Ihave dealt at length with our adventures at Fifth Avenue auction houses when we were amassing the furnishings for our Italian rooms and our Italian hallway. But I forgot to make mention of the many friends we encountered at the salesrooms—people who always before had seemed to us entirely normal, but now were plainly to be recognized for devotees of the same passion for bidding-in which had lain its insidious clutches upon us. I recall one victim in particular, a young woman whom I shall call Maude because that happens to be her name.
Theretofore this Maude lady had impressed mo as being one of the sanest, most competent females of my entire acquaintance—good-looking, witty and with a fine sense of proportion. Yet behold, here she was, balanced on the edge of a folding chair in an overheated, overcrowded room, her eyes feverish with a fanatical light, a printed catalogue clutched in her left hand and her right ready to go up in signal to the hypnotic gentleman on the auctioneer's block. At a glance we knew the symptoms because in them we saw duplicated our own. We knew exactly what ailed her: She was bidding on various articles, not because she particularly wanted them, but because she feared unless she bought them some stranger might.
After the sale had ended and her excitement—and ours—had abated we exchanged confidences touching on our besetting mania.
“Just coming and buying something that I wish afterward I hadn't bought isn't the worst of it,” she owned. “That is destructive only to my spending allowance. My chief trouble is that I've gotten so I can't bear to think of spending my afternoons anywhere except at this place or one of the places like it. And if there happen to be two sales going the same day at different shops I'm perfectly miserable. All the time I'm sitting in one I'm distracted by the thought that possibly I'm missing some perfectly wonderful bargain at the other. Sometimes I suspect that my intellect is beginning to give way under the strain, and then again I'm sure I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My husband has his own diagnosis. He says I'm just plain nutty, as he vulgarly expresses it. He has taken to calling me Nutchita, which he says is Spanish for a little nut. You know since Scott came back from South America he just adores to show off the Spanish he learned. He loves to tell how he went to a bull fight down there and saw the gallant mandatory stab the charging parabola to the heart with his shining bolero or whatever you call it.
“He says there is no hope of curing me and he appreciates the fact that teams of horses couldn't drag me away from these auction rooms, but he suggested that maybe we might be saved from spending our last days at the almshouse if before I started out on my mad career each afternoon I'd get somebody to muffle me and tie my arms fast so I couldn't bid on anything. But even if I couldn't speak or gesticulate I could still nod, so I suppose that wouldn't help. Besides, as I said to him, I would probably attract a good deal of attention riding down Fifth Avenue with my hands tied behind my back and a gag in my mouth. But he says he'd much rather I were made conspicuous now than that I should be even more conspicuous later on at a feeble-minded institute; he says they'd probably keep me in a strait-jacket anyhow after I reached the violent stage and that I might as well begin getting used to the feeling now.
“All joking aside, though, I really did have a frightful experience last winter,” she continued. “There was a sale of desirable household effects advertised to take place up at Blank's on West Forty-fifth Street and of course I went. I've spent so much of my time at Blank's these last few months I suppose people are beginning to think I live there. Well, anyway, I was one of the first arrivals and just as I got settled the auctioneer put up a basket; a huge, fiat, curious-looking, wickerwork affair, it was. You never in all your life saw such a basket! It was too big for a soiled-clothes hamper and besides wasn't the right shape. And it was too flat to store things in and it didn't have any top on it either. I suppose you would just call it a kind of a basket.
“Well, the man put it up and asked for bids on it, but nobody bid; and then the auctioneer looked right at me in an appealing sort of way—I feel that everybody connected with the shop is an old friend of mine by now, and especially the auctioneer—so when he looked in my direction with that yearning expression in his eye I bid a dollar just to start it off for him. And what do you think? Before you could say scat he'd knocked it down to me for a dollar. I just hate people who catch you up suddenly that way! It discouraged me so that after that the sale was practically spoiled for me. I didn't have the courage to bid on another thing the whole afternoon.
“When the sale was over I went back to the packing room to get a good look at what I'd bought. And, my dear, what do you suppose? I hadn't bought a single basket—that would have been bad enough—but no. I'd bought a job lot, comprising the original basket and its twin sister that was exactly like it, only homelier if anything, and on top of that an enormous square wooden box painted a bright green with a great lock fastening the lid down. That wretch of an auctioneer had deliberately taken a shameful advantage of me. How was I to know I was bidding in a whole wagonload of trash? Obtaining money under false pretenses, that's what I call it.
