We are your neighbours ... you are very fortunate to have us for neighbours
We are your neighbours ... you are very fortunate to have us for neighbours
“Mr. Upton spaded all that lawn up himself, and we made the bench together,” cried Stella.
“Well, well, youmustlike to work,” said Mr. Eckstrom. “It’s so much simpler to sic a few men on the job. Besides, they can usually do it better.”
Stella and I exchanged glances, and she cautioned me with her eyes. But politeness was never my strong point.
“Sometimes,” said I, “it happens that a chap who wants a garden lacks the means to sic a few men on the job. Under those conditions he may perhaps be pardoned for labouring himself.”
There was a slight silence broken by Stella, who said that we were going to get some goldfishes soon.
“We can give them some out of our pool, can’t we, father?” the other girl said, with an evident effort to be neighbourly. “We really have too many.”
“Certainly, certainly; have Peter bring some over to-night,” her father replied.
“Oh, thank you!” Stella cried. “And will you have Peter tell us their names?”
“Their what?” exclaimed Mrs. Eckstrom.
“Oh, haven’t they names? The poor things!” Stella said. “I shall name them as soon as they come.”
“What a quaint idea,” the girl said, with a smile. “Do you name all the creatures on the place?”
“Certainly,” said Stella. “Come, I’ll show you Epictetus and Luella.”
This was a new one on me, but I kept silent, while she led us around the house, and lifted the plank which led up from the sundial lawn to the south door. Under it were two enormous toads and two small ones.
“Those big ones are Epictetus and Luella,” she announced, “and, dear me, two children have arrived to visit them since morning! Let me see.”
She dropped on her knees and examined the toads carefully, while they tried to burrow into the soil backward, to escape the sun. Our callers regarded her with odd expressions of mingled amusement and amazement–or was it pity?
“A son and daughter-in-law,” she announced, rising. “They are Gladys and Gaynor.”
A polite smile flickered on the faces of our three visitors, and died out in silence. Stella once more shot a glance at me.
We turned toward the house. “If you will excuse me for a few moments, I will make myself fit to brew you some tea,” said my wife, holding open the door.
“That is very kind, but we’ll not remain to-day, I think,” Mrs. Eckstrom replied. “We will just glance at what you have done to this awful old house. It was certainly an eyesore before you bought it.”
“Ilikedit all gray and weathered,” Stella answered. “In fact, I didn’t want it painted. But apparentlyyou have to paint things to preserve them. Still, the Lord made wood before man made paint.”
“He also made man before man made clothes,” said I.
A polite smile from the girl followed this remark. Her father and mother seemed unaware of it. They gave our beautiful living-room a casual glance, and the man took in especially the books–in bulk.
“You are one of these literary chaps, I hear,” he said. “I suppose you need all these books in your business?”
“Well, hardly all,” I answered. “Some few I read for pleasure. Will you smoke?”
I offered him a cigar.
“Thanks, no,” said he. “Doctor’s orders. I can do nothing I want to. Diet, and all that. Damn nuisance, too. Why, once I used to––”
“Father,” said the girl, “don’t you want to see if the car is ready?”
The look of animation which had come over the man’s face when he began to talk about his ill health vanished again. He started toward the door.
“Let me,” said I, springing ahead of him.
The car, of course, was waiting, the chauffeur sitting in it gazing vacantly down the road, with the patient stare of the true flunkey. I came back and reported. With a polite good-bye and an invitation to call and see their garden, our guests departed.
Stella and I stood in the south room and listened tothe car rumble over the bridge. Then we looked at one another in silence.
Presently she picked up what appeared like a whole pack of calling cards from the table, and glanced at them.
“John,” she said, “it’s begun. They’ve called on me. I shall have to return the call. Are all the rest like them, do you suppose? Are they all so deadly dumb? Have they no playfulness of mind? I tried ’em out on purpose. They don’t arrive.”
“They’re rich,” said I. “Almost all rich people are bores. We bored them. The old man, though, seemed about to become quite animated on the subject of his stomach.”
Stella laughed. “I’mgladwe were in old clothes,” she said. “And aren’t Epictetus and Luella darlings?”
“By the way,” I cried, “why haven’t I met them before?”
“I just discovered them this noon,” she answered. “You were working at the time. I was saving them for a surprise after supper. I’m glad Gladys and Gaynor brought no grandchildren, though. It would have been hard to name so many correctly right off the bat, and it’s terrible to start life with a wrong name.”
“As Mike would say, it is surely,” I answered. “That is why they were careful to call you Stella.”
“Do you like the name?” she whispered, creeping close to me. “Oh, John, I’m glad we’re not rich likethem”–with a gesture toward the pack of calling cards–“I’m glad we can work in the garden with our own hands and play games with toads and just be ourselves. Let’sneverbe rich!”
“I promise,” said I, solemnly.
Then we laughed and went to hear the hermit thrush.
I SPENT considerably more money in July and August. Some of the items would be regarded as necessities even by our rural standards; some my farming neighbours would deem a luxury, if not downright folly. I was a green farmer then; I am a green farmer still; but as I began to get about the region a little more that first summer, especially at haying time, I was struck with the absurd waste of machinery brought about by insufficient care and lack of dry housing, and I began to do some figuring. All my rural neighbours, even Bert, left their ploughs, harrows, hay rakes, mowers, and even their carts, out of doors in rain and sun all summer, and many of them all winter. A soaking rain followed by a scorching sun seemed to me, in my ignorance, a most effective way of ruining a wagon, of shrinking and splitting hubs, of loosening the fastenings of shafts even in iron machinery. Neither do rusted bearings wear so long as those properly protected. I began to understand why our farmers are so poor, and I sent for Hard Cider.
