[pg 001]More Jonathan PapersIThe Searchings of Jonathan“What I find it hard to understand is, why a person who can see a spray of fringed gentian in the middle of a meadow can’t see a book on the sitting-room table.”“The reason why I can see the gentian,”said Jonathan,“is because the gentian is there.”“So is the book,”I responded.“Which table?”he asked.“The one with the lamp on it. It’s a red book, aboutsobig.”“It isn’t there; but, just to satisfy you, I’ll look again.”He returned in a moment with an argumentative expression of countenance.“It isn’t there,”he said firmly.“Will anything else do instead?”[pg 002]“No, I wanted you to read that special thing. Oh, dear! And I have all these things in my lap! And I know itisthere.”“And Iknowit isn’t.”He stretched himself out in the hammock and watched me as I rather ostentatiously laid down thimble, scissors, needle, cotton, and material and set out for the sitting-room table. There were a number of books on it, to be sure. I glanced rapidly through the piles, fingered the lower books, pushed aside a magazine, and pulled out from beneath it the book I wanted. I returned to the hammock and handed it over. Then, after possessing myself, again rather ostentatiously, of material, cotton, needle, scissors, and thimble, I sat down.“It’s the second essay I specially thought we’d like,”I said.“Just for curiosity,”said Jonathan, with an impersonal air,“where did you find it?”“Find what?”I asked innocently.“The book.”“Oh! On the table.”“Which table?”“The one with the lamp on it.”“I should like to know where.”[pg 003]“Why—just there—on the table. There was an‘Atlantic’on top of it, to be sure.”“I saw the‘Atlantic.’Blest if it looked as though it had anything under it! Besides, I was looking for it on top of things. You said you laid it down there just before luncheon, and I didn’t think it could have crawled in under so quick.”“When you’re looking for a thing,”I said,“you mustn’t think, you must look. Now go ahead and read.”If this were a single instance, or even if it were one of many illustrating a common human frailty, it would hardly be worth setting down. But the frailty under consideration has come to seem to me rather particularly masculine. Are not all the Jonathans in the world continually being sent to some sitting-room table for something, and coming back to assert, with more or less pleasantness, according to their temperament, that it is not there? The incident, then, is not isolated; it is typical of a vast group. For Jonathan, read Everyman; for the red book, read any particular thing that you want Him to bring; for the sitting-room table, read the place[pg 004]where you know it is and Everyman says it isn’t.This, at least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are really isolated cases and that their evidence is not cumulative, at others he takes refuge in atu quoque—in itself a confession of weakness—and alludes darkly to“top shelves”and“bottom drawers.”But let us have no mysteries. These phrases, considered as arguments, have their origin in certain incidents which, that all the evidence may be in, I will here set down.Once upon a time I asked Jonathan to get me something from the top shelf in the closet. He went, and failed to find it. Then I went, and took it down. Jonathan, watching over my shoulder, said,“But that wasn’t the top shelf, I suppose you will admit.”Sure enough! There was a shelf above.“Oh, yes; but I don’t count that shelf. We never use it, because nobody can reach it.”[pg 005]“How do you expect me to know which shelves you count and which you don’t?”“Of course, anatomically—structurally—it is one, but functionally it isn’t there at all.”“I see,”said Jonathan, so contentedly that I knew he was filing this affair away for future use.On another occasion I asked him to get something for me from the top drawer of the old“high-boy”in the dining-room. He was gone a long while, and at last, growing impatient, I followed. I found him standing on an old wooden-seated chair, screw-driver in hand. A drawer on a level with his head was open, and he had hanging over his arm a gaudy collection of ancient table-covers and embroidered scarfs, mostly in shades of magenta.“She stuck, but I’ve got her open now. I don’t see any pillow-cases, though. It’s all full of these things.”He pumped his laden arm up and down, and the table-covers wagged gayly.I sank into the chair and laughed.“Oh! Have you been prying at that all this time? Ofcoursethere’s nothing inthatdrawer.”[pg 006]“There’s where you’re wrong. There’s a great deal in it; I haven’t taken out half. If you want to see—”“Idon’twant to see! There’s nothing I want less! What I mean is—I never put anything there.”“It’s the top drawer.”He was beginning to lay back the table-covers.“But I can’t reach it. And it’s been stuck for ever so long.”“You said the top drawer.”“Yes, I suppose I did. Of course what I meant was the top one of the ones I use.”“I see, my dear. When you say top shelf you don’t mean top shelf, and when you say top drawer you don’t mean top drawer; in fact, when you say top you don’t mean top at all—you mean the height of your head. Everything above that doesn’t count.”Jonathan was so pleased with this formulation of my attitude that he was not in the least irritated to have put out unnecessary work. And his satisfaction was deepened by one more incident. I had sent him to the bottom drawer of my bureau to get a shawl. He returned without it, and I was puzzled.[pg 007]“Now, Jonathan, it’s there, and it’s the top thing.”“The real top,”murmured Jonathan,“or just what you call top?”“It’s right in front,”I went on;“and I don’t see how even a man could fail to find it.”He proceeded to enumerate the contents of the drawer in such strange fashion that I began to wonder where he had been.“I said my bureau.”“I went to your bureau.”“The bottom drawer.”“The bottom drawer. There was nothing but a lot of little boxes and—”“Oh,Iknow what you did! You went to the secret drawer.”“Isn’t that the bottom one?”“Why, yes, in a way—of course it is; but it doesn’t exactly count—it’s not one of the regular drawers—it hasn’t any knobs, or anything—”“But it’s a perfectly good drawer.”“Yes. But nobody is supposed to know it’s there; it looks like a molding—”“But I know it’s there.”“Yes, of course.”[pg 008]“And you know I know it’s there.”“Yes, yes; but I just don’t think about that one in counting up. I see what you mean, of course.”“And I see what you mean. You mean that your shawl is in the bottom one of the regular drawers—with knobs—that can be alluded to in general conversation. Now I think I can find it.”He did. And in addition he amused himself by working out phrases about“when is a bottom drawer not a bottom drawer?”and“when is a top shelf not a top shelf?”It is to these incidents—which I regard as isolated and negligible, and he regards as typical and significant—that he alludes on the occasions when he is unable to find a red book on the sitting-room table. In vain do I point out that when language is variable and fluid it is alive, and that there may be two opinions about the structural top and the functional top, whereas there can be but one as to the book being or not being on the table. He maintains a quiet cheerfulness, as of one who is conscious of being, if not invulnerable, at least well armed.[pg 009]For a time he even tried to make believe that he was invulnerable as well—to set up the thesis that if the book was really on the table he could find it. But in this he suffered so many reverses that only strong natural pertinacity kept him from capitulation.Is it necessary to recount instances? Every family can furnish them. As I allow myself to float off into a reminiscent dream I find my mind possessed by a continuous series of dissolving views in which Jonathan is always coming to me saying,“It isn’t there,”and I am always saying,“Please look again.”Though everything in the house seems to be in a conspiracy against him, it is perhaps with the fishing-tackle that he has most constant difficulties.“My dear, have you any idea where my rod is? No, don’t get up—I’ll look if you’ll just tell me where—”“Probably in the corner behind the chest in the orchard room.”“I’ve looked there.”“Well, then, did you take it in from the wagon last night?”“Yes, I remember doing it.”[pg 010]“What about the little attic? You might have put it up there to dry out.”“No. I took my wading boots up, but that was all.”“The dining-room? You came in that way.”He goes and returns.“Not there.”I reflect deeply.“Jonathan, are yousureit’s not in that corner of the orchard room?”“Yes, I’m sure; but I’ll look again.”He disappears, but in a moment I hear his voice calling,“No! Yours is here, but not mine.”I perceive that it is a case for me, and I get up.“You go and harness. I’ll find it,”I call.There was a time when, under such conditions, I should have begun by hunting in all the unlikely places I could think of. Now I know better. I go straight to the corner of the orchard room. Then I call to Jonathan, just to relieve his mind.“All right! I’ve found it.”“Where?”“Here, in the orchard room.”“Wherein the orchard room?”“In the corner.”[pg 011]“What corner?”“The usual corner—back of the chest.”“The devil!”Then he comes back to put his head in at the door.“What are you laughing at?”“Nothing. What are you talking about the devil for? Anyway, it isn’t the devil; it’s the brownie.”For there seems no doubt that the things he hunts for are possessed of supernatural powers; and the theory of a brownie in the house, with a special grudge against Jonathan, would perhaps best account for the way in which they elude his search but leap into sight at my approach. There is, to be sure, one other explanation, but it is one that does not suggest itself to him, or appeal to him when suggested by me, so there is no need to dwell upon it.If it isn’t the rod, it is the landing-net, which has hung itself on a nail a little to the left or right of the one he had expected to see it on; or his reel, which has crept into a corner of the tackle drawer and held a ball of string in front of itself to distract his vision; or a bunch of snell hooks, which, aware of its protective[pg 012]coloring, has snuggled up against the shady side of the drawer and tucked its pink-papered head underneath a gay pickerel-spoon.Fishing-tackle is, clearly,“possessed,”but in other fields Jonathan is not free from trouble. Finding anything on a bureau seems to offer peculiar obstacles. It is perhaps a big, black-headed pin that I want.“On the pincushion, Jonathan.”He goes, and returns with two sizes of safety-pins and one long hat-pin.“No, dear, those won’t do. A small, black-headed one—at least small compared with a hat-pin, large compared with an ordinary pin.”“Common or house pin?”he murmurs, quoting a friend’s phrase.“Do look again! I hate to drop this to go myself.”“When a man does a job, he gets his tools together first.”“Yes; but they say women shouldn’t copy men, they should develop along their own lines. Please go.”He goes, and comes back.“You don’t want fancy gold pins, I suppose?”“No, no! Here, you hold this, and I’ll go.”[pg 013]I dash to the bureau. Sure enough, he is right about the cushion. I glance hastily about. There, in a little saucer, are a half-dozen of the sort I want. I snatch some and run back.“Well, it wasn’t in the cushion, I bet.”“No,”I admit;“it was in a saucer just behind the cushion.”“You said cushion.”“I know. It’s all right.”“Now, if you had said simply‘bureau,’I’d have looked in other places on it.”“Yes, you’d havelookedin other places!”I could not forbear responding. There is, I grant, another side to this question. One evening when I went upstairs I found a partial presentation of it, in the form of a little newspaper clipping, pinned on my cushion. It read as follows:—“My dear,”said she,“please run and bring me the needle from the haystack.”“Oh, I don’t know which haystack.”“Look in all the haystacks—you can’t miss it; there’s only one needle.”Jonathan was in the cellar at the moment. When he came up, he said,“Did I hear any one laughing?”[pg 014]“I don’t know. Did you?”“I thought maybe it was you.”“It might have been. Something amused me—I forget what.”I accused Jonathan of having written it himself, but he denied it. Some other Jonathan, then; for, as I said, this is not a personal matter, it is a world matter. Let us grant, then, a certain allowance for those who hunt in woman-made haystacks. But what about pockets? Is not a man lord over his own pockets? And are they not nevertheless as so many haystacks piled high for his confusion? Certain it is that Jonathan has nearly as much trouble with his pockets as he does with the corners and cupboards and shelves and drawers of his house. It usually happens over our late supper, after his day in town. He sets down his teacup, struck with a sudden memory. He feels in his vest pockets—first the right, then the left. He proceeds to search himself, murmuring,“I thought something came to-day that I wanted to show you—oh, here! no, that isn’t it. I thought I put it—no, those are to be—what’s this? No, that’s a memorandum. Now, where in—”[pg 015]He runs through the papers in his pockets twice over, and in the second round I watch him narrowly, and perhaps see a corner of an envelope that does not look like office work.“There, Jonathan! What’s that? No, not that—that!”He pulls it out with an air of immense relief.“There! I knew I had something. That’s it.”When we travel, the same thing happens with the tickets, especially if they chance to be costly and complicated ones, with all the shifts and changes of our journey printed thick upon their faces. The conductor appears at the other end of the car. Jonathan begins vaguely to fumble without lowering his paper. Pocket after pocket is browsed through in this way. Then the paper slides to his knee and he begins a more thorough investigation, with all the characteristic clapping and diving motions that seem to be necessary. Some pockets must always be clapped and others dived into to discover their contents.No tickets. The conductor is halfway up the car. Jonathan’s face begins to grow serious.[pg 016]He rises and looks on the seat and under it. He sits down and takes out packet after packet of papers and goes over them with scrupulous care. At this point I used to become really anxious—to make hasty calculations as to our financial resources, immediate and ultimate—to wonder if conductors ever really put nice people like us off trains. But that was long ago. I know now that Jonathan has never lost a ticket in his life. So I glance through the paper that he has dropped or watch the landscape until he reaches a certain stage of calm and definite pessimism, when he says,“I must have pulled them out when I took out those postcards in the other car. Yes, that’s just what has happened.”Then, the conductor being only a few seats away, I beg Jonathan to look once more in his vest pocket, where he always puts them. To oblige me he looks, though without faith, and lo! this time the tickets fairly fling themselves upon him, with smiles almost curling up their corners. Does the brownie travel with us, then?I begin to suspect that some of the good men who have been blamed for forgetting to[pg 017]mail letters in their pockets have been, not indeed blameless, but at least misunderstood. Probably they do not forget. Probably they hunt for the letters and cannot find them, and conclude that they have already mailed them.In the matter of the home haystacks Jonathan’s confidence in himself has at last been shaken. For a long time, when he returned to me after some futile search, he used to say,“Of course you can look for it if you like, but it isnotthere.”But man is a reasoning, if not altogether a reasonable, being, and with a sufficient accumulation of evidence, especially when there is some one constantly at hand to interpret its teachings, almost any set of opinions, however fixed, may be shaken. So here.Once when we shut up the farm for the winter I left my fountain pen behind. This was little short of a tragedy, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that Jonathan was going back that week-end for a day’s hunt.“Be sure to get the pen first of all,”I said,“and put it in your pocket.”“Where is it?”he asked.“In the little medicine cupboard over the[pg 018]fireplace in the orchard room, standing up at the side of the first shelf.”“Why not on your desk?”he asked.“Because I was writing tags in there, and set it up so it would be out of the way.”“And itwasout of the way. All right. I’ll collect it.”He went, and on his return I met him with eager hand—“My pen!”“I’m sorry,”he began.“You didn’t forget!”I exclaimed.“No. But it wasn’t there.”