“Well, I stood aghast—or perhaps I should say I leaned aghast, because the shock was so great I felt I had to prop myself up against something. Why, the box alone must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. It didn't seem to be the sort of box you could put anything in either. It wouldn't do for a wood box or a coal box or a dog house or anything. It was just as useless as the baskets were, and they were nothing more nor less than two orders of willow-ware on the half shell. Even if they had been of any earthly use, what could I do with them in the tiny three-room apartment that we were occupying last winter? Isn't it perfectly shameful the way these auction-room people impose on the public? They don't make any exceptions either. Here was I, a regular customer, and just see what they had done to me, all because I'm so good-natured and sympathetic. I declare sometimes I'm ready to take a solemn oath I'll never do another favor for anybody so long as I live. It's the selfish ones who get along in this world!
“Well, when I realized what a scandalous trick had been played on me I was seized with a wild desire to get away. I decided I would try to slip out. But the manager had his eye on me. You know the rule they have: 'Claim all purchases and arrange for their removal before leaving premises, otherwise goods will be stored at owner's risk and cost.' And he called me back and told me my belongings were ready to be taken away and would I kindly get them out of the house at once because they took up so much room. Room? They took up all the room there was. You had to step into one of the baskets to get into the place and climb over the box to get out again.
“I asked him how I was going to get those things up to my address and he suggested a taxi. I told him I would just run out and find a taxi, meaning, of course, to forget to come back. But he told me not to bother because there was a taxi at the door that had been ordered to come for somebody else and then wasn't needed. And before I could think up any other excuse to escape he'd called the taxi driver in. And the taxi man took one look at my collection of junk and then he asked us if we thought he was driving a moving van or a Noah's ark and laughed in a low-bred way and went out.
“At that I had a faint ray of hope that maybe after all I might be saved, because I had made up my mind to tell the manager I would just step outside and arrange to hire a delivery wagon or something, and that would give me a chance to escape; but I think he must have suspected something from my manner because already he was calling in another taxi driver from off the street, and there I was, trapped. And the driver of the second taxi was more accommodating than the other one had been, though goodness knows his goodness of heart was no treat to me. I should have regarded it as a personal kindness on his part if he had behaved as the first driver had done. But no, nothing would do but that he must load that ghastly monstrosity of a box up alongside him on the rack where they carry trunks, and two of the packing-room men tied it on with ropes so it couldn't fall off and get lost. I suppose they thought by that they were doing me a favor! And then I got in the cab feeling like Marie Antoinette on her way to be beheaded, and they piled those two baskets in on top of me and the end of one of them stuck out so far that they couldn't get the door shut but had to leave it open. And then we rode home, only I didn't feel like Marie Antoinette any more; I felt like something that was being delivered in a crate and had come partly undone on the way.
“And when we got up to Eighty-ninth Street that bare-faced robber of a taxicab driver charged me two extra fares—just think of such things being permitted to go on in a city where the police are supposed to protect people! And then he unloaded all that mess on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house and drove off and left me there standing guard over it—probably the forlornest, most helpless object in all New York at that moment.
“I got one of the hallboys to call the janitor up from the basement and I asked him if he would be good enough to store my box and my two baskets in the storeroom where the tenants keep their trunks. And he said not on my life he wouldn't, because there wasn't any room to spare in the trunk room and then he asked me what I was going to do with all that truck anyway, and though it was none of his business I thought it would be tactful to make a polite answer and I told him I hadn't exactly decided yet and that I certainly would appreciate his kindness if he could just tuck my things away in some odd corner somewhere until I had fully made up my mind. While I was saying that I was giving him one of my most winning smiles, though it hurt like the toothache to smile under the circumstances and considering what I'd already been through.
“But all he said was: 'Huh, lady, you couldn't tuck them things away at Times Square and Forty-third Street and that's the biggest corner I knows of in this town.'
“The impudent scoundrel wouldn't relent a mite either, until I'd given him a dollar for a tip, and then he did agree to keep the baskets in the coal cellar for a couple of days but no longer. But he absolutely refused to take the box along too, so I had to have it sent upstairs to the apartment and put in the bedroom because it was too big to go in the hall. And when the men got it in the bedroom I could hardly get in myself to take off my hat. And after that I sat down and cried a little, because really I was frightfully upset, and moreover I had a feeling that when Scott came home he would be sure to try to be funny. You know how husbands are, being one yourself!