Just behind the barn he built me a lean-to shed,about seventy-five feet long, open toward the east, and shingled rainproof. It cost me $500, but every night every piece of farm machinery and every farm wagon went under it, and the mowing-machine was further covered with a tarpaulin. For more than a year my shed was the only one of the kind in Bentford, and that next winter I used to see machinery standing behind barns, half buried in snow and ice, going to pieces for want of care. I verily believe that the New England farmer of to-day is the most shiftless mortal north of the Mason and Dixon line–and he hasn’t hookworm for an excuse.
My next expenditure was for a cement root cellar, which scarcely needs defence, as I had no silo on the barn, and it would not pay to install one for only two cows. But the third item filled Mike with scorn. I had been making him milk the cows out of doors for some weeks, taking a tip from one of the big estates, and keeping an eye on him to see that he washed his hands properly and put on one of the white milking coats I had purchased. His utter contempt for that white rig was comical, but when I told him that I was going to have a cork and asphalt brick floor laid in the cow shed, he was speechless. He had endured the white apron, and the spectacle of the tuberculin test (the latter because the law made him), but an expensive floor in the barn was too much. He gave me one pitying look, and walked away.
The floor was laid, however, and when it was completed, and the drainage adjusted, Hard Cider trimmed up the supports of the barn cellar door and the two cellar window frames behind, and built in substantial screens. I didn’t tell Mike about them till they were all in. Then I showed them to him, and told him he was to keep them closed under penalty of his job, and he was further to sprinkle chloride of lime on the manure once a week.
“Well, I niver seen screens on a barn before,” said he, “and I guess nobody else iver did. Shure, it’s to be spendin’ your money azy ye are. Are yez goin’ to put in a bathroom for the horse?”
Bert was almost as scornful of the screens as Mike, though he understood the cork-asphalt floor, having, in fact, unconsciously persuaded me to install it by telling me how the cows of a dairyman in the next town had been injured by slipping on a concrete floor. My floor had the advantages of concrete, but gave the cows a footing. There had never been screens on a barn in Bentford before, however, nor any chloride of lime used. This was too much for Bert. But Mrs. Bert was interested. After our screens had been on ten days and the barn cellar had been limed, Mrs. Pillig pointed out that the number of flies caught on the fly paper on the kitchen door had decreased at least 400 per cent. “And I think what’s there now come down from your place,” she added to Mrs. Bert. The next thing weknew, Bert was talking of screening his stable. Truth compels me to admit, however, that he never got beyond the talking stage.
In the face of these expenditures, our garden expenses were a mere song, yet we had begun to plant and plan for the following year as soon as the pool was done. We knew we were green, and we did not scorn the advice of books and still more of our best practical friend–the head gardener on one of the large estates, who knew the exactions of our climate and the conditions of our soil.
“Plant your perennial seeds in as rich and cool a place as you can,” he told us, “and expect to lose at least three fourths of your larkspur. When your foxglove plants are large enough to transplant, make long trenches in the vegetable garden, with manure at the bottom and four inches of soil on top, and set in the plants. Do it early in September if you can, so that they can make roots before our early frosts. Then you’ll have fine plants for bedding in spring. If you buy any plants, get ’em from a nursery farther north if possible. They have to be very hardy here.”
We went through the seed catalogues as one wanders amid manifold temptations, but we kept to our purpose of planting only the simpler, more old-fashioned blooms at present. In addition to the bulbs, which came later, we resolved to sow pansies, sweet William, larkspur, Canterbury bells, foxglove, peach bells, Orientalpoppies, platicodon, veronica, mallow (for backing to the pool especially), hollyhocks, phlox (both the early variety, the divaricata, blooming in May, and, of course, the standard decussata. The May phlox we secured in plants). All these seeds were carefully planted in the new beds between the pool and the orchard, where we could water them plentifully, and Stella, with the instincts of the true gardener, babied and tended those seedlings almost as if they were human. Without her care, probably, they would never have pulled through the dry, hot weeks which followed.
We used to walk down to see them every morning after breakfast, when Stella watered them, dipping the water from the pool and sending Antony and Cleopatra scurrying. Antony and Cleopatra were the goldfish which the Eckstroms, true to their promise, had sent us. The poor things were unnamed when they arrived, but their aspect–the one dark and sinuous, the other pompously golden–betrayed their identity. Stella called a few days after their arrival, to convey our thanks–carefully waiting till she saw the Eckstroms driving out in their car! Their curiosity having been satisfied regarding us, and our thanks having been rendered to them, further intercourse lapsed. We have never tried to maintain relations with those of our neighbours who bore us, or with whom we have nothing in common. Life is too short.
Not only did Stella water the seedlings religiously,but she kept the soil mulched and the weeds out, working with her gloved hands in the earth. All the seeds came up well save the phlox, with which we had small luck, and thePapaver Orientalis, with which we had no luck at all. Not a seed came up, and not a seed ever has come up in our soil. We have had to beg the plants from other people. Even as the gardener predicted, the tender little larkspur plants mysteriously died. We ringed them with stiff paper, we surrounded them with coal ashes, we even sprayed them with Bordeaux and arsenate of lead. But still they were devoured at the roots or the tops, or mysteriously gave up the ghost with no apparent cause. We started with two hundred, and when autumn came we had just thirty left.
“Still,” said Stella cheerfully, “thirty will make quite a brave show.”
“If they survive the winter,” said I gloomily. “I’ve not the patience to be a gardener.”
“Itisa good deal like reform!” Stella replied.
