it had not been for the pump.

The pump was a clear case of new wine in an old bottle. It was large and very strong.[pg 057]The people who worked it were strong too. But the walls and floor to which it was attached were not strong at all. And so, one night, when Jonathan wanted a walk I was obliged instead to suggest the pump.

“What’s the matter there?”

“Why, it seems to have pulled clear of its moorings. You look at it.”

He looked, with that expression of meditative resourcefulness peculiar to the true Yankee countenance.“H’m—needs new wood there,—and there; that stuff’ll never hold.”And so the old bottle was patched with new skin at the points of strain, and in the zest of reconstruction Jonathan almost forgot to regret the walk.“We’ll have it to-morrow night,”he said:“the moon will be better.”

The next evening I met him below the turn of the road.“Wonderful night it’s going to be,”he said, as he pushed his wheel up the last hill.

“Yes—”I said, a little uneasily. I was thinking of the kitchen pump. Finally I brought myself to face it.

“There seems to be some trouble—with the pump,”I said apologetically. I felt that it was my fault, though I knew it wasn’t.

“More trouble? What sort of trouble?”

“Oh, it wheezes and makes funny sucking noises, and the water spits and spits, and then bursts out, and then doesn’t come at all. It sounds a little like a cat with a bone in its throat.”

“Probably just that,”said Jonathan:“grain of sand in the valve, very likely.”

“Shall I get a plumber?”

“Plumber! I’ll fix it myself in three shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Well,”I said, relieved:“you can do that after supper while I see that all the chickens are in, and those turkeys, and then we’ll have our walk.”

Accordingly I went off on my tour. When I returned the pale moon-shadows were already beginning to show in the lingering dusk of the fading daylight. Indoors seemed very dark, but on the kitchen floor a candle sat, flaring and dipping.

“Jonathan,”I called,“I’m ready.”

“Well, I’m not,”said a voice at my feet.

“Why, where are you? Oh, there!”I bent down and peered under the sink at a shape crouched there.“Haven’t you finished?”

“Finished! I’ve just got the thing apart.”

“I should say you had!”I regarded the various pieces of iron and leather and wood as they lay, mere dismembered shapes, about the dim kitchen.

“It doesn’t seem as if it would ever come together again—to be a pump,”I said in some depression.

“Oh, that’s easy! It’s just a question of time.”

“How much time?”

“Heaven knows.”

“Was it the valve?”

“It was—several things.”

His tone had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics, as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a traveler who has learned to ask questions in a foreign tongue, but not to understand the answers.

“Well, I’ll bring my sewing out here—or would you rather have me read to you? There’s something in the last number of—”

“No—get your sewing—blast that screw! Why doesn’t it start?”

Evidently sewing was better than the last number of anything. I settled myself under a lamp, while Jonathan, in the twilight beneath the sink, continued his mystic rites, with an accompaniment of mildly vituperative or persuasive language, addressed sometimes to his tools, sometimes to the screws and nuts and other parts, sometimes against the men who made them or the plumbers who put them in. Now and then I held a candle, or steadied some perverse bit of metal while he worked his will upon it. And at last the phœnix did indeed rise, the pump was again a pump,—at least it looked like one.

“Suppose it doesn’t work,”I suggested.

“Suppose it does,”said Jonathan.

He began to pump furiously.“Pour in water there!”he directed.“Keep on pouring—don’t stop—never mind if she does spout.”I poured and he pumped, and there were the usual sounds of a pump resuming activity: gurglings and spittings, suckings and sudden spoutings; but at last it seemed to get its breath—a few more long strokes of the handle, and the water poured.

“What time is it?”he asked.

“Oh, fairly late—about ten—ten minutes past.”

Instead of our walk, we stood for a moment under the big maples before the house and looked out into a sea of moonlight. It silvered the sides of the old gray barns and washed over the blossoming apple trees beyond the house. Is there anything more sweetly still than the stillness of moonlight over apple blossoms! As we went out to the barns to lock up, even the little hencoops looked poetic. Passing one of them, we half roused the feathered family within and heard muffled peepings and a smotheredclk-clk. Jonathan was by this time so serene that I felt I could ask him a question that had occurred to me.

“Jonathan, how longisthree shakes of a lamb’s tail?”

“Apparently, my dear, it is the whole evening,”he answered unruffled.