“But—did you look?”“Yes, I looked.”“Thoroughly?”“Yes. I lit three matches.”“Matches! Then you didn’t get it when you first got there!”“Why—no—I had the dog to attend to—and—but I had plenty of time when I got back, and itwasn’tthere.”“Well—Dear me! Did you look anywhere else? I suppose I may be mistaken. Perhaps I did take it back to the desk.”“That’s just what I thought myself,”said Jonathan.“So I went there, and looked, and[pg 019]then I looked on all the mantelpieces and your bureau. You must have put it in your bag the last minute—bet it’s there now!”“Bet it isn’t.”It wasn’t. For two weeks more I was driven to using other pens—strange and distracting to the fingers and the eyes and the mind. Then Jonathan was to go up again.“Please look once more,”I begged,“and don’t expect not to see it. I can fairly see it myself, this minute, standing up there on the right-hand side, just behind the machine oil can.”“Oh, I’ll look,”he promised.“If it’s there, I’ll find it.”He returned penless. I considered buying another. But we were planning to go up together the last week of the hunting season, and I thought I would wait on the chance.We got off at the little station and hunted our way up, making great sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought promising—certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill whistle of woodcock.[pg 020]At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots that are warm and still. It was dusk by the time we came over the crest of the farm ledges and saw the huddle of the home buildings below us, and quite dark when we reached the house. Fires had been made and coals smouldered on the hearth in the sitting-room.“You light the lamp,”I said,“and I’ll just take a match and go through to see if that penshouldhappen to be there.”“No use doing anything to-night,”said Jonathan.“To-morrow morning you can have a thorough hunt.”But I took my match, felt my way into the next room, past the fireplace, up to the cupboard, then struck my match. In its first flare-up I glanced in. Then I chuckled.Jonathan had gone out to the dining-room, but he has perfectly good ears.“NO!”he roared, and his tone of dismay, incredulity, rage, sent me off into gales of unscrupulous laughter. He was striding in, candle in hand, shouting,“It wasnot there!”“Look yourself,”I managed to gasp.[pg 021]This time, somehow, he could see it.“You planted it! You brought it up and planted it!”“I never! Oh, dear me! It pays for going without it for weeks!”“Nothingwill ever make me believe that that pen was standing there when I looked for it!”said Jonathan, with vehement finality.“All right,”I sighed happily.“You don’t have to believe it.”But in his heart perhaps he does believe it. At any rate, since that time he has adopted a new formula:“My dear, it may be there, of course, but I don’t see it.”And this position I regard as unassailable.One triumph he has had. I wanted something that was stored away in the shut-up town house.“Do you suppose you could find it?”I said, as gently as possible.“I can try,”he said.“I think it is in a box about this shape—see?—a gray box, in the attic closet, the farthest-in corner.”“Are you sure it’s in the house? If it’s in the house, I think I can find it.”[pg 022]“Yes, I’m sure of that.”When he returned that night, his face wore a look of satisfaction very imperfectly concealed beneath a mask of nonchalance.“Goodfor you! Was it where I said?”“No.”“Was it in a different corner?”“No.”“Where was it?”“It wasn’t in a corner at all. It wasn’t in that closet.”“It wasn’t! Where, then?”“Downstairs in the hall closet.”He paused, then could not forbear adding,“And it wasn’t in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all over it.”“Why,Jonathan!Aren’t you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn’t have done better myself.”Under such praise he expanded.“The fact is,”he said confidentially,“I had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself,‘Jonathan, don’t be a man! Think what she’d do if she were here now.’And then I got busy and found it.”[pg 023]“Jonathan!”I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.“Well,”he said, proud, yet rather sheepish,“what is there so funny about that? I gave up half a day to it.”“Funny! It isn’t funny—exactly. You don’t mind my laughing a little? Why, you’ve lived down the fountain pen—we’ll forget the pen—”“Oh, no, you won’t forget the pen either,”he said, with a certain pleasant grimness.“Well, perhaps not—of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I say, then, that we’ll always regard the pen in the light of the violet hat-box?”“I think that might do.”Then he had an alarming afterthought.“But, see here—you won’t expect me to do things like that often?”“Dear me, no! People can’t live always on their highest levels. Perhaps you’llneverdo it again.”Jonathan looked distinctly relieved.“I’ll accept it as a unique effort—like Dante’s angel and Raphael’s sonnet.”“Jonathan,”I said that evening,“what do you know about St. Anthony of Padua?”“Not much.”[pg 024]“Well, you ought to. He helped you to-day. He’s the saint who helps people to find lost articles. Every man ought to take him as a patron saint.”“And do you know which saint it is who helps people to find lost virtues—like humility, for instance?”“No. I don’t, really.”“I didn’t suppose you did,”said Jonathan.[pg 025]IISap-TimeIt was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he had come down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with the old locust stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for Jonathan, there he sat, in plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent him back to the tree, and I studied him there, marveling at the way he assimilated with its bark. As Jonathan came across the grass I called softly, and pointed to the tree.“Well?”he said.“Don’t you see?”“No. What?”“Look—I thought you had eyes!”“Oh, what a little beauty!”“And isn’t his back just like bark and lichens! And what are those things in the tree beside him?”“Plugs, I suppose.”“Plugs?”[pg 026]“Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, I believe.”“You mean for sap? Maple syrup?”“Yes.”“Jonathan! I didn’t know these were sugar maples.”“Oh, yes. These on the road.”“The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And you never told me!”“I thought you knew.”“Knew! I don’t know anything—I should think you’d know that, by this time. Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have let all these years go by—oh, dear—think of all the fun we’ve missed! And syrup!”“You’d have to come up in February.”“Well, then, I’llcomein February. Who’s afraid of February?”“All right. Try it next year.”I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and it was early April before I got to the farm. But it had been a wintry March, and the farmers told me that the sap had not been running except for a few days in a February thaw. Anyway, it was worth trying.[pg 027]Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. But Hiram found a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with these and an auger we went out along the snowy, muddy road. The hole was bored—a pair of them—in the first tree, and the spouts driven in. I knelt, watching—in fact, peering up the spout-hole to see what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with sawdust, appeared—gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off the end.“Look! Hiram! It’s running!”I called.Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently expected it to run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I felt sure. Is it a masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when the theoretically expected becomes actual? Or is it that some temperaments have naturally a certain large confidence in the sway of law, and refuse to wonder at its individual workings? To me the individual workings give an ever fresh thrill because they bring a new realization of the mighty powers behind them. It seems to depend on which end you begin at.But though the little drops thrilled me, I[pg 028]was not beyond setting a pail underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I followed with my pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There were, indeed, a few real pails—berry-pails, lard-pails, and water-pails—but for the most part the sap fell into pitchers, or tin saucepans, stew-kettles of aluminum or agate ware, blue and gray and white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware bowls. It was a strange collection of receptacles that lined the roadside when we had finished our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed, and even Hiram smiled.But what next? Every utensil in the house was out there, sitting in the road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors—no kitchen stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches high—yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it in the afternoon.I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh,[pg 029]Jonathan! Why did you have to be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows how to put stones together, as witness the stone“Eyrie”and the stile in the lane. However, there Jonathan wasn’t. So I went out into the swampy orchard behind the house and looked about—no lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect material, and Hiram, seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones. Somehow my fireplace got made—two side walls, one end wall, the other end left open for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it, but“’t was enough, ’t would serve.”I collected fire-wood, and there I was, ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap was drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil next day. I felt that I was being borne along on the providential wave that so often floats the inexperienced to success.That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them out once more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment benevolently on my work.“Will it run to-night?”I asked him.“No—no—’t won’t run to-night. Too[pg 030]cold. ’T won’t run any to-night. You can sleep all right.”This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it was growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in the middle of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little.So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went to sleep.I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding sunshine and Hiram’s voice outside my window.“Got anything I can empty sap into? I’ve got everything all filled up.”“Sap! Why, it isn’t running yet, is it?”“Pails were flowin’ over when I came out.”“Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn’t run last night.”“I guest there don’t nobody know when sap’ll run and when it won’t,”said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything full—old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things[pg 031]enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its resources.Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I felt as if I had turned on the faucets of the universe and didn’t know how to turn them off again.However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and began to pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he needed his feed-pails. We poured in sap and we poured in sap. Never did I see anything hold so much as that pan. Even Hiram was stirred out of his usual calm to remark,“It beats all, how much that holds.”Of course Jonathan would have had its capacity all calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and so I was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied themselves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch to allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence—my exclusive little fool’s Providence—was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, and when Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed[pg 032]pride and showed him the pan—now a heaving, frothing mass of sap-about-to-be-syrup, sending clouds of white steam down the wind. As he looked at the oven walls, I fancied his fingers ached to get at them, but he offered no criticism, seeing that they worked.The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely preparing for me a special little gift in the form of a miniature snowstorm. It was quite real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and the road, it piled itself softly among the clusters of swelling buds on the apple trees, and made the orchard look as though it had burst into bloom in an hour. Then the sun came out, there were a few dazzling moments when the world was all blue and silver, and then the whiteness faded.And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make the rounds, bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my pan was kept up so that the boiling down might keep pace with the new supply.“They do say snow makes it run,”shouted a passer-by, and another called,“You want to keep skimmin’!”Whereupon I seized my[pg 033]long-handled skimmer and fell to work. Southern Connecticut does not know much about syrup, but by the avenue of the road I was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it possessed.The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occasional overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, and bottled, and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the household through the year.* * * * *“This time I will go early,”I said to Jonathan;“they say the late running is never quite so good.”It was early March when I got up there this time—early March after a winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again Jonathan could not come, but Cousin Janet could, and we met at the little station, where Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The sun was warm, but the air was keen and the woods hardly showed spring at all yet, even in that first token of it, the slight thickening of their millions of little tips, through the swelling of the buds. The city trees already[pg 034]showed this, but the country ones still kept their wintry penciling of vanishing lines.Spring was in the road, however.“There ain’t no bottom to this road now, it’s just dropped clean out,”remarked a fellow teamster as we wallowed along companionably through the woods. But, somehow, we reached the farm. Again we bored our holes, and again I was thrilled as the first bright drops slipped out and jeweled the ends of the spouts. I watched Janet. She was interested but calm, classing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan. We unearthed last year’s oven and dug out its inner depths—leaves and dirt and apples and ashes—it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get to bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors of a season’s use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year’s sojourn in the attic. By sunset we had a panful of sap boiling merrily and already taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted it. It was very syrupy. Letting the fire die down, we went in to get supper in the utmost content of spirit.“It’s so much simpler than last year,”I[pg 035]said, as we sat over our cozy“tea,”—“having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all—”“You don’t suppose anything could happen to it while we’re in here?”suggested Janet.“Shan’t I just run out and see?”“No, sit still. What could happen? The fire’s going out.”“Yes, I know.”But her voice was uncertain.“You see, I’ve been all through it once,”I reassured her.As we rose, Janet said,“Let’s go out before we do the dishes.”And to humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out on the back porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward the fireplace we saw gleams of red.“How funny!”I murmured.“I didn’t think there was so much fire left.”We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, and as I raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The pan was a blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held the lantern more closely. I seized a stick and poked—the crisp black[pg 036]stuff broke and crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A curious odor arose.“It couldn’t have!”gasped Janet.“It couldn’t—but it has!”I said.It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter won. When we recovered a little we took up the black shell of carbon that had once been syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the oven, for a keepsake. Then we poured water in the pan, and steam rose hissing to the stars.“Does it leak?”faltered Janet.