As the busy autumn days came upon us, Twin Fires took on a new aspect, and one to us greenhorns indescribably thrilling. In the first place, our field of corn rustled perpetually as we walked past it, and down in the greenish-golden lanes beneath we could see the orange gleam of pungkins (I shall so spell the word lest it be mispronounced by the ignorant). Great ears of the Stowell’s evergreen were ripe, for Mike’s predictionabout the early frost had not come true, and we ate the succulent food clean to the cob every day at dinner, besides selling many dozens of ears to the market. In the long light of afternoon, Stella loved to go along the path by the hayfield wall and then turn in amid the corn, losing sight at once of all the universe and wandering in a new world of rustling leaves. She felt, she said, just as Alice must have felt after she had eaten the cake; and once a rabbit bounded across her foot, to her unspeakable delight. She looked to see if he had dropped his gloves!
Then there was the potato field. We were eating our own new potatoes now. Often Stella dug them.
“It seems so funny to go and dig up a potato,” she declared. “I’ve always felt that potatoesjust were. But to see the whole process of growth is quite another matter. Oh, John, it makes them so much nicer!”
“Especially when you are getting seventy-five cents a bushel for them,” I laughed.
The loaded tomato vines, too, with the red fruit hanging out from the wire frames and sending a pungent odour into the surrounding air, appealed to Stella endlessly. I used to see her now and then, as I glanced from the south room of a morning, eating a raw tomato like an apple, her head bent forward so that the juice would not spoil her dress.
And there were the apples! Already a red astrachan tree invited us on every trip to the brook, and other oldtrees were bearing fast reddening fruit. I had wanted to set out more orchard, but we agreed that we could not afford it that year, if we were to build chicken houses against the spring, so I reluctantly gave up the idea. But our old trees, in spite of (or perhaps because of) my spring pruning, were doing fairly well. We had enough for baked apples and cream all winter, anyhow, Stella reckoned, smacking her lips at the thought.
Every day, on our way to the pool, one or the other of us took a hoe along and scraped a tree for five minutes, gradually getting the old bark off, and making a final preparation for a thorough spraying the next winter just so much easier. I used to prune a bit, too, in spare moments, so that by the end of the summer considerable renovation had been accomplished.
And now came the foxglove transplanting. According to the gardener’s directions, we took two long rows where the early peas had stood (and where Mike had disobeyed my instructions to spade the vines under, that being a form of green manuring your old-time gardener will not see the value of, I have discovered), trenched them, put in manure and soil, and set out at least 300 foxglove plants six inches apart. It was a cool, cloudy day, and they stood up as though nothing had happened. Then, as an experiment, we moved scores of tiny hollyhocks from the crowded seed beds into their permanent position as a screen between the south kitchen windows and the sundial lawn, and as aborder on the west side of the same lawn. They, too, were quite unaffected by the change.
Meanwhile, we ordered our bulbs–hyacinths, daffodils (which in our climate refuse to take the winds of March with beauty, cowardly waiting till May), a few crocuses,Narcissus poeticus, Empress narcissus, German iris, Japanese iris, and Darwin tulips. We ordered the iris and tulips in named varieties.
“They have such nice names,” said Stella, “especially the Japanese iris–Kimi-no-megumi, Shirataki, Momochiguma! The tulips are nice, too. Here is Ariadne and Kate Greenaway hobnobbing with Professor Rauwenhoff! What’s the use of having plants that aren’t named? We must show them as much respect as Antony and Cleopatra, or Epictetus and Luella!”
We also experimented with lilies–lemon lilies for the shady north side of the house, tigers for the border beyond the pool, and two or three of the expensive Myriophyllums, just to show that we, too, could go in for the exotic, like our neighbours on the big estates.
When the bulbs came, in October, we looked at the boxes sadly.
“Whew!” said Stella, “you can’t be lazy and have a garden, can you?”
“I don’t work to-morrow, I guess,” said I. “Shall we ask Mike’s Joe to help us?”
“Never!” said my wife. “We’ll put these bulbs inourselves. If I had any help, I should feel like the Eckstroms, which God forbid!”
So the next day at seven-thirty we began. We ringed the pool with German and Japanese iris, alternated for succession, and planted a few Japanese both below and above the pool, close to the brook. We set theNarcissus poeticusbulbs where, if they grew, the flowers could look at themselves in the mirror below the dam. The Empress narcissus we placed on both sides of the pool just beyond the iris. On each side of the bench we placed a bulb of our precious Myriophyllums, and put the tigers into the borders close to the shrubbery on both sides. The hyacinths went into the sundial beds, the Darwins into the beds at the base of the rose aqueduct, a few crocuses into the sundial lawn, and the daffodils here and there all over the place, where the fancy struck us and the ground invited.
“Now, I’m going to label everything, and put it on a map besides,” cried Stella, “except the daffodils. I want to forget where they are. I want surprises in the spring. Oh, John, do you suppose they’ll come up?”
“Yes, I suppose they will,” I laughed, “some of them. But do you suppose we’ll ever get the kinks out of our backs?”
“I’m willing to go doubled up the rest of my life, for a garden of daffodils all my own,” she cried.
“’And then my heart with pleasure thrillsAnd dances with the daffodils––’
“’And then my heart with pleasure thrills
And dances with the daffodils––’
It was very thoughtful of old Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and Masefield, and all the rest to write nice things about the daffodils, wasn’t it, John? I wonder if gardens would be so wonderful if it weren’t for all their literary suggestions, and the lovely things they remind you of? Gardens have so much atmosphere! Oh, spring, spring, hurry and come!”