“Sure enough, when he came in the first thing he saw was that box. He couldn't very well help seeing it because he practically fell over it as he stepped in the door. He said: 'What's this?' and I said: 'It's a box'—just like that. And he said: 'What kind of a box?' And I didn't like his tone and I said: 'A green box. I should think anybody would know that much.' And he said: 'Ah, indeed,' several times in a most aggravating way and walked round it. He couldn't walk all the way round it on account of the wall being in the way; but as far round it as he could walk without bumping into the wall. And he looked at it and felt it with his hand and kicked it once or twice and then he sniffed and said: 'And what's it for?' And I said: 'To put things in.' And he said: 'For instance, what?'
“Now I despise for people to be so technical round me, and besides, of all the words in the English language I most abhor those words 'for instance'; but I kept my temper even if I was boiling inside and I said: 'It's to put things in that you haven't any other place to put them in.' Which was ungrammatical, I admit, but the best I could do under the prevalent conditions. And then he looked at me until I could have screamed, and he said: 'Maude, where did you get that damned thing?' And I said it wasn't a damned thing but a perfectly good box made out of wood and painted green and everything; and that I'd got it at an auction sale for a dollar and that I considered it a real bargain. I didn't feel called on to tell him about the two baskets down in the coal cellar just yet. So I didn't mention them; and anyhow, heaven knows I was sick and tired of the whole subject and ready to drop it, but he kept on looking at it and sniffing and asking questions. Some people have no idea how a great strong brute of a man can nag a weak defenseless woman to desperation when he deliberately sets out to do it.
“Finally I said: 'Well, even if you don't like the box I think it's a perfectly splendid box, and look what a good strong lock it has on it—surely that's worth something.' And he said: 'Well, let's see about that—where's the key?' And, my dear, then it dawned on me that I didn't have any key!
“Well, a person can stand just so much and no more. I'm a patient long-suffering woman and I've always been told that I had a wonderful disposition, but there are limits. And when he burst out laughing and wouldn't stop laughing but kept right on and laughed and laughed and leaned up against something and laughed some more until you could have heard him in the next block—why then, all of a sudden something seemed to give way inside of me and I burst out crying—I couldn't hold in another second—and I told him that I'd never speak to him again the longest day he lived and that he could go to Halifax or some other place beginning with the same initial and take the old box with him for all I cared; and just as I burst out of the room I heard him say: 'No, madam, when I married you I agreed to support you, but I didn't engage to take care of any air-tight, burglar-proof, pea-green box the size of a circus cage!' And I suppose he thought that was being funny, too. A perverted sense of humor is an awful cross to bear—in a husband!
“So I went and lay down on the living-room couch with a raging, splitting, sick headache and I didn't care whether I lived or died, but on the whole rather preferred dying. After a little he came in, trying to hold his face straight, and begged my pardon. And I told him I would forgive him if he would do just two things. And he asked me what those two things were and I told him one was to quit snickering like an idiot every few moments and the other was never to mention boxes to me again as long as he lived. And he promised on his solemn word of honor he wouldn't, but he said I must bear with him if he smiled a little bit once in a while as the evening wore on, because when he did that he would be thinking about something very funny that had happened at the office that day and not thinking about what I would probably think he was thinking about at all. And then he said how about running down to the Plaza for a nice little dinner and I said yes, and after dinner I felt braced up and strong enough to break the news to him about the two baskets.
“And he didn't laugh; in justice to him I must say that much for him. He didn't laugh. Only he choked or something, and had a very severe coughing spell. And then we went home and while he was undressing he fell over the box and barked his shins on it, and though it must have been a strain on him he behaved like a gentleman and swore only a little.
“But, my dear, the worst was yet to come! The next day I had to arrange to send the whole lot to storage because we simply couldn't go on living with that box in the only bedroom we had; and the bill for cartage came to two dollars and a quarter. After I had seen them off to the storage warehouse I tried to forget all about them. As a matter of fact they never crossed my mind again until we moved out to the country in April and then I suddenly remembered about them—getting a bill for three months' storage at two dollars a month may have had something to do with bringing them forcibly to my memory—and I telephoned in and asked the manager of the storage warehouse if he please wouldn't give them to somebody and he said he didn't know anybody who would have all that junk as a gift. So it seemed to me the best thing and the most economical thing to do would be to pay the bill to date and bring them on out to the place.