“Leak!”I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water stream through the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the ashes below.“The question is,”I went on as I got up,“did it boil away because it leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?”“I don’t see that it matters much,”said Janet. She was showing symptoms of depression at this point.“It matters a great deal,”I said.“Because, you see, we’ve got to tell Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it.”[pg 037]“I see,”said Janet; then she added, experimentally,“Why tell Jonathan?”“Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn’t miss telling Jonathan for anything. What is Jonathanfor!”“Well—of course,”she conceded.“Let’s do dishes.”We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted. Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision—a vision of black crust, with winking red embers smoldering along its broken edges. I found it distracting in the extreme.…At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I was awakened by a voice:—“It’s beginning to rain. I think I’ll just go out and empty what’s near the house.”“Janet!”I murmured,“don’t be absurd.”“But it will dilute all that sap.”“There isn’t any sap to dilute. It won’t be running at night.”After a while the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed:—“My dear, you don’t mind if I slip out. It will only take a minute.”“I do mind. Go to sleep!”[pg 038]Silence. Then:—“It’s raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap—”“You don’thaveto think!”I was quite savage.“Just go to sleep—and let me!”Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. The voice was pleading:—“Pleaselet me go! I’ll be back in a minute. And it’s not cold.”“Oh, well—I’m awake now, anyway.I’llgo.”My voice was tinged with that high resignation that is worse than anger. Janet’s tone changed instantly:—“No, no! Don’t! Please don’t! I’m going. I truly don’t mind.”“I’mgoing. I don’t mind, either, not at all.”“Oh, dear! Then let’s not either of us go.”“That was my idea in the first place.”“Well, then, we won’t. Go to sleep, and I will too.”“Not at all! I’ve decided to go.”“But it’s stopped raining. Probably it won’t rain any more.”“Then what are you making all this fuss for?”[pg 039]“I didn’t make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out—”“Well, you couldn’t. And it’s raining very hard again. And I’m going.”“Oh, don’t! You’ll get drenched.”“Of course. But I can’t bear to have all that sap diluted.”“It doesn’t run at night. You said it didn’t.”“You said it did.”“But I don’t really know. You know best.”“Why didn’t you think of that sooner? Anyway, I’m going.”“Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I’d stirred you up—”“You have,”I interrupted, sweetly.“I won’t deny that youhavestirred me up. But now that you have mentioned it”—I felt for a match—“now that you have mentioned it, I see that this was the one thing needed to make my evening complete, or perhaps it’s morning—I don’t know.”We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in those curious compromises of vesture that people adopt under such circumstances, and, with lantern and umbrella,[pg 040]we fumbled our way out to the trees. The rain was driving in sheets, and we plodded up the road in the yellow circle of lantern-light wavering uncertainly over the puddles, while under our feet the mud gave and sucked.“It’s diluted, sure enough,”I said, as we emptied the pails. We crawled slowly back, with our heavy milk-can full of sap-and-rain-water, and went in.The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down to cookies and milk, feeling almost cozy.“I’ve always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the middle of the night this way,”I remarked,“and now I know.”“Aren’t you hateful!”said Janet.“Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven’t anyotherplan, we’ll go back to bed.”It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there was nothing to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain-noises that only such an old house knows. On the little windows the drops pricked sharply; in the fireplace with the straight flue[pg 041]they fell, hissing, on the embers. On the porch roofs the rain made a dull patter of sound; on the tin roof of the“little attic”over the kitchen it beat with flat resonance. In the big attic, when we went up to see if all was tight, it filled the place with a multitudinous clamor; on the sides of the house it drove with a fury that re-echoed dimly within doors.Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed with consternation the torrents of rain-water pouring into the pails. We tried fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind blew them merrily down the road. It would have been easy enough to cover the pails, but how to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out—that was the question.“It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year,”said Janet.“The trouble is,”I said,“I know just enough to have lost my hold on the fool’s Providence, and not enough really to take care of myself.”“Superstition!”said Janet.“What do you call your idea of the curse?”I retorted.“Anyway, I have an idea! Look,[pg 042]Janet! We’ll just cut up these enamel-cloth table-covers here by the sink and everywhere, and tack them around the spouts.”Janet’s thrifty spirit was doubtful.“Don’t you need them?”“Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. We’ll have to have fresh ones this summer, anyway.”We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk-room. We got tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went again. We cut a piece for each tree, just enough to go over each pair of spouts and protect the pail. When tacked on, it had the appearance of a neat bib, and as the pattern was a blue and white check, the effect, as one looked down the road at the twelve trees, was very fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer the people who drove by, too.But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into the pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn’t run in the rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was right, and you can’t tell. I am glad if you can’t. The physical mysteries of the universe are being unveiled so[pg 043]swiftly that one likes to find something that still keeps its secret—though, indeed, the spiritual mysteries seem in no danger of such enforcement.The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and Jonathan managed to arrive, though the roads had even less“bottom to ’em”than before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, and, after Jonathan had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs were taken off. Somehow in the clear March sunshine they looked almost shocking. By the next day we had syrup enough to try for sugar.For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the first year, but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to Janet, when it came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again in a position to expect the aid of the fool’s Providence.“How muchdoyou know about it?”asked Janet.“Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and partly like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and then you pour it off.”[pg 044]“I’ve got more to go on than that,”said Jonathan.“I came up on the train with the Judge. He used to see it done.”“You’ve got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram can’t,”I said.“All right. There’s time enough.”We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the kitchen to“try”the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we would take turns, but usually we all three went. Supper seemed distinctly a side issue.“I’m going to take it off now,”said Jonathan.“Look out!”“Do you think it’s time?”I demurred.“We’ll know soon,”said Jonathan, with his usual composure.We hung over him.“Now you beat it,”I said. But he was already beating.“Get some cold water to set it in,”he commanded. We brought the dishpan with water from the well, where ice still floated.“Maybe you oughtn’t to stir so much—do you think?”I suggested, helpfully.“Beat it more—up, you know.”“More the way you would eggs,”said Janet.[pg 045]“I’ll show you.”I lunged at the spoon.“Go away! This isn’t eggs,”said Jonathan, beating steadily.“Your arm must be tired. Let me take it,”pleaded Janet.“No, me!”I said.“Janet, you’ve got to get your coat and things. You’ll have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, you need a fresh arm.”“I’m fresh enough.”“And I really don’t think you have the motion.”“I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet.”“Janet’s all right.”“So am I. See how white it’s getting. The Judge said—”“Here come Hiram and Kit,”announced Janet, returning with bag and wraps.“But you have ten minutes. Can’t I help?”“He won’t let us. He’s that ‘sot,’”I murmured.“He’ll make you miss your train.”“Youcouldbutter the pans,”he counter charged,“and you haven’t.”We flew to prepare, and the pouring began.[pg 046]It was a thrilling moment. The syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out thickly, blob-blob-blob, into the little pans. Janet moved them up as they were needed, and I snatched the spoon, at last, and encouraged the stuff to fall where it should. But Jonathan got it from me again, and scraped out the remnant, making designs of clovers and polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a dash for coats and hats and a rush to the carriage.When the surrey disappeared around the turn of the road, I went back, shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses will, being sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the table sat a huddle of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work getting things in order to be left in the morning. Then I went back to the fire and waited for Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried to read, but the stillness of the house was too importunate, it had to be listened to. I leaned back and watched the fire, and the old house and I held communion together.Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got that evening. It was partly[pg 047]my own attitude; I was going away in the morning, and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such things as these.If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present. But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon to return—then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and interprets the living past and the living future.Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful stillness. There were[pg 048]no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed background of one’s consciousness—the steps overhead, the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the“new part,”and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the house—very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me as it absorbed the rest—those before and after me—for time was not.There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring[pg 049]within. Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air—and the house fell silent so that Jonathan might come in.“Your sugar is hardening nicely, I see,”he said, rubbing his hands before the fire.“Yes,”I said.“You know ItoldJanet that for this part of the affair we could trust to the fool’s Providence.”“Thank you,”said Jonathan.
[pg 001]More Jonathan PapersIThe Searchings of Jonathan“What I find it hard to understand is, why a person who can see a spray of fringed gentian in the middle of a meadow can’t see a book on the sitting-room table.”“The reason why I can see the gentian,”said Jonathan,“is because the gentian is there.”“So is the book,”I responded.“Which table?”he asked.“The one with the lamp on it. It’s a red book, aboutsobig.”“It isn’t there; but, just to satisfy you, I’ll look again.”He returned in a moment with an argumentative expression of countenance.“It isn’t there,”he said firmly.“Will anything else do instead?”[pg 002]“No, I wanted you to read that special thing. Oh, dear! And I have all these things in my lap! And I know itisthere.”“And Iknowit isn’t.”He stretched himself out in the hammock and watched me as I rather ostentatiously laid down thimble, scissors, needle, cotton, and material and set out for the sitting-room table. There were a number of books on it, to be sure. I glanced rapidly through the piles, fingered the lower books, pushed aside a magazine, and pulled out from beneath it the book I wanted. I returned to the hammock and handed it over. Then, after possessing myself, again rather ostentatiously, of material, cotton, needle, scissors, and thimble, I sat down.“It’s the second essay I specially thought we’d like,”I said.“Just for curiosity,”said Jonathan, with an impersonal air,“where did you find it?”“Find what?”I asked innocently.“The book.”“Oh! On the table.”“Which table?”“The one with the lamp on it.”“I should like to know where.”[pg 003]“Why—just there—on the table. There was an‘Atlantic’on top of it, to be sure.”“I saw the‘Atlantic.’Blest if it looked as though it had anything under it! Besides, I was looking for it on top of things. You said you laid it down there just before luncheon, and I didn’t think it could have crawled in under so quick.”“When you’re looking for a thing,”I said,“you mustn’t think, you must look. Now go ahead and read.”If this were a single instance, or even if it were one of many illustrating a common human frailty, it would hardly be worth setting down. But the frailty under consideration has come to seem to me rather particularly masculine. Are not all the Jonathans in the world continually being sent to some sitting-room table for something, and coming back to assert, with more or less pleasantness, according to their temperament, that it is not there? The incident, then, is not isolated; it is typical of a vast group. For Jonathan, read Everyman; for the red book, read any particular thing that you want Him to bring; for the sitting-room table, read the place[pg 004]where you know it is and Everyman says it isn’t.This, at least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are really isolated cases and that their evidence is not cumulative, at others he takes refuge in atu quoque—in itself a confession of weakness—and alludes darkly to“top shelves”and“bottom drawers.”But let us have no mysteries. These phrases, considered as arguments, have their origin in certain incidents which, that all the evidence may be in, I will here set down.Once upon a time I asked Jonathan to get me something from the top shelf in the closet. He went, and failed to find it. Then I went, and took it down. Jonathan, watching over my shoulder, said,“But that wasn’t the top shelf, I suppose you will admit.”Sure enough! There was a shelf above.“Oh, yes; but I don’t count that shelf. We never use it, because nobody can reach it.”[pg 005]“How do you expect me to know which shelves you count and which you don’t?”“Of course, anatomically—structurally—it is one, but functionally it isn’t there at all.”“I see,”said Jonathan, so contentedly that I knew he was filing this affair away for future use.On another occasion I asked him to get something for me from the top drawer of the old“high-boy”in the dining-room. He was gone a long while, and at last, growing impatient, I followed. I found him standing on an old wooden-seated chair, screw-driver in hand. A drawer on a level with his head was open, and he had hanging over his arm a gaudy collection of ancient table-covers and embroidered scarfs, mostly in shades of magenta.“She stuck, but I’ve got her open now. I don’t see any pillow-cases, though. It’s all full of these things.”He pumped his laden arm up and down, and the table-covers wagged gayly.I sank into the chair and laughed.“Oh! Have you been prying at that all this time? Ofcoursethere’s nothing inthatdrawer.”[pg 006]“There’s where you’re wrong. There’s a great deal in it; I haven’t taken out half. If you want to see—”“Idon’twant to see! There’s nothing I want less! What I mean is—I never put anything there.”“It’s the top drawer.”He was beginning to lay back the table-covers.“But I can’t reach it. And it’s been stuck for ever so long.”“You said the top drawer.”“Yes, I suppose I did. Of course what I meant was the top one of the ones I use.”“I see, my dear. When you say top shelf you don’t mean top shelf, and when you say top drawer you don’t mean top drawer; in fact, when you say top you don’t mean top at all—you mean the height of your head. Everything above that doesn’t count.”Jonathan was so pleased with this formulation of my attitude that he was not in the least irritated to have put out unnecessary work. And his satisfaction was deepened by one more incident. I had sent him to the bottom drawer of my bureau to get a shawl. He returned without it, and I was puzzled.