I forgot my lame back in her enthusiasm, and later, when the apples were gathered, the potatoes dug, the beets and carrots in the root cellar, our own sweet cider foamed in a glass pitcher on our table, and the first snow spits of December whistled across the fields, we put a little long manure over the irises and other bulbs, and pine boughs over the remaining perennials, and wrapped the ramblers in straw, with almost as much laughing tenderness as you would put a child to bed.
The cows were back in the stable, and Mike had revised his opinion of cork-asphalt floors when he realized the ease of cleaning with a hose; the potatoes and apples and onions and beets and carrots for our family use were stored in barrels and bins in the cellar, or spread on shelves, or buried in sand. The vegetable garden was newly ploughed, and manure spread on the hayfield. Antony and Cleopatra had been captured and brought into the dining-room, where they were to spend the winter in a glass bowl. Epictetus and Luella and Gladys and Gaynor had all burrowed out of sight into the ground. The pageant of autumn on our hills wasover, only an amethyst haze succeeding at sunset time. Wood fires sparkled on our twin hearths. The summer residents had departed. Our first Thanksgiving turkey had been eaten, though a great stone crock of Mrs. Pillig’s incomparable mincemeat still yielded up its treasures for ambrosial pies.
“And now,” said Stella, “I’m going to find out at last what a country winter is like!”
“And your friends are pitying you down in town,” said I. “Don’t you want to go back to them till spring?”
Stella looked at the fires, she looked out over the bare garden and the ploughed fields to the dun hillsides, she listened a moment to the whistle of the bleak December wind, she looked at me.
In her eyes I read her answer.
Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into “a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
Our first winter began one bleak November day when the lone pine in the potato field was outlined black against a gray sky, and over the long mountain wall to the northwest came suddenly a puff of white vapour, like the beginning of artillery fire, and then the shrapnel of the snow descended upon us. Wrapped against it, we ran about the farm, marvelling at the transformations it wrought. First it filled up the furrows on the ploughed land, making our field like a zebra’s back. Then it whitened the sundial lawn, reminding us to take the wooden dial post in for the winter. Then it whitened the brown earth around the pool, where our July-sowngrass had failed to make a catch, and presently the pool was a black mirror on a field of white.
Then, as a crowning touch, it powdered the pines, and we ran among them. Under their thick shelter the wind was not felt. We could hear the flakes hissing against the needles overhead. All about us the white powder was sifting down. A peep into the outside world showed all distances blotted out by the storm. By evening the grove was a powdered Christmas card, the naked farm fields mantles of white laid upon the earth, the lamps in our house beacons of warmth gleaming behind us.
That snow melted, but others followed it, and by Christmas we were, as Mike put it, snowed in for the winter. In the barn was the warm smell of cattle. The motors had disappeared from our roads, and we went to the village in a pung, meeting other pungs on the way. It was as if we had slipped back a whole generation in time. Curiously enough, too, life became more leisurely, more familiar. The great summer estates were boarded up, the hotels closed. Only the real village people sat in church or waited at the post-office. We who in summer had known but few of our townsfolk now became acquainted with them all. We, too, left our pung in the horse sheds every Sabbath morning, listened to the nasal drone of the village choir, and joined in the social quarter-hour which followed the service. It was an altogether different world welive in from the summer world, and we liked it even better.
What walks we had! Either with stout boots along the roads or with snowshoes into the deep woods, we took our exercise almost daily by tramping, and to us the countryside was a perpetual revelation. Almost the first thing which impressed us was the colourful quality of the winter landscape. Even on our own thirty acres that was apparent. At sunset of a still, peaceful day we could look forth from our south windows across the white lawn to the dark green pines and beyond them the exquisite iron-rust tamaracks, soft and feathery. The eastern sky would be mother of pearl at that hour, the southern sky blue, the western sky warm salmon, green, and gold, and the encircling hills a soft gray. Then, as the sun sank lower, a veil of amethyst would steal mysteriously into the feathery tamaracks and over the gray hills, all the upper air would blush to rose, and for a brief ecstatic ten minutes nature would sound a colour chord like a Mozartian andante.
Out on the roads we were charmed by the tawny tiger colour of the willow shoots and the delicate lavender of the blackberry vines rising from the snow beside a gray roadside wall. On the edge of the woods a white birch trunk, naked of leaves, would tell like a lightning stab against the wall of pines, while in the woods themselves, where the sunlight flickered through, the brook would wander black as jet beneath beautifully curved banks ofsnow, and a laurel bush or fern would stand out a vivid green in a shaft of sunlight; or even a spot of brown leaves, where a pheasant or partridge had scratched, would disclose in its centre the vivid red of a partridge berry, a tiny woodland colour note that we loved.
And how close our wild neighbours came in the winter! We kept out a constant supply of suet and sunflower seeds on two or three downstair window ledges, and while we were dining, or reading in the south room, we could look up at any time and see chickadees or juncos or nuthatches just beyond the pane. The pheasants, too, came to our very doors in winter, leaving their unmistakable tracks, for they are walking birds and set their feet in a single line.
It was not long before we began to find tracks of four-footed wild things, a mink by the brook, a deer in the pasture, and finally a fox which, unlike Buster, tracked with one footprint in the other, leaving apparently but two marks. We followed him a long way on our snowshoes–up through our pasture and across Bert’s to Bert’s chicken house, and then out across the fields and into the woods. Stella had never tracked before, and she was as keen on the scent as a Boy Scout, reconstructing the animal’s actions in her imagination as she went along. We lost the trail finally where it crossed a road, but we picked up deer tracks instead, and found a spot where they had eaten from the sumachbushes, and another where they had pawed up the snow for frozen apples in an old abandoned orchard.
“Oh, if they’d only come intoourorchard!” cried Stella.