“But, as it turned out, that was a financial mistake, too. Because what with sending the truck all the way into town, thirty-eight miles and back again, and the wear and tear on the tires and the gasoline and the man's time who drove the truck and what Scott calls the overhead—though I don't see what he means by that because it is an open truck without any top to it at all—we figure, or rather Scott does, that the cost of getting them out to the country came to fourteen dollars.
“And we still have them, and if you should happen to know of anybody or should meet anybody who'd like to have two very large roomy wicker baskets and a very well-made wooden box painted in all-over design in a very good shade of green and which may contain something valuable, because I haven't been able to open it yet to find out what's inside, and with a lock that goes with it, I wish you'd tell them that they can send up to our place and get them any time that is convenient to them. Or if they don't live too far away I'd be very glad to send the things over to them. Only I'd like for them to decide as soon as possible because the gardener, who is Swedish and awfully fussy, keeps coming in every few days and complaining about them and asking why I don't have them moved out of the greenhouse, which is where we are keeping them for the present, and put some other place where they won't be forever getting in his way. Only there doesn't seem to be any other suitable place to keep them in unless we build a shed especially for that purpose. Isn't it curious that sometimes on a hundred-acre farm there should be so little spare room? I should hate to go to the added expense of building that shed, and so, as I was saying just now, if you should happen upon any one who could use those baskets and that box please don't forget to tell them about my offer.”
To the best of my ability I have been quoting Lady Maude verbatim; but if unintentionally I have permitted any erroneous quotations to creep into her remarks they will be corrected before these lines reach the reader's eye, because the next time she and Scott come over—they are neighbors of ours out here in Westchester—I mean to ask her to t read copy on this book. They drop in on us quite frequently and we talk furnishings, and Scott sits by and smokes and occasionally utters low mocking sounds under his breath, for as yet he has not been entirely won over to antiques. There are times when I fear that Scott, though a most worthy person in all other regards, is hopelessly provincial. Well, I was a trifle provincial myself before I took the cure.
Perhaps I should say that sometimes we talk furnishings with Mistress Maude, but more often we talk farming problems, with particular reference to our own successes and the failures of our friends in the same sphere of endeavor. Indeed, farming is the commonest topic of conversation in our vicinity. Because, like us, nearly all our friends in this part of the country were formerly flat dwellers and because, like us, all of them have done a lot of experimenting in the line of intensified, impractical agriculture since they moved to the country.
We seek to profit by one another's mistakes, and we do—that is, we profit by them to the extent of gloating over them. Then we go and make a few glaring mistakes on our own account, and when the word of it spreads through the neighborhood, seemingly on the wings of the wind, it is their turn to gloat. We have a regular Gloat Club with an open membership and no dues. If an amateur tiller of the soil and his wife drop in on us on a fine spring evening to announce that yesterday they had their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines are still in the blossoming state; or if in midsummer they come for the express purpose of informing us that they have been eating roasting ears for a week—they knowing full well that our early corn has suffered a backset—we compliment them with honeyed words, and outwardly our manner may bespeak a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in our souls all is bitterness.
After they have left one catches oneself saying to one's helpmeet: “Well, the Joneses are nice people in a good many respects. Jones would loan you the last cent he had on earth if you were in trouble and needed it, and in most regards Mrs. Jones is about as fine a little woman as you'd meet in a day's ride. But dog-gone it, I wish they didn't brag so much!” Then one of us opportunely recalls that last year their potatoes developed a slow and mysterious wasting disease resembling malignant tetter, which carried off the entire crop in its infancy, whereas we harvested a cellarful of wonderful praties free from skin blemishes of whatever sort; and warmed by that delectable recollection we cheer up a bit. And if our strawberries turn out well or our apple trees bear heavily or our cow has twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose no time in going about the countryside to spread the tidings, leaving in our wake saddened firesides and hearts all abrim with the concentrated essence of envy.