[pg 007]“Now, Jonathan, it’s there, and it’s the top thing.”“The real top,”murmured Jonathan,“or just what you call top?”“It’s right in front,”I went on;“and I don’t see how even a man could fail to find it.”He proceeded to enumerate the contents of the drawer in such strange fashion that I began to wonder where he had been.“I said my bureau.”“I went to your bureau.”“The bottom drawer.”“The bottom drawer. There was nothing but a lot of little boxes and—”“Oh,Iknow what you did! You went to the secret drawer.”“Isn’t that the bottom one?”“Why, yes, in a way—of course it is; but it doesn’t exactly count—it’s not one of the regular drawers—it hasn’t any knobs, or anything—”“But it’s a perfectly good drawer.”“Yes. But nobody is supposed to know it’s there; it looks like a molding—”“But I know it’s there.”“Yes, of course.”[pg 008]“And you know I know it’s there.”“Yes, yes; but I just don’t think about that one in counting up. I see what you mean, of course.”“And I see what you mean. You mean that your shawl is in the bottom one of the regular drawers—with knobs—that can be alluded to in general conversation. Now I think I can find it.”He did. And in addition he amused himself by working out phrases about“when is a bottom drawer not a bottom drawer?”and“when is a top shelf not a top shelf?”It is to these incidents—which I regard as isolated and negligible, and he regards as typical and significant—that he alludes on the occasions when he is unable to find a red book on the sitting-room table. In vain do I point out that when language is variable and fluid it is alive, and that there may be two opinions about the structural top and the functional top, whereas there can be but one as to the book being or not being on the table. He maintains a quiet cheerfulness, as of one who is conscious of being, if not invulnerable, at least well armed.[pg 009]For a time he even tried to make believe that he was invulnerable as well—to set up the thesis that if the book was really on the table he could find it. But in this he suffered so many reverses that only strong natural pertinacity kept him from capitulation.Is it necessary to recount instances? Every family can furnish them. As I allow myself to float off into a reminiscent dream I find my mind possessed by a continuous series of dissolving views in which Jonathan is always coming to me saying,“It isn’t there,”and I am always saying,“Please look again.”Though everything in the house seems to be in a conspiracy against him, it is perhaps with the fishing-tackle that he has most constant difficulties.“My dear, have you any idea where my rod is? No, don’t get up—I’ll look if you’ll just tell me where—”“Probably in the corner behind the chest in the orchard room.”“I’ve looked there.”“Well, then, did you take it in from the wagon last night?”“Yes, I remember doing it.”[pg 010]“What about the little attic? You might have put it up there to dry out.”“No. I took my wading boots up, but that was all.”“The dining-room? You came in that way.”He goes and returns.“Not there.”I reflect deeply.“Jonathan, are yousureit’s not in that corner of the orchard room?”“Yes, I’m sure; but I’ll look again.”He disappears, but in a moment I hear his voice calling,“No! Yours is here, but not mine.”I perceive that it is a case for me, and I get up.“You go and harness. I’ll find it,”I call.There was a time when, under such conditions, I should have begun by hunting in all the unlikely places I could think of. Now I know better. I go straight to the corner of the orchard room. Then I call to Jonathan, just to relieve his mind.“All right! I’ve found it.”“Where?”“Here, in the orchard room.”“Wherein the orchard room?”“In the corner.”[pg 011]“What corner?”“The usual corner—back of the chest.”“The devil!”Then he comes back to put his head in at the door.“What are you laughing at?”“Nothing. What are you talking about the devil for? Anyway, it isn’t the devil; it’s the brownie.”For there seems no doubt that the things he hunts for are possessed of supernatural powers; and the theory of a brownie in the house, with a special grudge against Jonathan, would perhaps best account for the way in which they elude his search but leap into sight at my approach. There is, to be sure, one other explanation, but it is one that does not suggest itself to him, or appeal to him when suggested by me, so there is no need to dwell upon it.If it isn’t the rod, it is the landing-net, which has hung itself on a nail a little to the left or right of the one he had expected to see it on; or his reel, which has crept into a corner of the tackle drawer and held a ball of string in front of itself to distract his vision; or a bunch of snell hooks, which, aware of its protective[pg 012]coloring, has snuggled up against the shady side of the drawer and tucked its pink-papered head underneath a gay pickerel-spoon.Fishing-tackle is, clearly,“possessed,”but in other fields Jonathan is not free from trouble. Finding anything on a bureau seems to offer peculiar obstacles. It is perhaps a big, black-headed pin that I want.“On the pincushion, Jonathan.”He goes, and returns with two sizes of safety-pins and one long hat-pin.“No, dear, those won’t do. A small, black-headed one—at least small compared with a hat-pin, large compared with an ordinary pin.”“Common or house pin?”he murmurs, quoting a friend’s phrase.“Do look again! I hate to drop this to go myself.”“When a man does a job, he gets his tools together first.”“Yes; but they say women shouldn’t copy men, they should develop along their own lines. Please go.”He goes, and comes back.“You don’t want fancy gold pins, I suppose?”“No, no! Here, you hold this, and I’ll go.”[pg 013]I dash to the bureau. Sure enough, he is right about the cushion. I glance hastily about. There, in a little saucer, are a half-dozen of the sort I want. I snatch some and run back.“Well, it wasn’t in the cushion, I bet.”“No,”I admit;“it was in a saucer just behind the cushion.”“You said cushion.”“I know. It’s all right.”“Now, if you had said simply‘bureau,’I’d have looked in other places on it.”“Yes, you’d havelookedin other places!”I could not forbear responding. There is, I grant, another side to this question. One evening when I went upstairs I found a partial presentation of it, in the form of a little newspaper clipping, pinned on my cushion. It read as follows:—“My dear,”said she,“please run and bring me the needle from the haystack.”“Oh, I don’t know which haystack.”“Look in all the haystacks—you can’t miss it; there’s only one needle.”Jonathan was in the cellar at the moment. When he came up, he said,“Did I hear any one laughing?”[pg 014]“I don’t know. Did you?”“I thought maybe it was you.”“It might have been. Something amused me—I forget what.”I accused Jonathan of having written it himself, but he denied it. Some other Jonathan, then; for, as I said, this is not a personal matter, it is a world matter. Let us grant, then, a certain allowance for those who hunt in woman-made haystacks. But what about pockets? Is not a man lord over his own pockets? And are they not nevertheless as so many haystacks piled high for his confusion? Certain it is that Jonathan has nearly as much trouble with his pockets as he does with the corners and cupboards and shelves and drawers of his house. It usually happens over our late supper, after his day in town. He sets down his teacup, struck with a sudden memory. He feels in his vest pockets—first the right, then the left. He proceeds to search himself, murmuring,“I thought something came to-day that I wanted to show you—oh, here! no, that isn’t it. I thought I put it—no, those are to be—what’s this? No, that’s a memorandum. Now, where in—”[pg 015]He runs through the papers in his pockets twice over, and in the second round I watch him narrowly, and perhaps see a corner of an envelope that does not look like office work.“There, Jonathan! What’s that? No, not that—that!”He pulls it out with an air of immense relief.“There! I knew I had something. That’s it.”When we travel, the same thing happens with the tickets, especially if they chance to be costly and complicated ones, with all the shifts and changes of our journey printed thick upon their faces. The conductor appears at the other end of the car. Jonathan begins vaguely to fumble without lowering his paper. Pocket after pocket is browsed through in this way. Then the paper slides to his knee and he begins a more thorough investigation, with all the characteristic clapping and diving motions that seem to be necessary. Some pockets must always be clapped and others dived into to discover their contents.No tickets. The conductor is halfway up the car. Jonathan’s face begins to grow serious.[pg 016]He rises and looks on the seat and under it. He sits down and takes out packet after packet of papers and goes over them with scrupulous care. At this point I used to become really anxious—to make hasty calculations as to our financial resources, immediate and ultimate—to wonder if conductors ever really put nice people like us off trains. But that was long ago. I know now that Jonathan has never lost a ticket in his life. So I glance through the paper that he has dropped or watch the landscape until he reaches a certain stage of calm and definite pessimism, when he says,“I must have pulled them out when I took out those postcards in the other car. Yes, that’s just what has happened.”Then, the conductor being only a few seats away, I beg Jonathan to look once more in his vest pocket, where he always puts them. To oblige me he looks, though without faith, and lo! this time the tickets fairly fling themselves upon him, with smiles almost curling up their corners. Does the brownie travel with us, then?I begin to suspect that some of the good men who have been blamed for forgetting to[pg 017]mail letters in their pockets have been, not indeed blameless, but at least misunderstood. Probably they do not forget. Probably they hunt for the letters and cannot find them, and conclude that they have already mailed them.In the matter of the home haystacks Jonathan’s confidence in himself has at last been shaken. For a long time, when he returned to me after some futile search, he used to say,“Of course you can look for it if you like, but it isnotthere.”But man is a reasoning, if not altogether a reasonable, being, and with a sufficient accumulation of evidence, especially when there is some one constantly at hand to interpret its teachings, almost any set of opinions, however fixed, may be shaken. So here.Once when we shut up the farm for the winter I left my fountain pen behind. This was little short of a tragedy, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that Jonathan was going back that week-end for a day’s hunt.“Be sure to get the pen first of all,”I said,“and put it in your pocket.”“Where is it?”he asked.“In the little medicine cupboard over the[pg 018]fireplace in the orchard room, standing up at the side of the first shelf.”“Why not on your desk?”he asked.“Because I was writing tags in there, and set it up so it would be out of the way.”“And itwasout of the way. All right. I’ll collect it.”He went, and on his return I met him with eager hand—“My pen!”“I’m sorry,”he began.“You didn’t forget!”I exclaimed.“No. But it wasn’t there.”“But—did you look?”“Yes, I looked.”“Thoroughly?”“Yes. I lit three matches.”“Matches! Then you didn’t get it when you first got there!”“Why—no—I had the dog to attend to—and—but I had plenty of time when I got back, and itwasn’tthere.”“Well—Dear me! Did you look anywhere else? I suppose I may be mistaken. Perhaps I did take it back to the desk.”“That’s just what I thought myself,”said Jonathan.“So I went there, and looked, and[pg 019]then I looked on all the mantelpieces and your bureau. You must have put it in your bag the last minute—bet it’s there now!”“Bet it isn’t.”It wasn’t. For two weeks more I was driven to using other pens—strange and distracting to the fingers and the eyes and the mind. Then Jonathan was to go up again.“Please look once more,”I begged,“and don’t expect not to see it. I can fairly see it myself, this minute, standing up there on the right-hand side, just behind the machine oil can.”“Oh, I’ll look,”he promised.“If it’s there, I’ll find it.”He returned penless. I considered buying another. But we were planning to go up together the last week of the hunting season, and I thought I would wait on the chance.We got off at the little station and hunted our way up, making great sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought promising—certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill whistle of woodcock.[pg 020]At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots that are warm and still. It was dusk by the time we came over the crest of the farm ledges and saw the huddle of the home buildings below us, and quite dark when we reached the house. Fires had been made and coals smouldered on the hearth in the sitting-room.“You light the lamp,”I said,“and I’ll just take a match and go through to see if that penshouldhappen to be there.”“No use doing anything to-night,”said Jonathan.“To-morrow morning you can have a thorough hunt.”But I took my match, felt my way into the next room, past the fireplace, up to the cupboard, then struck my match. In its first flare-up I glanced in. Then I chuckled.Jonathan had gone out to the dining-room, but he has perfectly good ears.“NO!”he roared, and his tone of dismay, incredulity, rage, sent me off into gales of unscrupulous laughter. He was striding in, candle in hand, shouting,“It wasnot there!”“Look yourself,”I managed to gasp.[pg 021]This time, somehow, he could see it.“You planted it! You brought it up and planted it!”“I never! Oh, dear me! It pays for going without it for weeks!”“Nothingwill ever make me believe that that pen was standing there when I looked for it!”said Jonathan, with vehement finality.“All right,”I sighed happily.“You don’t have to believe it.”But in his heart perhaps he does believe it. At any rate, since that time he has adopted a new formula:“My dear, it may be there, of course, but I don’t see it.”And this position I regard as unassailable.One triumph he has had. I wanted something that was stored away in the shut-up town house.“Do you suppose you could find it?”I said, as gently as possible.“I can try,”he said.“I think it is in a box about this shape—see?—a gray box, in the attic closet, the farthest-in corner.”“Are you sure it’s in the house? If it’s in the house, I think I can find it.”[pg 022]“Yes, I’m sure of that.”When he returned that night, his face wore a look of satisfaction very imperfectly concealed beneath a mask of nonchalance.“Goodfor you! Was it where I said?”“No.”“Was it in a different corner?”“No.”“Where was it?”“It wasn’t in a corner at all. It wasn’t in that closet.”“It wasn’t! Where, then?”“Downstairs in the hall closet.”He paused, then could not forbear adding,“And it wasn’t in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all over it.”“Why,Jonathan!Aren’t you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn’t have done better myself.”Under such praise he expanded.“The fact is,”he said confidentially,“I had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself,‘Jonathan, don’t be a man! Think what she’d do if she were here now.’And then I got busy and found it.”[pg 023]“Jonathan!”I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.“Well,”he said, proud, yet rather sheepish,“what is there so funny about that? I gave up half a day to it.”“Funny! It isn’t funny—exactly. You don’t mind my laughing a little? Why, you’ve lived down the fountain pen—we’ll forget the pen—”“Oh, no, you won’t forget the pen either,”he said, with a certain pleasant grimness.“Well, perhaps not—of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I say, then, that we’ll always regard the pen in the light of the violet hat-box?”“I think that might do.”Then he had an alarming afterthought.“But, see here—you won’t expect me to do things like that often?”“Dear me, no! People can’t live always on their highest levels. Perhaps you’llneverdo it again.”Jonathan looked distinctly relieved.“I’ll accept it as a unique effort—like Dante’s angel and Raphael’s sonnet.”“Jonathan,”I said that evening,“what do you know about St. Anthony of Padua?”“Not much.”[pg 024]“Well, you ought to. He helped you to-day. He’s the saint who helps people to find lost articles. Every man ought to take him as a patron saint.”“And do you know which saint it is who helps people to find lost virtues—like humility, for instance?”“No. I don’t, really.”“I didn’t suppose you did,”said Jonathan.