It was not long afterward, one moonlight night, that I chanced to be sitting up late, and before retiring I glanced from the window. There was something–there were two somethings–moving about amid the apple trees. I looked closer and ran to awake Stella. Wrapped in a dressing-gown, she came with me to the window and peered out. There, in the full moonlight which flooded the white world with a misty silver radiance, were two deer pawing for apples in our orchard. Buster, by some sixth sense, suddenly scented them, and we heard him set up an alarm in the kitchen. The buck shot up his head and listened, a beautiful sight which made Stella gasp for breath. We heard the horse stamp in the stable, and Buster continued his yelps. But the buck was evidently satisfied of his safety, for he lowered his muzzle into the snow again. However, as we watched, there came a different sound to his ears, though not to ours, for suddenly he gave a leap, and with the doe after him took the stone wall at a bound, the wall across the road at another, and vanished up our pasture. A moment later we, too, heard the sound; it was the jingle of approaching sleigh-bells.
Stella sighed happily as she went back to bed. “All my dreams are coming true!” she whispered.
I wonder if any pleasure in this world is quite comparable with that of coming back to your own snug dwelling after a long tramp through the snowy woods, returning when the green sunset is fading in the west and the amethyst shadows are creeping up the hills and the cold night stillness is abroad, and seeing from afar the red window-squares of home gleaming over the snow? Our favourite method of return was to climb the stone wall by the frozen tamarack swamp and enter the pines, where the ice-covered brook crept like a flowing black ribbon through the white, with the snow on the banks curled over it in the most exquisite and fantastic of tiny cornices. We could see our south windows through the branches, just before the path emerged, and Mrs. Pillig had orders to light the lamps before our return so that they might glow a welcome. We always stood a moment, hand in hand, regarding them, before we climbed the slope and entered the door.
Ah, the warmth that greeted us when we stepped inside! The good smell of burning apple wood on the twin hearths! The cheerful bark of Buster, if he had not gone to walk with us! The prophetic rattle of dishes and the kettle song from the kitchen! We had a kettle of our own, too, now, in the long room. It hung on a crane in the west fireplace, and was delightfully black, and often made the tea taste smoky, like camp tea. Quickly we left our wraps in the hall, quickly Stella brought out cups and tea caddy to a littletabouret before the western fireplace, and sitting on our settle in the chimney nook, with the last wan light of sunset competing with the evening lamps, we warmed our hands before the blaze, and drank our tea, and felt that delicious drowse steal over us which comes only after brisk exercise in the mountain air of winter.
And then the evenings, the long winter evenings by the twin fires, when we were supposed by our friends in town to be pining for the opera or the theatre, and were in reality blissfully unaware of either! Stella’s first duty after supper was to hear Peter’s lessons, while Buster lay on the hearth and I sprawled in a Morris chair with my cigar, and read the morning paper. That is another delightful feature of country life. You never have time to read the morning paper till evening, and then you read it comfortably all through, if you like. Peter was going far ahead of his class as a result of this individual instruction, and had actually begun to develop a real interest in the acquisition of knowledge–a thing that did not exist as a rule in the pupils of Bentford, which, perhaps, was not the pupils’ fault. So far as I have observed, it is not characteristic of most of our public schools in America. Perhaps that is a penalty of democracy; certainly it is a penalty of too large classes and too low salaries paid for teaching. We make the profession of teacher a stop-gap for girls between the normal school and matrimony.
When Peter’s lesson was over, and we were left alone,we had the best books in the world, the best music in the world, to choose from. We could have a play if we liked, the kind too seldom seen on Broadway. We could have Mozart, or so much of him as Stella could render. We had letters to write, also, a task always left till evening. Sometimes I had tag ends of my morning labours to finish up. Any writing of my own I brought forth in the evening for Stella to read, and to criticise as mercilessly as she chose–which was sometimes very mercilessly; and we thrashed it over together. Sometimes, even, I agreed with her!
Once a week we gathered in several high school pupils who lived near by–Mike’s Nora, a boy, and three other girls–and read Shakespeare. It took them two months to read one play in school, but we read a play in two or three evenings, each of us taking a part. I showed them pictures of the ancient playhouses, and explained as best I could the conditions of stage productions in various periods. Stella supplied the necessary philology. We had a real course in Shakespeare, and yet one which interested the children, for they were reading the plays aloud, and visualizing them. One evening we dressed up in costume, so far as we could, amid much laughter, and acted a scene from “As You Like It,” with Nora as Rosalind (she wore my knickerbockers and a long cape of Stella’s, and blushed adorably), and Mrs. Pillig and Peter called in as audience.
Before the winter was over, two or three otherchildren from the village had begged to come to the class, and made the long, cold trip out to the farm on foot every week. We had cake and chocolate when the lessons were over. As Stella and I stood in the door listening to the young voices die away down the road, we used to look at one another happily.
“Oh,” she once cried, “how much you can do for folks in the country! In town we’d pay $4 to see Shakespeare, played by professionals, and then go selfishly home. Here we can help give him to these children, with all that means. And some of them so need it! Why, look at Joe Bostwick! When he first began to come he had the manners of a bear, and read like a seven-year-old child. I don’t believe he’deverread out loud, or been of an evening among nice people. Now he’s getting to know how to behave in company, poor fellow, and he reads almost intelligently!”
“You don’t want to go back to the city, then?” I smiled.
“Oh, John, I never want to go back to the city,” she answered. “I want to live here forever. I want to do more and more for these people. I want to do more and more for Twin Fires. I want to know more and more what I’ve never known–the sense of being rooted to the land, of having a home. Our grandfathers used to know that, but in our modern cities we have forgotten. I want to die in the house I’ve always lived in.”