Practically all our little group specialize. We go in for some line that is absolutely guaranteed to be profitable until the expense becomes too great for a person of limited means any longer to bear up under. Then we drop that and specialize in another line, also recommended as being highly lucrative, for so long as we can afford it; and then we tackle something else again. It is a never-ending round of new experiences, because no matter how disastrously one's most recent experiment has tinned out the agricultural weeklies are constantly holding forth the advantages of a field as yet new and untried and morally insured to be one that will yield large and nourishing dividends. It is my sober conviction that the most inspired fiction writers in America—the men with the most buoyant imaginations—are the regular contributors to our standard agricultural journals. And next to them the most gifted romancers are the fellows who sell bulbs and seeds. They are not fabulists exactly, because fables have morals and frequently these persons have none, but they are inspired fancifiers, I'll tell the world.
Each succeeding season finds each family among us embarking upon some new and fascinating venture. For instance, I have one friend who this year went in for bees—Italian bees, I think he said they were, though why he should have been prejudiced against the native-born variety I cannot understand. He used to drop in at our place to borrow a little cooking soda—he was constantly running out of cooking soda at his house owing to using so much of it on his face and hands and his neck for poulticing purposes—and tell us what charming creatures bees were and how much honey he expected to lay by that fall. From what he said we gathered that the half had never been told by Maeterlinck about the engaging personal habits and captivating tribal customs of bees; bees, we gathered, were, as a race, perhaps a trifle quicktempered and hot-headed, or if not exactly hotheaded at least hot elsewhere, but ever ready to forgive and forget and, once the heat of passion had passed, to let bygones be bygones. A bee, it seemed from his accounts, was one creature that always stood ready to meet you halfway.
He finally gave up bee culture though, not because his enthusiasm had waned, for it did not, but for professional reasons solely. He is a distinguished actor and when he got the leading rôle in a new play it broke in on his study of the part to be dropping the manuscript every few minutes and grabbing up a tin dish and running out in an endeavor, by the power of music, to induce a flock of swarming bees to rehive themselves, or whatever it is bees are supposed to do when favored with a pie-pan solo. It seemed his bees had a perfect mania for swarming. The least little thing would set them off. There must have been too much artistic temperament about the premises for such emotional and flighty creatures as bees appear to be.
Then there was another reason: After the play went on he found it interfered with his giving the best that was in him to his art if he had to go on for a performance all bumpy in spots; also he discovered that grease paint had the effect of irritating a sting rather than soothing it. The other afternoon he came over and offered to give me his last remaining hive of bees. Indeed, he almost pressed them on me.
I declined though. I told him to unload his little playmates on some stranger; that I valued his friendship and hoped to keep it; the more especially, as I now confessed to him, since I had lately thought that if literature ever petered out I might take up the drama as a congenial mode of livelihood, and in such case would naturally benefit through the good offices of a friend who was already in the business and doing well at it. Not, however, that I felt any doubt regarding my ultimate success. I do not mean by this that I have seriously considered playwriting as a regular profession. Once I did seriously consider it, but nobody else did, and especially the critics didn't. Remembering what happened to the only dramatic offering I ever wrote, I long ago made up my mind that if ever I wrote another play—which, please heaven, I shall not—I would call it Solomon Grundy, whether I had a character of that name in it or not. You may recall what happened to the original Solomon Grundy—how he was born on a Monday, began to fail on Thursday, passed away on Saturday of the same week and was laid to eternal rest on Sunday. So even though I never do another play I have the name picked out and ready and waiting.
No, my next venture into the realm of Thespis, should necessity direct my steps thither, would land me directly upon the histrionic boards. Ever since I began to fill out noticeably I have nourished this ambition secretly. As I look at it, a pleasing plumpness of outline should be no handicap but on the contrary rather a help. My sex of course is against my undertaking to play The Two Orphans, otherwise I should feel no doubt of my ability to play both of them, and if they had a little sister I shouldn't be afraid to take her on, too. But I do rather fancy myself in the title rôles of The Corsican Brothers. If I should show some enterprising manager how he might pay out one salary and save another, surely the idea would appeal to him; and some of these fine days I may give the idea a try. So having this contingency in mind I gently but firmly told my friend to take his bees elsewhere. I told him I had no intention of looking a gift bee in the mouth.