“What I find it hard to understand is, why a person who can see a spray of fringed gentian in the middle of a meadow can’t see a book on the sitting-room table.”
“The reason why I can see the gentian,”said Jonathan,“is because the gentian is there.”
“So is the book,”I responded.
“Which table?”he asked.
“The one with the lamp on it. It’s a red book, aboutsobig.”
“It isn’t there; but, just to satisfy you, I’ll look again.”
He returned in a moment with an argumentative expression of countenance.“It isn’t there,”he said firmly.“Will anything else do instead?”
“No, I wanted you to read that special thing. Oh, dear! And I have all these things in my lap! And I know itisthere.”
“And Iknowit isn’t.”He stretched himself out in the hammock and watched me as I rather ostentatiously laid down thimble, scissors, needle, cotton, and material and set out for the sitting-room table. There were a number of books on it, to be sure. I glanced rapidly through the piles, fingered the lower books, pushed aside a magazine, and pulled out from beneath it the book I wanted. I returned to the hammock and handed it over. Then, after possessing myself, again rather ostentatiously, of material, cotton, needle, scissors, and thimble, I sat down.
“It’s the second essay I specially thought we’d like,”I said.
“Just for curiosity,”said Jonathan, with an impersonal air,“where did you find it?”
“Find what?”I asked innocently.
“The book.”
“Oh! On the table.”
“Which table?”
“The one with the lamp on it.”
“I should like to know where.”
“Why—just there—on the table. There was an‘Atlantic’on top of it, to be sure.”
“I saw the‘Atlantic.’Blest if it looked as though it had anything under it! Besides, I was looking for it on top of things. You said you laid it down there just before luncheon, and I didn’t think it could have crawled in under so quick.”
“When you’re looking for a thing,”I said,“you mustn’t think, you must look. Now go ahead and read.”
If this were a single instance, or even if it were one of many illustrating a common human frailty, it would hardly be worth setting down. But the frailty under consideration has come to seem to me rather particularly masculine. Are not all the Jonathans in the world continually being sent to some sitting-room table for something, and coming back to assert, with more or less pleasantness, according to their temperament, that it is not there? The incident, then, is not isolated; it is typical of a vast group. For Jonathan, read Everyman; for the red book, read any particular thing that you want Him to bring; for the sitting-room table, read the place[pg 004]where you know it is and Everyman says it isn’t.
This, at least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are really isolated cases and that their evidence is not cumulative, at others he takes refuge in atu quoque—in itself a confession of weakness—and alludes darkly to“top shelves”and“bottom drawers.”But let us have no mysteries. These phrases, considered as arguments, have their origin in certain incidents which, that all the evidence may be in, I will here set down.
Once upon a time I asked Jonathan to get me something from the top shelf in the closet. He went, and failed to find it. Then I went, and took it down. Jonathan, watching over my shoulder, said,“But that wasn’t the top shelf, I suppose you will admit.”
Sure enough! There was a shelf above.“Oh, yes; but I don’t count that shelf. We never use it, because nobody can reach it.”
“How do you expect me to know which shelves you count and which you don’t?”
“Of course, anatomically—structurally—it is one, but functionally it isn’t there at all.”
“I see,”said Jonathan, so contentedly that I knew he was filing this affair away for future use.
On another occasion I asked him to get something for me from the top drawer of the old“high-boy”in the dining-room. He was gone a long while, and at last, growing impatient, I followed. I found him standing on an old wooden-seated chair, screw-driver in hand. A drawer on a level with his head was open, and he had hanging over his arm a gaudy collection of ancient table-covers and embroidered scarfs, mostly in shades of magenta.
“She stuck, but I’ve got her open now. I don’t see any pillow-cases, though. It’s all full of these things.”He pumped his laden arm up and down, and the table-covers wagged gayly.
I sank into the chair and laughed.“Oh! Have you been prying at that all this time? Ofcoursethere’s nothing inthatdrawer.”
“There’s where you’re wrong. There’s a great deal in it; I haven’t taken out half. If you want to see—”
“Idon’twant to see! There’s nothing I want less! What I mean is—I never put anything there.”
“It’s the top drawer.”He was beginning to lay back the table-covers.
“But I can’t reach it. And it’s been stuck for ever so long.”
“You said the top drawer.”
“Yes, I suppose I did. Of course what I meant was the top one of the ones I use.”
“I see, my dear. When you say top shelf you don’t mean top shelf, and when you say top drawer you don’t mean top drawer; in fact, when you say top you don’t mean top at all—you mean the height of your head. Everything above that doesn’t count.”
Jonathan was so pleased with this formulation of my attitude that he was not in the least irritated to have put out unnecessary work. And his satisfaction was deepened by one more incident. I had sent him to the bottom drawer of my bureau to get a shawl. He returned without it, and I was puzzled.[pg 007]“Now, Jonathan, it’s there, and it’s the top thing.”
“The real top,”murmured Jonathan,“or just what you call top?”
“It’s right in front,”I went on;“and I don’t see how even a man could fail to find it.”
He proceeded to enumerate the contents of the drawer in such strange fashion that I began to wonder where he had been.
“I said my bureau.”
“I went to your bureau.”
“The bottom drawer.”
“The bottom drawer. There was nothing but a lot of little boxes and—”
“Oh,Iknow what you did! You went to the secret drawer.”
“Isn’t that the bottom one?”
“Why, yes, in a way—of course it is; but it doesn’t exactly count—it’s not one of the regular drawers—it hasn’t any knobs, or anything—”
“But it’s a perfectly good drawer.”
“Yes. But nobody is supposed to know it’s there; it looks like a molding—”
“But I know it’s there.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you know I know it’s there.”
“Yes, yes; but I just don’t think about that one in counting up. I see what you mean, of course.”
“And I see what you mean. You mean that your shawl is in the bottom one of the regular drawers—with knobs—that can be alluded to in general conversation. Now I think I can find it.”
He did. And in addition he amused himself by working out phrases about“when is a bottom drawer not a bottom drawer?”and“when is a top shelf not a top shelf?”
It is to these incidents—which I regard as isolated and negligible, and he regards as typical and significant—that he alludes on the occasions when he is unable to find a red book on the sitting-room table. In vain do I point out that when language is variable and fluid it is alive, and that there may be two opinions about the structural top and the functional top, whereas there can be but one as to the book being or not being on the table. He maintains a quiet cheerfulness, as of one who is conscious of being, if not invulnerable, at least well armed.
For a time he even tried to make believe that he was invulnerable as well—to set up the thesis that if the book was really on the table he could find it. But in this he suffered so many reverses that only strong natural pertinacity kept him from capitulation.
Is it necessary to recount instances? Every family can furnish them. As I allow myself to float off into a reminiscent dream I find my mind possessed by a continuous series of dissolving views in which Jonathan is always coming to me saying,“It isn’t there,”and I am always saying,“Please look again.”
Though everything in the house seems to be in a conspiracy against him, it is perhaps with the fishing-tackle that he has most constant difficulties.
“My dear, have you any idea where my rod is? No, don’t get up—I’ll look if you’ll just tell me where—”
“Probably in the corner behind the chest in the orchard room.”
“I’ve looked there.”
“Well, then, did you take it in from the wagon last night?”
“Yes, I remember doing it.”
“What about the little attic? You might have put it up there to dry out.”
“No. I took my wading boots up, but that was all.”
“The dining-room? You came in that way.”
He goes and returns.“Not there.”I reflect deeply.
“Jonathan, are yousureit’s not in that corner of the orchard room?”
“Yes, I’m sure; but I’ll look again.”He disappears, but in a moment I hear his voice calling,“No! Yours is here, but not mine.”
I perceive that it is a case for me, and I get up.“You go and harness. I’ll find it,”I call.
There was a time when, under such conditions, I should have begun by hunting in all the unlikely places I could think of. Now I know better. I go straight to the corner of the orchard room. Then I call to Jonathan, just to relieve his mind.
“All right! I’ve found it.”
“Where?”
“Here, in the orchard room.”
“Wherein the orchard room?”
“In the corner.”
“What corner?”
“The usual corner—back of the chest.”
“The devil!”Then he comes back to put his head in at the door.“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing. What are you talking about the devil for? Anyway, it isn’t the devil; it’s the brownie.”
For there seems no doubt that the things he hunts for are possessed of supernatural powers; and the theory of a brownie in the house, with a special grudge against Jonathan, would perhaps best account for the way in which they elude his search but leap into sight at my approach. There is, to be sure, one other explanation, but it is one that does not suggest itself to him, or appeal to him when suggested by me, so there is no need to dwell upon it.
If it isn’t the rod, it is the landing-net, which has hung itself on a nail a little to the left or right of the one he had expected to see it on; or his reel, which has crept into a corner of the tackle drawer and held a ball of string in front of itself to distract his vision; or a bunch of snell hooks, which, aware of its protective[pg 012]coloring, has snuggled up against the shady side of the drawer and tucked its pink-papered head underneath a gay pickerel-spoon.
Fishing-tackle is, clearly,“possessed,”but in other fields Jonathan is not free from trouble. Finding anything on a bureau seems to offer peculiar obstacles. It is perhaps a big, black-headed pin that I want.“On the pincushion, Jonathan.”
He goes, and returns with two sizes of safety-pins and one long hat-pin.
“No, dear, those won’t do. A small, black-headed one—at least small compared with a hat-pin, large compared with an ordinary pin.”
“Common or house pin?”he murmurs, quoting a friend’s phrase.
“Do look again! I hate to drop this to go myself.”
“When a man does a job, he gets his tools together first.”
“Yes; but they say women shouldn’t copy men, they should develop along their own lines. Please go.”
He goes, and comes back.“You don’t want fancy gold pins, I suppose?”
“No, no! Here, you hold this, and I’ll go.”[pg 013]I dash to the bureau. Sure enough, he is right about the cushion. I glance hastily about. There, in a little saucer, are a half-dozen of the sort I want. I snatch some and run back.
“Well, it wasn’t in the cushion, I bet.”
“No,”I admit;“it was in a saucer just behind the cushion.”
“You said cushion.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
“Now, if you had said simply‘bureau,’I’d have looked in other places on it.”
“Yes, you’d havelookedin other places!”I could not forbear responding. There is, I grant, another side to this question. One evening when I went upstairs I found a partial presentation of it, in the form of a little newspaper clipping, pinned on my cushion. It read as follows:—
“My dear,”said she,“please run and bring me the needle from the haystack.”“Oh, I don’t know which haystack.”“Look in all the haystacks—you can’t miss it; there’s only one needle.”
“My dear,”said she,“please run and bring me the needle from the haystack.”
“Oh, I don’t know which haystack.”
“Look in all the haystacks—you can’t miss it; there’s only one needle.”
Jonathan was in the cellar at the moment. When he came up, he said,“Did I hear any one laughing?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
“I thought maybe it was you.”
“It might have been. Something amused me—I forget what.”