“It’s a little soon to plan for that,” said I, as weentered the south room again, but I knew what she meant.
The hour was late for us in the country–almost eleven. We put away the cups and plates, and went through our nightly ceremony of locking up. First, we peeped out of the window at the thermometer, which registered two degrees above zero, and I set it down in my diary, for the temperature and the weather are important items to record when you are a farmer. Then we locked all the doors, giving Buster a pat as he lay on his old quilt in a corner of the kitchen. The kitchen lamp was out, and the room was lighted only by the moon, but the kettle was singing softly. Then we returned to the south room and banked the fires carefully, so that the fresh logs would catch in the morning, on top of the noble piles of ashes. Finally we blew out the lamps. Cold moonlight stole in across the floor from the glass door and windows, and met midway the warm red glow from the fires. The world was very still. The great room, so homelike, so friendly, so full of beautiful things and yet so simple, seemed sleeping. We tiptoed from it with a last loving glance and climbed the stairs. In our dressing-room, which was an extra chamber, an open fire burned, but in our chamber there was no heat. The shades were up and the moonlight showed the fairy frost patterns on the panes. We took a last look out across the silvery world before we retired, a last deep breath of the stinging cold air as thewindows were opened, and jumped beneath the covering, with heavy blankets beneath us as well as above.
“It is a very nice old world,” said Stella sleepily. “Winter or summer, it is lovely. I think New York is but a dream–and I hope it won’t be mine!”
I heard her breathing steadily a few minutes later, and from far off somewhere in the outer world the mournful whistle of a screech owl came to my ears, the andante of the winter night. It seemed to intensify the freezing silence. I thought how at college I used to hear from my chamber the screech of trolley cars rounding a curve and biting my nerves. I thought of that lonely chamber, of all my life there, of Stella’s life in the triple turmoil of New York. And I put out my hand and took hers into it, while she stirred in her sleep, her fingers unconsciously closing over mine. So we awoke in the morning, with the sunshine smiting the snow into diamonds and a chickadee piping for breakfast.
The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its excitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrill of the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it was Stella’s initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south wind walking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the second place, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds were an experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were an experiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put upon the soil (more or less to Mike’s disgust) were an experiment. We were learning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that of learning.
The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but cold nasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers on March 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we could spade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant early peas, which I inoculated withnitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mike looked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing process of legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.
“Bugs!” he said. “Puttin’ bugs in the soil! No good never came o’ that. Manure’s the thing.”
About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for, owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as Stella said, the piles “steamed expensively,” like small volcanoes, as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting in his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one of our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum, asters, stock,Phlox Drummondi, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope, andDimorphotheca Aurantiaca, a plant chosen by Stella because she said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed that that was about its only appeal.
While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruningto be accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course, the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grass seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.
“Oh, I don’t know which is the real sign of spring,” said Stella, one evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. “Sometimes I think it’s the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it’s the fox sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01a.m.while you were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes I think it’s the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes I think it’s a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it’s the steaming manure piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet painting.”
“Lump them,” I suggested. “It’s all of them combined. In New York it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush counter.”
“New York!” sniffed Stella. “Thereisno such place!”
April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the year before burst intobud. Nearly all our perennials had come through the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the beds fertilized and trimmed.
About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box. When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike’s disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly. In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which I thinned out to the strongest stalks.
“Now, Mike,” said I, “I’ll beat you and the town in the market.”
“Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don’t know nothin’ about farmin’ can do some things,” he said, regarding my corn with comical amazement.
“That’s because we are willing to learn,” said I, and left him still looking at the six-inch high stalks.
(Incidentally, I may remark that I did beat everybody in the market, and made about $15 extra by my simple experiment.)
But Stella’s chief joy in the garden was in the surprises of the blooms: in the stately clumps of Darwins against the pillars of the rose aqueduct; in the golden bursts of daffodils here and there where we had sown a few bulbs and forgotten the spot; in theNarcissus poeticus, which were in their element close to the brook and did verily look at themselves in the tiny pool below the dam; in the pale gold ring of the great Empress narcissus bordering the iris spears around the large pool; above all, perhaps, in the maroon of the trilliums which we had brought home from that first wonderful walk in the woods. Not alone her heart, but her feet, danced with the daffodils, and I could hear her of a morning as I worked, out in the garden singing or bringing in great bunches of blooms to decorate the house.
On several afternoons we made further trips to the deep woods after wild-flower plants, and set them in along our brook. The thrush had returned, the apple blossoms had made all the garden fragrant while the plants were budding (this year they were carefully sprayed twice, for, though it cost nearly as much to spray them as the entire value of the apples, one thing I cannot stand on my farm is poor or neglected fruit; besides, the improved aspect of the trees themselves was worth the price). Now that their petals had fallencame the new fragrance, subtler but no less exquisite, of many flowers after May rain, of a spring brook running under pines, and near the house the pungent aroma of lilacs.
Then came the German irises, like soldiers on parade, around the pool, and the bright lemon lilies in the shady dooryard. Scarce had the irises begun to fall when the foxgloves began to blossom, and all suddenly one morning after a very warm night the sundial was surrounded by a stately conclave of slender queens dressed in white and lavender, while more queens marched down from the orchard to the pool, and yet more stood against the shrubbery beyond it, or half hid the bare newness of our grape arbour.
“I don’t need to take digitalis internally for a heart stimulant!” cried Stella. “Oh, the lovely things! Quick, vases of them below the Hiroshiges! Quick, your camera! Quick, come and look at them, come and see the bees swinging in their bells!”