We have another neighbor who has gone in rather extensively for blooded stock with the intention ultimately of producing butter and milk for the city market. During practically all his active life he has been a successful theatrical manager, which naturally qualifies him for the cow business. He is doing very well at it too. So long as he continues to enjoy successful theatrical seasons he feels that he will be able to go on with cows. Being a shrewd and far seeing business man he has it all figured out that a minimum of three substantial enduring hits every autumn will justify him in maintaining his herd at its present proportions, whereas with four shows on Broadway all playing to capacity he might even increase it to the extent of investing in a few more head of registered thoroughbred stock.
From him I have gleaned much regarding cows. Before, the life of a cow fancier had been to me as a closed book. Generally speaking, cows, so far as my personal knowledge went, were divided roughly into regular cows running true to sex, and the other kind of cows, which were invariably referred to with a deep blush by old-fashioned maiden ladies. True enough, we owned cows during the earlier stages of our rural life; in fact, we own one now, a mild-eyed creature originally christened Buttercup but called by us Sahara because of her prevalent habits. But gentle bone-dry Sahara is just a plain ordinary cow of undistinguished ancestry. In the preceding generations of her line scandal after scandal must have occurred; were she a bagpipe solo instead of a cow scarcely could she have in her more mixed strains than she has. We acquired her at a bargain in an auction sale; she is a bargain to any one desiring a cow of settled and steady habits, regular at her meals, always with an unfailing appetite and having a deep far-reaching voice. There is also an expectation that some future day we may also derive from her milk. However, this contingency rests, as one might say, upon the laps of the gods.
The point I am getting at though is that Sahara, whatever else of merit she may possess in the matters of a kind disposition and a willingness to eat whatever is put before her, is after all but a mere common country-bred cow; whereas the cows whose society my wealthy neighbor cultivates are the pedigreed aristocrats of their breed, and for buying and selling purposes are valued accordingly. Why, from the way the proprietors of registered cows brag about their ancient lineage and their blue-blooded forbears you might think they were all from South Carolina or Massachusetts—the cows, I mean, not necessarily the proprietors.
So it is with the man of whom I have been speaking. Having become a breeder of fancy stock he now appraises a cow not for what she can do on her own intrinsic merits but for the size of her family tree, provided she brings with her the documents to prove it. So far as cows are concerned he has become a confirmed ancestor worshipper. I am sure he would rather own a quarter interest in a collateral descendant of old Prince Bullcon the First of the royal family of the Island of Guernsey, even though the present bearer of the name were but an indifferent milker and of unsettled habits, than to be the sole possessor of some untitled but versatile cow giving malted milk and whipped cream. Such vagaries I cannot fathom. In a democratic country like this, or at least in a country which used to be democratic, it seems to me we should value a cow not for what her grandparents may have been; not for the names emblazoned on her genealogical record, but for what she herself is.
The other Sunday we drove over to his place ostensibly to pay a neighborly call but really to plant distress in his fireside circle by incidentally mentioning that our young grapevines were bearing magnificently.
You see, a member of the Gloat Club is expected to work at his trade Sundays as well as weekdays; and besides we had heard that his arbors, with the coming of the autumn, had seemed a bit puny. So the opportunity was too good to be lost and we went over.
After I had driven the harpoon into his soul and watched it sink into him up to the barbs he took me out to see the latest improvements he had made in his cow bam and to call upon the newest addition to his herd. These times you can bed a hired hand down almost anywhere, but if you go in for blooded stock you must surround them with the luxuries to which they have been accustomed, else they are apt to go into a decline. He invited my inspection of the porcelain-walled stalls and the patent feeding devices and the sanitary fixtures which abounded on every hand, and to his recently installed cream separator. In my youth the only cream separator commonly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache worn by the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, with it, cream separating was merely incidental, the real purposes of the mustache being to be ornamental and impressive and subtly to convey a proper respect for the majesty of the law. Often a town marshal wore one too. But the modern separator is a product of science and not a gift of Nature skillfully elaborated by the art of the barber. It costs a heap of money and it operates by machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is complete without it.