I accused Jonathan of having written it himself, but he denied it. Some other Jonathan, then; for, as I said, this is not a personal matter, it is a world matter. Let us grant, then, a certain allowance for those who hunt in woman-made haystacks. But what about pockets? Is not a man lord over his own pockets? And are they not nevertheless as so many haystacks piled high for his confusion? Certain it is that Jonathan has nearly as much trouble with his pockets as he does with the corners and cupboards and shelves and drawers of his house. It usually happens over our late supper, after his day in town. He sets down his teacup, struck with a sudden memory. He feels in his vest pockets—first the right, then the left. He proceeds to search himself, murmuring,“I thought something came to-day that I wanted to show you—oh, here! no, that isn’t it. I thought I put it—no, those are to be—what’s this? No, that’s a memorandum. Now, where in—”[pg 015]He runs through the papers in his pockets twice over, and in the second round I watch him narrowly, and perhaps see a corner of an envelope that does not look like office work.“There, Jonathan! What’s that? No, not that—that!”
He pulls it out with an air of immense relief.“There! I knew I had something. That’s it.”
When we travel, the same thing happens with the tickets, especially if they chance to be costly and complicated ones, with all the shifts and changes of our journey printed thick upon their faces. The conductor appears at the other end of the car. Jonathan begins vaguely to fumble without lowering his paper. Pocket after pocket is browsed through in this way. Then the paper slides to his knee and he begins a more thorough investigation, with all the characteristic clapping and diving motions that seem to be necessary. Some pockets must always be clapped and others dived into to discover their contents.
No tickets. The conductor is halfway up the car. Jonathan’s face begins to grow serious.[pg 016]He rises and looks on the seat and under it. He sits down and takes out packet after packet of papers and goes over them with scrupulous care. At this point I used to become really anxious—to make hasty calculations as to our financial resources, immediate and ultimate—to wonder if conductors ever really put nice people like us off trains. But that was long ago. I know now that Jonathan has never lost a ticket in his life. So I glance through the paper that he has dropped or watch the landscape until he reaches a certain stage of calm and definite pessimism, when he says,“I must have pulled them out when I took out those postcards in the other car. Yes, that’s just what has happened.”Then, the conductor being only a few seats away, I beg Jonathan to look once more in his vest pocket, where he always puts them. To oblige me he looks, though without faith, and lo! this time the tickets fairly fling themselves upon him, with smiles almost curling up their corners. Does the brownie travel with us, then?
I begin to suspect that some of the good men who have been blamed for forgetting to[pg 017]mail letters in their pockets have been, not indeed blameless, but at least misunderstood. Probably they do not forget. Probably they hunt for the letters and cannot find them, and conclude that they have already mailed them.
In the matter of the home haystacks Jonathan’s confidence in himself has at last been shaken. For a long time, when he returned to me after some futile search, he used to say,“Of course you can look for it if you like, but it isnotthere.”But man is a reasoning, if not altogether a reasonable, being, and with a sufficient accumulation of evidence, especially when there is some one constantly at hand to interpret its teachings, almost any set of opinions, however fixed, may be shaken. So here.
Once when we shut up the farm for the winter I left my fountain pen behind. This was little short of a tragedy, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that Jonathan was going back that week-end for a day’s hunt.
“Be sure to get the pen first of all,”I said,“and put it in your pocket.”
“Where is it?”he asked.
“In the little medicine cupboard over the[pg 018]fireplace in the orchard room, standing up at the side of the first shelf.”
“Why not on your desk?”he asked.
“Because I was writing tags in there, and set it up so it would be out of the way.”
“And itwasout of the way. All right. I’ll collect it.”
He went, and on his return I met him with eager hand—“My pen!”
“I’m sorry,”he began.
“You didn’t forget!”I exclaimed.
“No. But it wasn’t there.”
“But—did you look?”
“Yes, I looked.”
“Thoroughly?”
“Yes. I lit three matches.”
“Matches! Then you didn’t get it when you first got there!”
“Why—no—I had the dog to attend to—and—but I had plenty of time when I got back, and itwasn’tthere.”
“Well—Dear me! Did you look anywhere else? I suppose I may be mistaken. Perhaps I did take it back to the desk.”
“That’s just what I thought myself,”said Jonathan.“So I went there, and looked, and[pg 019]then I looked on all the mantelpieces and your bureau. You must have put it in your bag the last minute—bet it’s there now!”
“Bet it isn’t.”
It wasn’t. For two weeks more I was driven to using other pens—strange and distracting to the fingers and the eyes and the mind. Then Jonathan was to go up again.
“Please look once more,”I begged,“and don’t expect not to see it. I can fairly see it myself, this minute, standing up there on the right-hand side, just behind the machine oil can.”
“Oh, I’ll look,”he promised.“If it’s there, I’ll find it.”
He returned penless. I considered buying another. But we were planning to go up together the last week of the hunting season, and I thought I would wait on the chance.
We got off at the little station and hunted our way up, making great sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought promising—certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill whistle of woodcock.[pg 020]At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots that are warm and still. It was dusk by the time we came over the crest of the farm ledges and saw the huddle of the home buildings below us, and quite dark when we reached the house. Fires had been made and coals smouldered on the hearth in the sitting-room.
“You light the lamp,”I said,“and I’ll just take a match and go through to see if that penshouldhappen to be there.”
“No use doing anything to-night,”said Jonathan.“To-morrow morning you can have a thorough hunt.”
But I took my match, felt my way into the next room, past the fireplace, up to the cupboard, then struck my match. In its first flare-up I glanced in. Then I chuckled.
Jonathan had gone out to the dining-room, but he has perfectly good ears.
“NO!”he roared, and his tone of dismay, incredulity, rage, sent me off into gales of unscrupulous laughter. He was striding in, candle in hand, shouting,“It wasnot there!”
“Look yourself,”I managed to gasp.
This time, somehow, he could see it.
“You planted it! You brought it up and planted it!”
“I never! Oh, dear me! It pays for going without it for weeks!”
“Nothingwill ever make me believe that that pen was standing there when I looked for it!”said Jonathan, with vehement finality.
“All right,”I sighed happily.“You don’t have to believe it.”
But in his heart perhaps he does believe it. At any rate, since that time he has adopted a new formula:“My dear, it may be there, of course, but I don’t see it.”And this position I regard as unassailable.
One triumph he has had. I wanted something that was stored away in the shut-up town house.
“Do you suppose you could find it?”I said, as gently as possible.
“I can try,”he said.
“I think it is in a box about this shape—see?—a gray box, in the attic closet, the farthest-in corner.”
“Are you sure it’s in the house? If it’s in the house, I think I can find it.”
“Yes, I’m sure of that.”
When he returned that night, his face wore a look of satisfaction very imperfectly concealed beneath a mask of nonchalance.
“Goodfor you! Was it where I said?”
“No.”
“Was it in a different corner?”
“No.”
“Where was it?”
“It wasn’t in a corner at all. It wasn’t in that closet.”
“It wasn’t! Where, then?”
“Downstairs in the hall closet.”He paused, then could not forbear adding,“And it wasn’t in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all over it.”
“Why,Jonathan!Aren’t you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Under such praise he expanded.“The fact is,”he said confidentially,“I had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself,‘Jonathan, don’t be a man! Think what she’d do if she were here now.’And then I got busy and found it.”
“Jonathan!”I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.
“Well,”he said, proud, yet rather sheepish,“what is there so funny about that? I gave up half a day to it.”
“Funny! It isn’t funny—exactly. You don’t mind my laughing a little? Why, you’ve lived down the fountain pen—we’ll forget the pen—”
“Oh, no, you won’t forget the pen either,”he said, with a certain pleasant grimness.
“Well, perhaps not—of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I say, then, that we’ll always regard the pen in the light of the violet hat-box?”
“I think that might do.”Then he had an alarming afterthought.“But, see here—you won’t expect me to do things like that often?”
“Dear me, no! People can’t live always on their highest levels. Perhaps you’llneverdo it again.”Jonathan looked distinctly relieved.“I’ll accept it as a unique effort—like Dante’s angel and Raphael’s sonnet.”
“Jonathan,”I said that evening,“what do you know about St. Anthony of Padua?”
“Not much.”
“Well, you ought to. He helped you to-day. He’s the saint who helps people to find lost articles. Every man ought to take him as a patron saint.”
“And do you know which saint it is who helps people to find lost virtues—like humility, for instance?”
“No. I don’t, really.”
“I didn’t suppose you did,”said Jonathan.
[pg 025]IISap-TimeIt was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he had come down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with the old locust stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for Jonathan, there he sat, in plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent him back to the tree, and I studied him there, marveling at the way he assimilated with its bark. As Jonathan came across the grass I called softly, and pointed to the tree.“Well?”he said.“Don’t you see?”“No. What?”“Look—I thought you had eyes!”“Oh, what a little beauty!”“And isn’t his back just like bark and lichens! And what are those things in the tree beside him?”“Plugs, I suppose.”“Plugs?”[pg 026]“Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, I believe.”“You mean for sap? Maple syrup?”“Yes.”“Jonathan! I didn’t know these were sugar maples.”“Oh, yes. These on the road.”“The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And you never told me!”“I thought you knew.”“Knew! I don’t know anything—I should think you’d know that, by this time. Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have let all these years go by—oh, dear—think of all the fun we’ve missed! And syrup!”“You’d have to come up in February.”“Well, then, I’llcomein February. Who’s afraid of February?”“All right. Try it next year.”I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and it was early April before I got to the farm. But it had been a wintry March, and the farmers told me that the sap had not been running except for a few days in a February thaw. Anyway, it was worth trying.[pg 027]Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. But Hiram found a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with these and an auger we went out along the snowy, muddy road. The hole was bored—a pair of them—in the first tree, and the spouts driven in. I knelt, watching—in fact, peering up the spout-hole to see what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with sawdust, appeared—gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off the end.“Look! Hiram! It’s running!”I called.Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently expected it to run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I felt sure. Is it a masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when the theoretically expected becomes actual? Or is it that some temperaments have naturally a certain large confidence in the sway of law, and refuse to wonder at its individual workings? To me the individual workings give an ever fresh thrill because they bring a new realization of the mighty powers behind them. It seems to depend on which end you begin at.But though the little drops thrilled me, I[pg 028]was not beyond setting a pail underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I followed with my pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There were, indeed, a few real pails—berry-pails, lard-pails, and water-pails—but for the most part the sap fell into pitchers, or tin saucepans, stew-kettles of aluminum or agate ware, blue and gray and white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware bowls. It was a strange collection of receptacles that lined the roadside when we had finished our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed, and even Hiram smiled.But what next? Every utensil in the house was out there, sitting in the road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors—no kitchen stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches high—yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it in the afternoon.I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh,[pg 029]Jonathan! Why did you have to be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows how to put stones together, as witness the stone“Eyrie”and the stile in the lane. However, there Jonathan wasn’t. So I went out into the swampy orchard behind the house and looked about—no lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect material, and Hiram, seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones. Somehow my fireplace got made—two side walls, one end wall, the other end left open for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it, but“’t was enough, ’t would serve.”I collected fire-wood, and there I was, ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap was drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil next day. I felt that I was being borne along on the providential wave that so often floats the inexperienced to success.That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them out once more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment benevolently on my work.“Will it run to-night?”I asked him.“No—no—’t won’t run to-night. Too[pg 030]cold. ’T won’t run any to-night. You can sleep all right.”This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it was growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in the middle of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little.So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went to sleep.I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding sunshine and Hiram’s voice outside my window.“Got anything I can empty sap into? I’ve got everything all filled up.”“Sap! Why, it isn’t running yet, is it?”“Pails were flowin’ over when I came out.”“Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn’t run last night.”“I guest there don’t nobody know when sap’ll run and when it won’t,”said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything full—old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things[pg 031]enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its resources.Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I felt as if I had turned on the faucets of the universe and didn’t know how to turn them off again.However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and began to pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he needed his feed-pails. We poured in sap and we poured in sap. Never did I see anything hold so much as that pan. Even Hiram was stirred out of his usual calm to remark,“It beats all, how much that holds.”Of course Jonathan would have had its capacity all calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and so I was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied themselves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch to allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence—my exclusive little fool’s Providence—was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, and when Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed[pg 032]pride and showed him the pan—now a heaving, frothing mass of sap-about-to-be-syrup, sending clouds of white steam down the wind. As he looked at the oven walls, I fancied his fingers ached to get at them, but he offered no criticism, seeing that they worked.The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely preparing for me a special little gift in the form of a miniature snowstorm. It was quite real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and the road, it piled itself softly among the clusters of swelling buds on the apple trees, and made the orchard look as though it had burst into bloom in an hour. Then the sun came out, there were a few dazzling moments when the world was all blue and silver, and then the whiteness faded.And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make the rounds, bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my pan was kept up so that the boiling down might keep pace with the new supply.“They do say snow makes it run,”shouted a passer-by, and another called,“You want to keep skimmin’!”Whereupon I seized my[pg 033]long-handled skimmer and fell to work. Southern Connecticut does not know much about syrup, but by the avenue of the road I was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it possessed.The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occasional overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, and bottled, and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the household through the year.