“I suppose they are breakfast bells,” said I.
“This is no time for bad puns,” she answered, dragging me swiftly down through the orchard, and up again to the sundial.
Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing the white dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribable air of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous with bees. Again and again that morning I looked up from mywork and saw them there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, saw beyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on the farm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the far hills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throated sparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxgloves turn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songs die away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle of our brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night.
“The spring melts into summer,” said Stella, “as gently as the little brook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John, couldn’t we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool of spring forever in our garden?”
“We shall have to make that pool within our hearts,” said I.
There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelor before he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new range of social relations and impulses which follow a happy union. I do not mean social relations with a capital S. About such I know little and care less. Presumably marriage may bring them, also, into the life of a man who chooses the wrong wife. In fact, Stella and I have seen more than one case of it in Bentford, where we dwell near enough to the fringes of Society to observe the parasitic aspirations of several ladies with more fortune than “position.” Mrs. Eckstrom, we have discovered since her call, is such a one. We, of course, were of no use to her, and she had not troubled us since, though two gold fish did arrive that night, as I have told. We are grateful for Antony and Cleopatra.
No, what I mean by social relations and impulses are the opportunities for service and the impulses to jump in and help others, which matrimony discloses and breeds. Who can say why this is so? Who can say why the bachelor is generally negatively–if notactively–selfish, while the same man when he has achieved a good wife, opened a house of his own, begun to employ labour directly instead of through the medium of a club or bachelor apartment hotel, is suddenly aware of wrong conditions in the world about him and a new desire to help set them right? It cannot entirely be due to the woman, for very often her maiden life has been as barren of social service as his own. It is inherent in the state of matrimony, and to me it seems one of the glories of that state. Those couples who have not felt it, I think, have been but sterilely mated, though they have reproduced their kind never so many times.
At any rate, it was not long after the Eckstrom invasion that Stella and I went to play golf, carrying a load of lettuce heads and cauliflowers to market on our way. As all Bert’s cauliflowers are sold in bulk to a New York commission merchant, I found I had the local market pretty much to myself, and was getting 15 cents a head for my plants. Mike dearly loved cauliflowers, and babied ours as a flower gardener babies his hybrid tea roses. They were splendid heads, and were bringing me in a dollar a day or more. I had visions of greatly increasing my output another season, for I could easily supply the two hotels as well.
We left our farm wagon in the church horse-sheds and went down to the links. There was a crowd of caddies of all ages sitting on the benches reserved for them, andhalf a dozen came rushing toward us. I chose a large boy, because I am one of those idiots who carries around at least seven more clubs than he ever uses, and Stella picked a smaller boy because she liked his face. As golf is not an engrossing game when you are playing with your wife, and she’s a beginner into the bargain (matrimony has its drawbacks, too!) we fell to talking with our caddies.
“You must be in the high school, eh?” said I to mine.
“I went last year,” he replied, “but I ain’t goin’ no more. Goin’ to work.”
“Work at your age? What are you going to do?” asked Stella.
“I dunno–somethin’,” he answered.
“Why don’t you keep on at school?” I said.
“Aw, what’s the use?” said he. “They don’t learn you nothin’–algebra and English and stuff like that.”
“A little English wouldn’t hurt you at all, young man,” said Stella. “You don’t like to study, do you?”
The boy looked sheepish, but admitted that he didn’t.
“What do you like to do?” I asked. “You don’t like to caddy very well, because you don’t keep your eye on the ball, and you’ve made the little fellow take out the pin on every hole so far.”
The boy flushed at this, and went up to the next pin himself.
“I’d like to work in a garden,” he said, as we were walking to the next tee.
“You want to be a gardener, eh?” said I. “Has anybody ever taught you how to start a hotbed?”
“No, sir.”
“Ever run a wheel hoe?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you know what date to plant early peas, and corn, and lima beans?”
“No, sir.”
“Ever graft an apple tree?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you’re not very well fitted to take a job as a gardener yet, are you?” said I.
He admitted that he wasn’t.
“Would you keep on going to school if they taught you how to be a gardener?” asked Stella, carrying on the line of questioning.
“You bet,” he replied. “But, gee! they don’t teach nothin’ like that. Only bookkeepin’ and typewritin’, and then you have to go away to a business college somewhere before you can get a job.”
“We seem to have stumbled on a civic problem,” I remarked to my wife as we teed up. “I don’t believe an educational survey would do this town any harm.”
“And the finger of destiny points to us?” she smiled.
“Probably,” said I. “You’d hardly expect the Eckstroms to tackle the job!”
That night we began by consulting Bert. Bert is one of the best men I know, and he applies the latest methods to growing cauliflowers; but he’s a New England farmer, none the less, and he has the true “rural mind.”
“’Vocational education!’” he exclaimed. “We got more education than we kin afford now. Taxes are way up, an’ the school appropriation’s the biggest one we have–$19,000, to only $7,000 for the roads! And then you talk about more! We got along pretty well without it so far.”
“Have you, though?” said Stella. “You’ve got a high school, but how many boys have you got in it?”
“I dunno,” said Bert.
“That’s it. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about what your schools are doing. You must be on the school committee!”
Bert grinned at this. “No, I ain’t,” he said, “but I guess I’m ez good ez them that are. They do say Buckstone–you know, the man who runs the meat market–engages teachers on their looks.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Stella; “looks mean a lot to children.”
“Not the kind Buckie’s after, I reckon,” said Bert. “But you two go run your farm an’ don’t worry about this town. We’ll git along.”
Bert spoke good naturedly, but we felt, none the less, as if he were rebuking us.