The next night was drizzly. Well, we would have books instead of a walk. We lighted a fire, May though it was, and settled down before it.“What shall we read?”I asked, feeling very cozy.

Jonathan was filling his pipe with a leisurely deliberation good to look upon. With the match in his hand he paused—“Oh, I meant to tell you—those young turkeys of yours—they were still out when I came through the yard. I wonder if they went in all right.”

I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them“our turkeys,”but in the spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly youth, he is apt to allude to them as“those young turkeys of yours.”

I rose wearily.“No. They never go in all right when they get out at this time—especially on wet nights. I’ll have to find them and stow them.”

Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe.“You’ll need the lantern,”he said.

We went out together into the May drizzle—a good thing to be out in, too, if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little turkeys who literally don’t know enough to go in when it rains, and when you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems different, the drizzle[pg 063]seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.

We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds, listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them, half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish prudence to fools.

“Nine o’clock,”said Jonathan,“and we’re too wet to sit down. If you could just shut in those turkeys on wet days—”

“Shut them in! Didn’t I shut them in! They must have got out since four o’clock.”

“Isn’t the shed tight?”he asked.

“Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is turkey-tight.”

“They’re bigger than chickens.”

“Not in any one spot they aren’t. They’re[pg 064]like coiled wire—when they stretch out to get through a crack they havenodimension except length, their bodies are mere imaginary points to hang feathers on. You don’t know little turkeys.”

It might be said that, having undertaken to raise turkeys, we had to expect them to act like turkeys. But there were other interruptions in our evenings where our share of responsibility was not so plain. For example, one wet evening in early June we had kindled a little fire and I had brought the lamp forward. The pump was quiescent, the little turkeys were all tucked up in the turkey equivalent for bed, the farm seemed to be cuddling down into itself for the night. We sat for a moment luxuriously regarding the flames, listening to the sighing of the wind, feeling the sweet damp air as it blew in through the open windows. I was considering which book it should be and at last rose to possess myself of two or three.

“Sh—h—h!”said Jonathan, a warning finger raised.

I stood listening.

“I don’t hear anything,”I said.

“Sh—h!”he repeated.“There!”

This time, indeed, I heard faint bird-notes.

“Young robins!”He sprang up and made for the back door with long strides.

I peered out through the window of the orchard room, but saw only the reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes.

“Where are you?”I called into it.

The whistle again, quite near me, apparently out of the air.

“Bring a lantern,”came a whisper.

I got it and came back and down the steps to the path, holding up my light and peering about in search of the voice.

“Where are you? I can’t see you at all.”

“Right here—look—here—up!”The voice was almost over my head.

I searched the dark masses of the tree—oh, yes! the lantern revealed the heel of a shoe in a crotch, and above,—yes, undoubtedly, the rest of Jonathan, stretched out along a limb.

“Oh! What are you doing up there?”

“Get me a long stick—hoe—clothes-pole—anything[pg 066]I can poke with. Quick! The cat’s up here. I can hear her, but I can’t see her.”

I found the rake and reached it up to him. From the dark beyond him came a distressed mew.

“Now the lantern. Hang it on the teeth.”He drew it up to him, then, rake in one hand and lantern in the other, proceeded to squirm out along the limb.

“Now I see her.”

I saw her too—a huddle of yellow, crouched close.

“I’ll have her in a minute. She’ll either have to drop or be caught.”

And in fact this distressing dilemma was already becoming plain to the marauder herself. Her mewings grew louder and more frequent. A few more contortions brought the climber nearer his victim. A little judicious urging with the rake and she was within reach. The rake came down to me, and a long, wild mew announced that Jonathan had clutched.

“I don’t see how you’re going to get down,”I said, mopping the rain-mist out of my eyes.

“Watch me,”panted the contortionist.

I watched a curious mass descend the tree, the lantern, swinging and jerking, fitfully illumined the pair, and I could see, now a knee and an ear, now a hand and a yellow furry shape, now a white collar, nose, and chin. There was a last, long, scratching slide. I snatched the lantern, and Jonathan stood beside me, holding by the scruff of her neck a very much frazzled yellow cat. We returned to the porch where her victims were—one alive, in a basket, two dead, beside it, and Jonathan, kneeling, held the cat’s nose close to the little bodies while he boxed her ears—once, twice; remonstrant mews rose wild, and with a desperate twist the culprit backed out under his arm and leaped into the blackness.