* * * * *“This time I will go early,”I said to Jonathan;“they say the late running is never quite so good.”It was early March when I got up there this time—early March after a winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again Jonathan could not come, but Cousin Janet could, and we met at the little station, where Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The sun was warm, but the air was keen and the woods hardly showed spring at all yet, even in that first token of it, the slight thickening of their millions of little tips, through the swelling of the buds. The city trees already[pg 034]showed this, but the country ones still kept their wintry penciling of vanishing lines.Spring was in the road, however.“There ain’t no bottom to this road now, it’s just dropped clean out,”remarked a fellow teamster as we wallowed along companionably through the woods. But, somehow, we reached the farm. Again we bored our holes, and again I was thrilled as the first bright drops slipped out and jeweled the ends of the spouts. I watched Janet. She was interested but calm, classing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan. We unearthed last year’s oven and dug out its inner depths—leaves and dirt and apples and ashes—it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get to bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors of a season’s use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year’s sojourn in the attic. By sunset we had a panful of sap boiling merrily and already taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted it. It was very syrupy. Letting the fire die down, we went in to get supper in the utmost content of spirit.“It’s so much simpler than last year,”I[pg 035]said, as we sat over our cozy“tea,”—“having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all—”“You don’t suppose anything could happen to it while we’re in here?”suggested Janet.“Shan’t I just run out and see?”“No, sit still. What could happen? The fire’s going out.”“Yes, I know.”But her voice was uncertain.“You see, I’ve been all through it once,”I reassured her.As we rose, Janet said,“Let’s go out before we do the dishes.”And to humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out on the back porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward the fireplace we saw gleams of red.“How funny!”I murmured.“I didn’t think there was so much fire left.”We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, and as I raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The pan was a blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held the lantern more closely. I seized a stick and poked—the crisp black[pg 036]stuff broke and crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A curious odor arose.“It couldn’t have!”gasped Janet.“It couldn’t—but it has!”I said.It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter won. When we recovered a little we took up the black shell of carbon that had once been syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the oven, for a keepsake. Then we poured water in the pan, and steam rose hissing to the stars.“Does it leak?”faltered Janet.“Leak!”I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water stream through the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the ashes below.“The question is,”I went on as I got up,“did it boil away because it leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?”“I don’t see that it matters much,”said Janet. She was showing symptoms of depression at this point.“It matters a great deal,”I said.“Because, you see, we’ve got to tell Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it.”[pg 037]“I see,”said Janet; then she added, experimentally,“Why tell Jonathan?”“Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn’t miss telling Jonathan for anything. What is Jonathanfor!”“Well—of course,”she conceded.“Let’s do dishes.”We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted. Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision—a vision of black crust, with winking red embers smoldering along its broken edges. I found it distracting in the extreme.…At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I was awakened by a voice:—“It’s beginning to rain. I think I’ll just go out and empty what’s near the house.”“Janet!”I murmured,“don’t be absurd.”“But it will dilute all that sap.”“There isn’t any sap to dilute. It won’t be running at night.”After a while the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed:—“My dear, you don’t mind if I slip out. It will only take a minute.”“I do mind. Go to sleep!”[pg 038]Silence. Then:—“It’s raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap—”“You don’thaveto think!”I was quite savage.“Just go to sleep—and let me!”Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. The voice was pleading:—“Pleaselet me go! I’ll be back in a minute. And it’s not cold.”“Oh, well—I’m awake now, anyway.I’llgo.”My voice was tinged with that high resignation that is worse than anger. Janet’s tone changed instantly:—“No, no! Don’t! Please don’t! I’m going. I truly don’t mind.”“I’mgoing. I don’t mind, either, not at all.”“Oh, dear! Then let’s not either of us go.”“That was my idea in the first place.”“Well, then, we won’t. Go to sleep, and I will too.”“Not at all! I’ve decided to go.”“But it’s stopped raining. Probably it won’t rain any more.”“Then what are you making all this fuss for?”[pg 039]“I didn’t make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out—”“Well, you couldn’t. And it’s raining very hard again. And I’m going.”“Oh, don’t! You’ll get drenched.”“Of course. But I can’t bear to have all that sap diluted.”“It doesn’t run at night. You said it didn’t.”“You said it did.”“But I don’t really know. You know best.”“Why didn’t you think of that sooner? Anyway, I’m going.”“Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I’d stirred you up—”“You have,”I interrupted, sweetly.“I won’t deny that youhavestirred me up. But now that you have mentioned it”—I felt for a match—“now that you have mentioned it, I see that this was the one thing needed to make my evening complete, or perhaps it’s morning—I don’t know.”We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in those curious compromises of vesture that people adopt under such circumstances, and, with lantern and umbrella,[pg 040]we fumbled our way out to the trees. The rain was driving in sheets, and we plodded up the road in the yellow circle of lantern-light wavering uncertainly over the puddles, while under our feet the mud gave and sucked.“It’s diluted, sure enough,”I said, as we emptied the pails. We crawled slowly back, with our heavy milk-can full of sap-and-rain-water, and went in.The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down to cookies and milk, feeling almost cozy.“I’ve always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the middle of the night this way,”I remarked,“and now I know.”“Aren’t you hateful!”said Janet.“Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven’t anyotherplan, we’ll go back to bed.”It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there was nothing to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain-noises that only such an old house knows. On the little windows the drops pricked sharply; in the fireplace with the straight flue[pg 041]they fell, hissing, on the embers. On the porch roofs the rain made a dull patter of sound; on the tin roof of the“little attic”over the kitchen it beat with flat resonance. In the big attic, when we went up to see if all was tight, it filled the place with a multitudinous clamor; on the sides of the house it drove with a fury that re-echoed dimly within doors.Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed with consternation the torrents of rain-water pouring into the pails. We tried fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind blew them merrily down the road. It would have been easy enough to cover the pails, but how to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out—that was the question.“It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year,”said Janet.“The trouble is,”I said,“I know just enough to have lost my hold on the fool’s Providence, and not enough really to take care of myself.”“Superstition!”said Janet.“What do you call your idea of the curse?”I retorted.“Anyway, I have an idea! Look,[pg 042]Janet! We’ll just cut up these enamel-cloth table-covers here by the sink and everywhere, and tack them around the spouts.”Janet’s thrifty spirit was doubtful.“Don’t you need them?”“Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. We’ll have to have fresh ones this summer, anyway.”We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk-room. We got tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went again. We cut a piece for each tree, just enough to go over each pair of spouts and protect the pail. When tacked on, it had the appearance of a neat bib, and as the pattern was a blue and white check, the effect, as one looked down the road at the twelve trees, was very fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer the people who drove by, too.But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into the pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn’t run in the rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was right, and you can’t tell. I am glad if you can’t. The physical mysteries of the universe are being unveiled so[pg 043]swiftly that one likes to find something that still keeps its secret—though, indeed, the spiritual mysteries seem in no danger of such enforcement.The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and Jonathan managed to arrive, though the roads had even less“bottom to ’em”than before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, and, after Jonathan had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs were taken off. Somehow in the clear March sunshine they looked almost shocking. By the next day we had syrup enough to try for sugar.For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the first year, but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to Janet, when it came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again in a position to expect the aid of the fool’s Providence.“How muchdoyou know about it?”asked Janet.“Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and partly like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and then you pour it off.”[pg 044]“I’ve got more to go on than that,”said Jonathan.“I came up on the train with the Judge. He used to see it done.”“You’ve got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram can’t,”I said.“All right. There’s time enough.”We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the kitchen to“try”the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we would take turns, but usually we all three went. Supper seemed distinctly a side issue.“I’m going to take it off now,”said Jonathan.“Look out!”“Do you think it’s time?”I demurred.“We’ll know soon,”said Jonathan, with his usual composure.We hung over him.“Now you beat it,”I said. But he was already beating.“Get some cold water to set it in,”he commanded. We brought the dishpan with water from the well, where ice still floated.“Maybe you oughtn’t to stir so much—do you think?”I suggested, helpfully.“Beat it more—up, you know.”“More the way you would eggs,”said Janet.[pg 045]“I’ll show you.”I lunged at the spoon.“Go away! This isn’t eggs,”said Jonathan, beating steadily.“Your arm must be tired. Let me take it,”pleaded Janet.“No, me!”I said.“Janet, you’ve got to get your coat and things. You’ll have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, you need a fresh arm.”“I’m fresh enough.”“And I really don’t think you have the motion.”“I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet.”“Janet’s all right.”“So am I. See how white it’s getting. The Judge said—”“Here come Hiram and Kit,”announced Janet, returning with bag and wraps.“But you have ten minutes. Can’t I help?”“He won’t let us. He’s that ‘sot,’”I murmured.“He’ll make you miss your train.”“Youcouldbutter the pans,”he counter charged,“and you haven’t.”We flew to prepare, and the pouring began.[pg 046]It was a thrilling moment. The syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out thickly, blob-blob-blob, into the little pans. Janet moved them up as they were needed, and I snatched the spoon, at last, and encouraged the stuff to fall where it should. But Jonathan got it from me again, and scraped out the remnant, making designs of clovers and polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a dash for coats and hats and a rush to the carriage.When the surrey disappeared around the turn of the road, I went back, shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses will, being sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the table sat a huddle of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work getting things in order to be left in the morning. Then I went back to the fire and waited for Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried to read, but the stillness of the house was too importunate, it had to be listened to. I leaned back and watched the fire, and the old house and I held communion together.Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got that evening. It was partly[pg 047]my own attitude; I was going away in the morning, and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such things as these.If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present. But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon to return—then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and interprets the living past and the living future.Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful stillness. There were[pg 048]no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed background of one’s consciousness—the steps overhead, the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the“new part,”and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the house—very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me as it absorbed the rest—those before and after me—for time was not.There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring[pg 049]within. Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air—and the house fell silent so that Jonathan might come in.“Your sugar is hardening nicely, I see,”he said, rubbing his hands before the fire.“Yes,”I said.“You know ItoldJanet that for this part of the affair we could trust to the fool’s Providence.”“Thank you,”said Jonathan.
It was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he had come down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with the old locust stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for Jonathan, there he sat, in plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent him back to the tree, and I studied him there, marveling at the way he assimilated with its bark. As Jonathan came across the grass I called softly, and pointed to the tree.
“Well?”he said.
“Don’t you see?”
“No. What?”
“Look—I thought you had eyes!”
“Oh, what a little beauty!”
“And isn’t his back just like bark and lichens! And what are those things in the tree beside him?”
“Plugs, I suppose.”
“Plugs?”
“Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, I believe.”
“You mean for sap? Maple syrup?”
“Yes.”
“Jonathan! I didn’t know these were sugar maples.”
“Oh, yes. These on the road.”
“The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And you never told me!”
“I thought you knew.”
“Knew! I don’t know anything—I should think you’d know that, by this time. Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have let all these years go by—oh, dear—think of all the fun we’ve missed! And syrup!”
“You’d have to come up in February.”
“Well, then, I’llcomein February. Who’s afraid of February?”
“All right. Try it next year.”
I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and it was early April before I got to the farm. But it had been a wintry March, and the farmers told me that the sap had not been running except for a few days in a February thaw. Anyway, it was worth trying.
Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. But Hiram found a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with these and an auger we went out along the snowy, muddy road. The hole was bored—a pair of them—in the first tree, and the spouts driven in. I knelt, watching—in fact, peering up the spout-hole to see what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with sawdust, appeared—gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off the end.
“Look! Hiram! It’s running!”I called.
Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently expected it to run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I felt sure. Is it a masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when the theoretically expected becomes actual? Or is it that some temperaments have naturally a certain large confidence in the sway of law, and refuse to wonder at its individual workings? To me the individual workings give an ever fresh thrill because they bring a new realization of the mighty powers behind them. It seems to depend on which end you begin at.
But though the little drops thrilled me, I[pg 028]was not beyond setting a pail underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I followed with my pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There were, indeed, a few real pails—berry-pails, lard-pails, and water-pails—but for the most part the sap fell into pitchers, or tin saucepans, stew-kettles of aluminum or agate ware, blue and gray and white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware bowls. It was a strange collection of receptacles that lined the roadside when we had finished our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed, and even Hiram smiled.
But what next? Every utensil in the house was out there, sitting in the road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors—no kitchen stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches high—yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it in the afternoon.