“He thinks we are butting in,” said Stella, as we walked home. “I suppose you have to live in a New England town thirty years before you are really a citizen. Well, I’m getting my mad up. Let’s butt!”
We next consulted Mrs. Pillig on the subject, and found her as stiffly opposed to vocational education as Bert, but on entirely different grounds.
“I don’t want my boy educated as if he wa’n’t as good as anybody else’s,” she said. “Just because I’m poor is no reason why my boy shouldn’t be fitted to go to college same as young Carl Swain.”
Carl Swain was the son of the village bank president. He, I happened to know, had been obliged to go to Phillips Andover for a year after his graduation from our high school before he could get into college.
“In the first place,” I answered, “your high school doesn’t fit for college now. In the second place, is Peter going to college?”
“Of course he ain’t,” said Mrs. Pillig.
“Then why not educate him in some way that will really fit him to make a better living, and be a better man?” said Stella.
“I want he should have what the rest have,” the mother stoutly maintained.
Stella shook her head. “It’s hopeless,” she whispered.
I mentioned the matter next to Mr. Swain, when I was in the bank. He, too, was a true New Englander, of a different class from Bert, but with the fundamentalconservatism–to give it the pleasantest name possible.
“There’s too much fol-de-rol in the school now,” he said. “If they’d just try to teach ’em Greek and Latin and the things you need for a liberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn’t have had to send my boy to Andover.”
“Your boy, yes,” I answered. “How many other boys and girls in his class are going to college?”
“Well, there’s another one,” he replied.
“Out of a class of how many?”
“Twenty,” said he.
“Hm–you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?”
He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew at human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn’t believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are grounded in the fetish of the old “humanist” curriculum (which when it originated was strictly vocational). He didn’t believe that trade instruction educated. There was no “culture” in it. I left him, wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn’t done as much harm as good in the world.
After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We brought him and his wife over todinner, and sat in the orchard afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.
“Yes,” he said, “there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you’ve got to get your arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy, they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than we do in rural New England!”
I didn’t quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a Bentford Town Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuing autumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list of voters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort in Bentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerable summer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of our taxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (however desultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a total voting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twenty were directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers on the estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part time farmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of a similarnature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged in manual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roads or trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred and one, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position to benefit by agricultural education–a truly tremendous proportion. At the same time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higher institutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and a slightly greater number of girls–most of the latter to normal school.
It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promise of state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce the expenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schools and I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the town at the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation. Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriation committee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going to cost $9,000 for roads that year.
This would be rather amusing if it weren’t, as Stella points out, so terribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do not employ a road superintendent, and don’t know how to build them right, still employing the ancient American method of scraping back the gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil, furthermore, is now so saturated withoil that it makes a pudding whenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the money evaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the great grafting institution till I moved to a New England small town. There I learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I’ve told how selectman Morrissy scraped my lawn–admitting I was party to the crime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel to the town at 50 cents a load, from a gravel bed the town already owned, and, as selectman, O. K’d his own bill! I have seen how our “honest farmers” rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soon as Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the time it isn’t needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teams on the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home at night an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spent before July, so there is nothing to repair roads with in the autumn. Of course some roads do have to be repaired in the autumn, so the selectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was so much the poorer, and couldn’t afford an extra $500 to educate its children properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but we still lack the $500.
If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a road contract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he is taking away the bread fromtown labour, and the next year he is so snowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He is snowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labour up to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquor license. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, even when they don’t know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people–the richest taxpayers, who are summer residents–don’t care anyhow, so long as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, these rich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declare a half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are left are, as the expressive phrase goes, “up against it.”
That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. I was blue, despondent, ready to give up.
“Twenty-five per cent. who really cared,” said she, “could reform the universe. Reform is like the dictionary–it takes infinite patience. The first thing is to get the 25 per cent. together.”
“You’re right!” I cried, taking heart again. “There’s plenty of work for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mere upstarts because we’ve lived here only a year or two. But that is just why we can see so many things which must be altered. We’ve got to keep our batteries on the firing line. We’ve got plenty of work besides getting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncovering our perennials.”
We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by the woodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used the spring before.
It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. If we couldn’t have real vocational instruction, at least we might have school gardens, with volunteer instruction and prizes awarded, perhaps, by the Grange. I sent away that evening for bulletins on the subject, and presently took the matter up with the school superintendent and the master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that, after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, what similar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of coöperation among those working for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of a piece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfully volunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as an incentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the large estates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen) volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at five o’clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from the district sent quantities of government seeds, and more were donated by one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land, nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty little squares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boy toiling. We had the beginnings of vocationalinstruction. It had been entirely accomplished by voluntary coöperation among the minority who saw the need for it.
I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, an Irish-American who had practically grown up into the management of one of the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his natural strength of character had been developed by responsibility.
“The trouble is,” he said, “that we organize for political parties, for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don’t organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight of numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club. It would be for the town, not for a party.”
He carried out his idea, too, and the Bentford Town Club was the result. It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hitherto scattered and ineffectual minority.
It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I remarked one day that the town didn’t get more than 60 cents’ worth of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: “Well, if we didn’t pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or to break out the snowdrifts inwinter, we’d have to pay for their keep in some other way. They would be ’on the town.’”
“On the town!” The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent balls, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece, past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn, the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a pleasant land, be “on the town?” Why should some of us own acres upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once stood in her ancestor’s name. Why had the acres slipped away in the intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities–to make New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle withfresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till something perilously close to degeneracy resulted.
“On the town!” The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers, all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, all independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves “poor worms” on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century with a new problem on our hands.
And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when I see the road work being done by “town labour,” I think of what that means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which floats in the blue above our dwelling.