When I had viewed these wonders he led me to a glorified pasture lot and presented me to the occupant—a smallish cow of, a prevalent henna tone. Except that she had rather slender legs and a permanent wave between the horns she seemed to my uninitiated eyes much the same as any other cow of the Jersey persuasion. I realized, however, that she must be very high-church. My friend, I knew, would harbor no nonconformist cows in his place, and besides, she distinctly had the high-church manner, a thing which is indefinable in terms of speech but unmistakably to be recognized wherever found. Otherwise, though, I could observe nothing about her calculated to excite the casual passer-by. But my friend was all enthusiasm.
“Now,” he said proudly, “what do you think of that for a perfect specimen?”
“Well,” I said, “anybody could tell that she's had a lot of refining influences coming into her life. She's no doubt cultured and ladylike to a degree; and she has the fashionable complexion of the hour and she's all marcelled up and everything, but excepting for these adornments has she any special accomplishments that are calculated to give her class?”
“Class!” he repeated. “Class, did you say? Say, listen! That cow has all the class there is. She's less than two years old and she cost me a cool fifteen hundred cash—and cheap at the figure, at that.”
“Fifteen hundred,” I murmured dazedly. “What does she give?”
“Why, she gives milk, of course,” he explained. “What else would she be giving?”
“Well,” I said, “I should think that at that price she should at least give music lessons. Perhaps she does plain sewing?”
“Say,” he demanded, “what do you expect for fifteen hundred dollars? Fifteen hundred is a perfectly ridiculous price to pay for a cow with a pedigree such as this cow has. She's registered back I don't know how far. It's the regal breeding you pay for when you get an animal like this—not the animal herself.”
But I refused to be swept off my feet. Before this I had associated with royalty. I once met a lineal descendant of William the Conqueror; he told me so himself. Being a descendant was apparently the only profession he had, and I judged this cow was in much the same line of business. “Well,” I replied, “all I can say is that I wouldn't care if her ancestors came over on the Mayflower—if she belonged to me she'd have to show me something in the line of special endeavor. She'd have to have talents or we'd part company pretty pronto, I'm telling you.”
“It is evident you do not understand anything about blooded stock,” he said. “The grandmother of this cow was insured for fifteen thousand dollars, and her great-grandfather, King Bulbul, was worth a fortune. The owner was offered fifty thousand for him—and refused it.”
In my surprise I could only mutter over and over again the name of William Tell's brother. A great many people do not know that William Tell ever had a brother. His first name was Wat.
After that my friend gave me up as one hopelessly sunken in ignorance, and by a mutual yet unspoken consent we turned the subject to the actors' strike, which was then in full blast. But at intervals ever since I have been thinking of what he told me. To my way of thinking there is something wrong with the economic system of a country which saddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an income of more than two thousand dollars a year and if he be married sinks the ax into all he makes above three thousand, leaving him the interest deduction on the extra one thousand, amounting, I believe, to about twelve dollars and a half, for the support of his wife, on the theory that under the present scale of living any reasonably prudent man can suitably maintain a wife on twelve-fifty a year—I repeat, there is something radically wrong with a government which does this to the wage-earner and yet passes right on by a cow that carries fifteen thousand in life insurance and a bull worth fifty thousand in his own right. It amounts to class privilege, I maintain. It's almost enough to make a man vote the Republican ticket, and I may yet do it, too, sometime when there aren't any Democrats running, just to show how I feel about it.
Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur-farming group have taken up fruit growing or pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares have been highly recommended to us as being very prolific. You start in with one pair of domestic-minded Belgian hares and presently countless thousands of little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening the landscape. From what I can hear the average Belgian hare has almost as many aunts and uncles and cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too. You can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who hat never tried to eat one. But as we have only about sixty acres and part of that in woodland, we have felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to go in for Belgian hares without sacrificing space which we may require for ourselves.
Mainly our experiments have been confined to hogs and poultry. I will not claim that we have been entirely successful in these directions. The trouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremendously opposed to race suicide and that our hens are so firmly committed to it. Now offhand you might think an adult animal of the swine family that completely gave herself over to the idea of multiplying and replenishing the earth with her species would be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience I have found that such is not always the case. Into the world a brood of little pinky-white squealers are ushered. They grow apace, devouring with avidity the most expensive brands of pig food that the grocer has in stock; and then, just when your mind is filled with delectable visions of hams in the smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellar and tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare-ribs and crackling and home-made country sausage and pork tenderloins on the table—why, your prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera and are shortly no more. They have a perfect mania for it. They'll travel miles out of their way to catch it; they'll sit up until all hours of the night in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the Mississippi River—and it full of ice—to get where hog cholera is. Our hogs have been observed in the act of standing in the pen with their snouts in the air, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs of it right out of the air. It is very disheartening to be counting on bacon worth eighty cents a pound only to find that all you have on your hands is a series of hurried interments.