I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh,[pg 029]Jonathan! Why did you have to be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows how to put stones together, as witness the stone“Eyrie”and the stile in the lane. However, there Jonathan wasn’t. So I went out into the swampy orchard behind the house and looked about—no lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect material, and Hiram, seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones. Somehow my fireplace got made—two side walls, one end wall, the other end left open for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it, but“’t was enough, ’t would serve.”I collected fire-wood, and there I was, ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap was drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil next day. I felt that I was being borne along on the providential wave that so often floats the inexperienced to success.
That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them out once more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment benevolently on my work.
“Will it run to-night?”I asked him.
“No—no—’t won’t run to-night. Too[pg 030]cold. ’T won’t run any to-night. You can sleep all right.”
This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it was growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in the middle of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little.
So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went to sleep.
I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding sunshine and Hiram’s voice outside my window.
“Got anything I can empty sap into? I’ve got everything all filled up.”
“Sap! Why, it isn’t running yet, is it?”
“Pails were flowin’ over when I came out.”
“Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn’t run last night.”
“I guest there don’t nobody know when sap’ll run and when it won’t,”said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.
In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything full—old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things[pg 031]enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its resources.
Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I felt as if I had turned on the faucets of the universe and didn’t know how to turn them off again.
However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and began to pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he needed his feed-pails. We poured in sap and we poured in sap. Never did I see anything hold so much as that pan. Even Hiram was stirred out of his usual calm to remark,“It beats all, how much that holds.”Of course Jonathan would have had its capacity all calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and so I was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied themselves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch to allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence—my exclusive little fool’s Providence—was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, and when Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed[pg 032]pride and showed him the pan—now a heaving, frothing mass of sap-about-to-be-syrup, sending clouds of white steam down the wind. As he looked at the oven walls, I fancied his fingers ached to get at them, but he offered no criticism, seeing that they worked.
The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely preparing for me a special little gift in the form of a miniature snowstorm. It was quite real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and the road, it piled itself softly among the clusters of swelling buds on the apple trees, and made the orchard look as though it had burst into bloom in an hour. Then the sun came out, there were a few dazzling moments when the world was all blue and silver, and then the whiteness faded.
And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make the rounds, bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my pan was kept up so that the boiling down might keep pace with the new supply.
“They do say snow makes it run,”shouted a passer-by, and another called,“You want to keep skimmin’!”Whereupon I seized my[pg 033]long-handled skimmer and fell to work. Southern Connecticut does not know much about syrup, but by the avenue of the road I was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it possessed.
The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occasional overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, and bottled, and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the household through the year.
* * * * *
“This time I will go early,”I said to Jonathan;“they say the late running is never quite so good.”
It was early March when I got up there this time—early March after a winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again Jonathan could not come, but Cousin Janet could, and we met at the little station, where Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The sun was warm, but the air was keen and the woods hardly showed spring at all yet, even in that first token of it, the slight thickening of their millions of little tips, through the swelling of the buds. The city trees already[pg 034]showed this, but the country ones still kept their wintry penciling of vanishing lines.
Spring was in the road, however.“There ain’t no bottom to this road now, it’s just dropped clean out,”remarked a fellow teamster as we wallowed along companionably through the woods. But, somehow, we reached the farm. Again we bored our holes, and again I was thrilled as the first bright drops slipped out and jeweled the ends of the spouts. I watched Janet. She was interested but calm, classing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan. We unearthed last year’s oven and dug out its inner depths—leaves and dirt and apples and ashes—it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get to bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors of a season’s use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year’s sojourn in the attic. By sunset we had a panful of sap boiling merrily and already taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted it. It was very syrupy. Letting the fire die down, we went in to get supper in the utmost content of spirit.
“It’s so much simpler than last year,”I[pg 035]said, as we sat over our cozy“tea,”—“having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all—”
“You don’t suppose anything could happen to it while we’re in here?”suggested Janet.“Shan’t I just run out and see?”
“No, sit still. What could happen? The fire’s going out.”
“Yes, I know.”But her voice was uncertain.
“You see, I’ve been all through it once,”I reassured her.
As we rose, Janet said,“Let’s go out before we do the dishes.”And to humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out on the back porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward the fireplace we saw gleams of red.
“How funny!”I murmured.“I didn’t think there was so much fire left.”
We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, and as I raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The pan was a blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held the lantern more closely. I seized a stick and poked—the crisp black[pg 036]stuff broke and crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A curious odor arose.
“It couldn’t have!”gasped Janet.
“It couldn’t—but it has!”I said.
It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter won. When we recovered a little we took up the black shell of carbon that had once been syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the oven, for a keepsake. Then we poured water in the pan, and steam rose hissing to the stars.
“Does it leak?”faltered Janet.
“Leak!”I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water stream through the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the ashes below.
“The question is,”I went on as I got up,“did it boil away because it leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?”
“I don’t see that it matters much,”said Janet. She was showing symptoms of depression at this point.
“It matters a great deal,”I said.“Because, you see, we’ve got to tell Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it.”
“I see,”said Janet; then she added, experimentally,“Why tell Jonathan?”
“Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn’t miss telling Jonathan for anything. What is Jonathanfor!”
“Well—of course,”she conceded.“Let’s do dishes.”
We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted. Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision—a vision of black crust, with winking red embers smoldering along its broken edges. I found it distracting in the extreme.…
At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I was awakened by a voice:—
“It’s beginning to rain. I think I’ll just go out and empty what’s near the house.”
“Janet!”I murmured,“don’t be absurd.”
“But it will dilute all that sap.”
“There isn’t any sap to dilute. It won’t be running at night.”After a while the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed:—
“My dear, you don’t mind if I slip out. It will only take a minute.”
“I do mind. Go to sleep!”
Silence. Then:—
“It’s raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap—”
“You don’thaveto think!”I was quite savage.“Just go to sleep—and let me!”Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. The voice was pleading:—
“Pleaselet me go! I’ll be back in a minute. And it’s not cold.”
“Oh, well—I’m awake now, anyway.I’llgo.”My voice was tinged with that high resignation that is worse than anger. Janet’s tone changed instantly:—
“No, no! Don’t! Please don’t! I’m going. I truly don’t mind.”
“I’mgoing. I don’t mind, either, not at all.”
“Oh, dear! Then let’s not either of us go.”
“That was my idea in the first place.”
“Well, then, we won’t. Go to sleep, and I will too.”
“Not at all! I’ve decided to go.”
“But it’s stopped raining. Probably it won’t rain any more.”
“Then what are you making all this fuss for?”
“I didn’t make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out—”
“Well, you couldn’t. And it’s raining very hard again. And I’m going.”
“Oh, don’t! You’ll get drenched.”
“Of course. But I can’t bear to have all that sap diluted.”
“It doesn’t run at night. You said it didn’t.”
“You said it did.”
“But I don’t really know. You know best.”
“Why didn’t you think of that sooner? Anyway, I’m going.”
“Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I’d stirred you up—”
“You have,”I interrupted, sweetly.“I won’t deny that youhavestirred me up. But now that you have mentioned it”—I felt for a match—“now that you have mentioned it, I see that this was the one thing needed to make my evening complete, or perhaps it’s morning—I don’t know.”
We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in those curious compromises of vesture that people adopt under such circumstances, and, with lantern and umbrella,[pg 040]we fumbled our way out to the trees. The rain was driving in sheets, and we plodded up the road in the yellow circle of lantern-light wavering uncertainly over the puddles, while under our feet the mud gave and sucked.
“It’s diluted, sure enough,”I said, as we emptied the pails. We crawled slowly back, with our heavy milk-can full of sap-and-rain-water, and went in.
The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down to cookies and milk, feeling almost cozy.
“I’ve always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the middle of the night this way,”I remarked,“and now I know.”
“Aren’t you hateful!”said Janet.
“Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven’t anyotherplan, we’ll go back to bed.”
It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there was nothing to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain-noises that only such an old house knows. On the little windows the drops pricked sharply; in the fireplace with the straight flue[pg 041]they fell, hissing, on the embers. On the porch roofs the rain made a dull patter of sound; on the tin roof of the“little attic”over the kitchen it beat with flat resonance. In the big attic, when we went up to see if all was tight, it filled the place with a multitudinous clamor; on the sides of the house it drove with a fury that re-echoed dimly within doors.
Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed with consternation the torrents of rain-water pouring into the pails. We tried fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind blew them merrily down the road. It would have been easy enough to cover the pails, but how to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out—that was the question.
“It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year,”said Janet.
“The trouble is,”I said,“I know just enough to have lost my hold on the fool’s Providence, and not enough really to take care of myself.”
“Superstition!”said Janet.
“What do you call your idea of the curse?”I retorted.“Anyway, I have an idea! Look,[pg 042]Janet! We’ll just cut up these enamel-cloth table-covers here by the sink and everywhere, and tack them around the spouts.”
Janet’s thrifty spirit was doubtful.“Don’t you need them?”
“Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. We’ll have to have fresh ones this summer, anyway.”
We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk-room. We got tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went again. We cut a piece for each tree, just enough to go over each pair of spouts and protect the pail. When tacked on, it had the appearance of a neat bib, and as the pattern was a blue and white check, the effect, as one looked down the road at the twelve trees, was very fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer the people who drove by, too.
But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into the pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn’t run in the rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was right, and you can’t tell. I am glad if you can’t. The physical mysteries of the universe are being unveiled so[pg 043]swiftly that one likes to find something that still keeps its secret—though, indeed, the spiritual mysteries seem in no danger of such enforcement.
The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and Jonathan managed to arrive, though the roads had even less“bottom to ’em”than before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, and, after Jonathan had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs were taken off. Somehow in the clear March sunshine they looked almost shocking. By the next day we had syrup enough to try for sugar.
For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the first year, but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to Janet, when it came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again in a position to expect the aid of the fool’s Providence.
“How muchdoyou know about it?”asked Janet.
“Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and partly like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and then you pour it off.”
“I’ve got more to go on than that,”said Jonathan.“I came up on the train with the Judge. He used to see it done.”
“You’ve got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram can’t,”I said.
“All right. There’s time enough.”
We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the kitchen to“try”the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we would take turns, but usually we all three went. Supper seemed distinctly a side issue.
“I’m going to take it off now,”said Jonathan.“Look out!”
“Do you think it’s time?”I demurred.
“We’ll know soon,”said Jonathan, with his usual composure.
We hung over him.“Now you beat it,”I said. But he was already beating.
“Get some cold water to set it in,”he commanded. We brought the dishpan with water from the well, where ice still floated.
“Maybe you oughtn’t to stir so much—do you think?”I suggested, helpfully.“Beat it more—up, you know.”
“More the way you would eggs,”said Janet.
“I’ll show you.”I lunged at the spoon.
“Go away! This isn’t eggs,”said Jonathan, beating steadily.
“Your arm must be tired. Let me take it,”pleaded Janet.
“No, me!”I said.“Janet, you’ve got to get your coat and things. You’ll have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, you need a fresh arm.”
“I’m fresh enough.”
“And I really don’t think you have the motion.”
“I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet.”
“Janet’s all right.”
“So am I. See how white it’s getting. The Judge said—”
“Here come Hiram and Kit,”announced Janet, returning with bag and wraps.“But you have ten minutes. Can’t I help?”
“He won’t let us. He’s that ‘sot,’”I murmured.“He’ll make you miss your train.”
“Youcouldbutter the pans,”he counter charged,“and you haven’t.”
We flew to prepare, and the pouring began.[pg 046]It was a thrilling moment. The syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out thickly, blob-blob-blob, into the little pans. Janet moved them up as they were needed, and I snatched the spoon, at last, and encouraged the stuff to fall where it should. But Jonathan got it from me again, and scraped out the remnant, making designs of clovers and polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a dash for coats and hats and a rush to the carriage.
When the surrey disappeared around the turn of the road, I went back, shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses will, being sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the table sat a huddle of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work getting things in order to be left in the morning. Then I went back to the fire and waited for Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried to read, but the stillness of the house was too importunate, it had to be listened to. I leaned back and watched the fire, and the old house and I held communion together.
Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got that evening. It was partly[pg 047]my own attitude; I was going away in the morning, and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such things as these.
If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present. But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon to return—then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and interprets the living past and the living future.
Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful stillness. There were[pg 048]no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed background of one’s consciousness—the steps overhead, the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the“new part,”and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the house—very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me as it absorbed the rest—those before and after me—for time was not.
There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring[pg 049]within. Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air—and the house fell silent so that Jonathan might come in.
“Your sugar is hardening nicely, I see,”he said, rubbing his hands before the fire.
“Yes,”I said.“You know ItoldJanet that for this part of the affair we could trust to the fool’s Providence.”
“Thank you,”said Jonathan.