“Don’t believe she’ll eat young robin for a day or two,”said Jonathan.

“Is that what they were? Where were they?”

“Under the tree. She’d knocked them out.”

“Could you put this one back? He seems all right—only sort of naked in spots.”

“We’ll half cover the basket and hang it in the tree. His folks’ll take care of him.”

Next morning early there began the greatest to-do among the robins in the orchard. They shrieked their comments on the affair at the top of their lungs. They screamed abusively at Jonathan and me as we stood watching.“They say we did it!”said Jonathan.“I call that gratitude!”

I wish I could record that from that evening the cat was a reformed character. An impression had indeed been made. All next day she stayed under the porch, two glowing eyes in the dark. The second day she came out, walking indifferent and debonair, as cats do. But when Jonathan took down the basket from the tree and made her smell of it, she flattened her ears against her head and shot under the porch again.

But lessons grow dim and temptation is freshly importunate. It was not two weeks before Jonathan was up another tree on the same errand, and when I considered the number of nests in our orchard, and the number of cats—none of them really our cats—on the place, I felt that the position of overruling[pg 069]Providence was almost more than we could undertake, if we hoped to do anything else.

* * * * *

These things—tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in the orchard and among the poultry—filled our evenings fairly full. Yet these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples either. They were the sort of things that happened oftenest, the common emergencies incidental to the life. But there were also the uncommon emergencies, each occurring seldom but each adding its own touch of variety to the tale of our evenings.

For instance, there was the time of the great drought, when Jonathan, coming in from a tour of the farm at dusk, said,“I’ve got to go up and dig out the spring-hole across the swamp. Everything else is dry, and the cattle are getting crazy.”

“Can I help?”I asked, not without regrets for our books and our evening—it was a black night, and I had had hopes.

“Yes. Come and hold the lantern.”

We went. The spring-hole had been trodden by the poor, eager creatures into a useless[pg 070]jelly of mud. Jonathan fell to work, while I held the lantern high. But soon it became more than a mere matter of holding the lantern. There was a crashing in the blackness about us and a huge horned head emerged behind my shoulder, another loomed beyond Jonathan’s stooping bulk.

“Keep ’em back,”he said.“They’ll have it all trodden up again—Hi! You! Ge’ back ’ere!”There is as special a lingo for talking to cattle as there is for talking to babies. I used it as well as I could. I swung the lantern in their faces, I brandished the hoe-handle at them, I jabbed at them recklessly. They snorted and backed and closed in again,—crazy, poor things, with the smell of the water. It was an evening’s battle for us. Jonathan dug and dug, and then laid rails, and the precious water filled in slowly, grew to a dark pool, and the thirsty creatures panted and snuffed in the dark just outside the radius of the hoe-handle, until at last we could let them in. I had forgotten my books, for we had come close to the earth and the creatures of the earth. The cows were our sisters and the steers our brothers that night.

Sometimes the emergency was in the barn—a broken halter and trouble among the horses, or perhaps a new calf. Sometimes a stray creature,—cow or horse,—grazing along the roadside, got into our yard and threatened our corn and squashes and my poor, struggling flower-beds. Once it was a break in the wire fence around Jonathan’s muskmelon patch in the barn meadow. The cows had just been turned in, and if it wasn’t mended that evening it meant no melons that season, also melon-tainted cream for days.

Once or twice each year it was the drainpipe from the sink. The drain, like the pump, was an innovation. Our ancestors had always carried out whatever they couldn’t use or burn, and dumped it on the far edge of the orchard. In a thinly settled community, there is much to be said for this method: you know just where you are. But we had the drain, and occasionally we didn’t know just where we were.

“Coffee grounds,”Jonathan would suggest, with a touch of sternness.

“No,”I would reply firmly;“coffee grounds are always burned.”

“What then?”

“Don’t know. I’ve poked and poked.”

A gleam in the corner of Jonathan’s eye—“What with?”

“Oh, everything.”

“Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?”

“Why—hair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then button-hook—you needn’t smile. Button-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out—”Jonathan was laughing by this time—“Well, I have to use what I have, don’t I?”

“Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?”

“After that—oh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod.”

“The devil you did!”

“Not at all. It wasn’t hurt a bit. It just wouldn’t go down, that’s all. So then I thought I’d wait for you.”

“And now what do you expect?”

“I expect you to fix it.”

Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it. Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a[pg 073]whole evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst through—and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a sight, and there was—undoubtedly there was—a strong smell of coffee. Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its position, while the rest[pg 074]of us cleared up the kitchen,—it’s astonishing what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,—and as our friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in“Hamlet,”shouted,“Hold ’em! There’s half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can finish.”Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn’t have to pack it down. We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot, in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering, through his sleep,“Who’s sick now?”How could they know it was only a plumbing party?

As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the year. It isn’t so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction in the world, that we meant, on[pg 075]that particular evening, to have a plumbing party, with the drain as thepièce de résistance. Toward this our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!

Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs broke out of the pen, about nine o’clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs. Hiram needed our help to get them in—there was no use in pretending that we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game, but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the only way to keep one’s temper at all is to regard it, for the time being, as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own rewards. But the attitude is difficult to maintain, especially late at night.

On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the house, I could[pg 076]not refrain from saying, with some edge,“I never wanted to keep pigs anyway.”

“Who says we’re keeping them?”remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and laughed.

“You needn’t think I’m laughing because you said anything specially funny,”I said.“It’s only because I’m tired enough to laugh at anything.”

The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I finally broke out,“Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!”

“I’ll have the thing together now in a jiffy,”said Jonathan.

“Jiffy! There’s no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night,”I snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked.“Why can’t we find a really simple way of living? This isn’t simple. It’s highly complex and very difficult.”

“You cut those washers very well,”suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I was not prepared to be soothed.

“It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we’ve done this evening! We’ve shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog’s chain, and now we’ve fixed the pump—and it won’t stay fixed at that!”

“Fair evening’s work,”murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.

“Yes, as work. But all I mean is—it isn’tsimple. Farm life has a reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesn’t seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of a—I don’t know what!”

“I like your climaxes,”said Jonathan, and we both laughed.“There! I’m done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and chicken-houses.”

* * * * *

And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and quiet things—books and firelight and moonlight and talk;[pg 078]many in retrospect full of things quite different—drains and latches and fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the“critters”were at rest. Evenings when we sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and searched for a philosophy to cover them.

“I’m beginning to see that it will never be any better,”I said.

“Probably not,”said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.

“You seem contented enough about it.”

“I am.”

“I don’t know that I’m contented, but perhaps I’m resigned. I believe it’s necessary.”

“Of course it’s necessary.”

Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on,“You see, we’re right down close to[pg 079]the earth that is the ultimate basis of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we have to make immediate adjustments to them.”

“And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings.”

“Now if we’re in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those adjustments for us. We’re like the princess with seventeen mattresses between her and the pea.”

“She felt it, though,”said Jonathan.“It kept her awake.”

“I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn’t been there.”

“True,”said Jonathan.

“Farm life is the pea without the mattresses—”I went on.

“Sounds a little cheerless,”said Jonathan.

“Well—of course, it isn’t really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy. It’s full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment.”

“That was the way the princess felt about her pea.”

“The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn’t call her soul her own a minute, I suppose.”

“Perhaps that was why she ran away,”suggested Jonathan.

“Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn’t find it.”

“No. She found the pea—even with all those mattresses.”

“And we’ve run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses,”said Jonathan.

“Let’s not get confused—”

“I’m not confused,”said Jonathan.

“Well, I shall be in a minute if I don’t look out. You can’t follow a parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of complexity you run into another kind.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to like it all,”I answered,“and make believe I meant to do it.”

After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again.“You know your trick of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t do that with our souls.”

“That suggests to me a rather curious picture,”said Jonathan.

“Well—you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass stays quiet.”

“Well—”

“Well, I don’t see why—only, of course, our souls aren’t really anything like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of carrying them around carefully like that.”

“Perhaps you’d better back out of that figure of speech,”suggested Jonathan.“Go back to your princess. Say,‘every man his own mattress.’”

“No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers you, and if you don’t notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking.”

“And yet you can’t think without them.”

“No, you can’t think without them.”

“Well—where are we, anyway?”he asked placidly.

“I don’t know at all. Only I feel sure that leading the simple life doesn’t depend on the things you do itwith. Feeding your own cows and pigs and using pumps and candles brings you no nearer to it than marketing by telephone and using city water supply and electric lighting. I don’t know what does bring you nearer, but I’m sure it must be something inside you.”

“That sounds rather reasonable,”said Jonathan;“almost scriptural—”

“Yes, I know,”I said.

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