In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicidally minded as hogs are. I speak with authority here because we tried raising turkeys, too. For a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells doom for the turkey, and accordingly it practically devotes its life to getting its feet wet. If it cannot escape from the pen into the damp grass immediately following a rain it will in its desperation take other measures with a view to catching its death of cold. One of the most distressing spectacles to be witnessed in all Nature is a half-grown feebleminded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that it was born a puddle duck, running round and round a coop trying to find a damp spot to stand on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In order to get its feet wet an infant turkey has been known to jump down an artesian well two hundred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it if a scientific fact well authenticated. If somebody would only invent a style of overshoe that might be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkey without making the turkey feel distraught or self-concious, that person would confer a boon upon the entire turkey race and at the same time be in a fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know that a few months back if such an article had been in the market I would gladly have taken fifty pairs, assorted misses' and children's sizes.
As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt like altogether abandoning my belief in the good faith and honest intentions of hens. Naturally one thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, but my experience has been that the hen does not follow this line of reasoning. She prefers to go off on a different bent. She figures she was created to adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter of man. Or at any rate I would state that this has been the obsession customarily harbored by the hens which we have owned and which we persistently continue, in the face of disappointment compounded, to go on owning.
We started out by buying, at a perfectly scandalous outlay, a collection of blooded hens of the white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been told that the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth Rock hen; that a white Plymouth Rock hen which had had the right sort of influences in her life and the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in her maturer career would inevitably dedicate her entire being to producing eggs. And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselves offered proof to the absolute contrary.
It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself: “Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the sake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me, sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am I right? I'll say I am!”
You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. And then when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests you knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind.
We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make them see the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administered to them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted gravel and ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finicky and particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied with the things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; they wished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantities of costly chick feed—compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmed spinster hen to laying her head off.
So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The more confirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpy dropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbid way as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of them as a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she was burdened inside with half-developed yolks—a case, one might say, of mislaid eggs.
In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestion on them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and read aloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?
While I was considering these expedients some one suggested that probably the trouble lay in the fact that our fowls either were too highly bred or were too closely related and perhaps an infusion of new blood was what was needed. So now we went to the other extreme and added to our flock a collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed and homely as to their outward appearance, but declared—by their former owner—to be passionately addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs. Conceding that this was true, the fact remained that immediately they passed into our possession they became slackers and nonproducers. I imagine the mistake we made was in permitting them to associate with the frivolous white débutantes we already owned; undoubtedly those confirmed bachelor maids put queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believe there was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be served up with a comparative stranger's fried ham. On the theory that they might require exercise to stimulate their creative faculties we let them range through the meadows. Some among them promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravage our garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of the thickets, where the hawks and the weasels and the skunks and the crows might fatten on the fruits of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them up again in their run, whereupon they developed rheumatism and sore eyes and a perverted craving for eating one another's tail feathers. At present our chicken yard is nothing more nor less than a hen sanitarium. But we do not despair of ultimate success with our hens. We may have to cross them with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere until victory has perched upon our roosts. As Rupert Hughes remarked when, after writing a long list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually produced a riotous hit of hits: “Well, I'm only human—I couldn't fail every time.”
I should have said that there is one fad to which all our Westchester County colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one agricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception the members of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You meet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience with Polled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they have been highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter him again he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners or Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.
One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopes and disappointments during which he first hired and then for good and sufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commoner varieties—plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls and mavericks—decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employment agencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places. He procured the address of such an establishment and repaired thither—simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he entered the place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, was a shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather than the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. He tried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in so doing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobs offered to him—one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on Long Island and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut. He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants that they'll hire almost anybody without requiring references.
None of us will ever be rich; we're all convinced of that, the cost of impractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none of us would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor's lot—the word landed being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., a landed sucker—for the life of a flat dweller again. It's a great life if a fellow doesn't weaken—and we'll never weaken.