New lives for old

The first thing I did when I was fairly on my feet was to buy a farm.

It was a matter of sentiment with me. All my family with the exception of my father had been farmers and even he, in his latter years, had talked wistfully of the independence of country life. His father had owned a fairly prosperous farm in New Hampshire and on his few acres had lived and died. He had raised there wheat for his flour, wool for his clothing, hides for his shoes, cream for his butter, and meat and vegetables for his table. He even made a fairly good imitation tea and coffee and sweetened the drink with maple sugar from his own trees. Grandfather Carleton, according to father, could have built a Chinese wall about his fields and lived within its boundaries, asking favor of no man. I suppose it was the feeling of independence coming of this that made such men as he good Americans; the first to shoulder muskets for their country, the first to shoulder axes and blaze a trail through the wilderness.

Ruth’s folks, too, had all been farmers. She herself was born and bred on a farm and I think it was that which gave her such good health and good courage. Though in the years of our struggle in the city I never heard her complain, I knew that always in her heart she had a great yearning for the fields and open sky. She never spoke of this, but sometimes Ruth says a great deal when she doesn’t speak. I know when I first told her of my plan she had to swallow hard to keep from crying.

One thing alone disturbed Ruth and that was the thought that with success we were running away from our new-found friends.

“Somehow it seems as though we ought to stay right on here where we’ve made good and share our success with the others,” she said.

“You talk as though we’d made our fortune and were going back to the fatherland,” I said.

“I feel that way,” she admitted.

“Well,” I said, “the gang is part of me now and I wouldn’t quit if I were worth a million. But we’re in a position where we can afford more elbow room now. Of course we can move back into the suburbs again, if we want to.”

She shuddered a little at that.

“Not back there,” she answered.

“Then the only other thing is a farm,” I said. “And if you want, you can think of it as a farm for the whole gang. What a place it will be for the kiddies; your own and the others!”

That was all the cue Ruth needed. On the spot she hatched plans enough to keep her busy all her life. It looked to me as though we’d need a Carnegie endowment to carry out all her schemes, but I didn’t say anything. I’d felt that way before about her projects and seen her end by putting them through on a few dollars. If Ruth had put into business the same amount of thought and brains and energy that she put into her philanthropies she would have made a fortune.

I went to a real estate dealer and there I received my first surprise. It wasn’t my last, however. Before I was through with this business I discovered that I had as much to learn as I had during those first years as an emigrant. And I may as well say right here that my experience wasn’t the kind I’ve read about in the “Simple Life” and “Back to the Farm” stories. And because it was different is the reason I’m writing this. There’s been just as much nonsense written about the farm as about the slums. One man makes it out a hell on earth and another man makes it out a paradise on earth, and both of them are wrong and both of them are right, but neither of them seems to me to have got at the heart of the matter.

In “One Way Out” I learned to my own satisfaction that if an emigrant succeeds where an American fails it proves there’s something wrong with the American. And there is. True as you’re living, there is. Something is lacking in him that his ancestors had; something lacking that the emigrant has to-day. I thought that I had learned this once for all but when I got back into the country I had to learn it over again. The conditions were different, but the same facts held good.

I received a surprise, I said, at the very beginning. It came when the real estate man handed me a list of almost a hundred places for rent and for sale—all within easy reach of the city. I had my choice of anything from one acre to a hundred acres. Not only this but they were offered me almost at my own figure and my own terms. I found I could buy a farm as easily as a set of books. I don’t think the agents would have refused a dollar down and a dollar a week.

I didn’t know anything about real estate values then, but judging from the prices suburban property was bringing I had an idea that a fairly decent place with buildings would cost me around ten thousand dollars. I found that for this sum I could get a fourteen room Colonial house with land enough for a park. After living where the same amount of land would almost make a ward, I was staggered. I thought there must be something crooked in the proposition. But I went to the other agencies and found the same bargains open to me. It seemed that farms were a drug on the market.

And this was in a section of the country which had been settled for over two hundred and fifty years! There’s something to think about in that. It was within a ten cent car fare of a region which was absorbing emigrants by the hundred thousand. It was on the very outskirts of a city which was howling about congestion and moaning over the high cost of living. Land was actually lying idle almost within sight of a market pleading for more produce. It certainly looked queer.

These facts, however, didn’t concern me at the time. As soon as I made sure the facts were actually as represented, I set about making a selection. To Ruth and me this was like living our honeymoon all over again. Perhaps it was more like living our youth again, for we hadn’t ever passed our honeymoon. I’d go over the lists with her in the evening and we’d check off the places that sounded good to us, and then on the first fair morning we’d start to hunt them up. She’d leave the baby at home with some of our good neighbors and we’d go as far as we could on the electric cars and then walk. I wanted to have a carriage but she wouldn’t hear of it because she wanted to feel free. Some days she pretended we were gypsies and other days that we were two Indians hunting a spot to camp. I didn’t mind, because Dick was looking after most of the business now so I could take my time without worrying about that. In this way we squandered whole days along the country roads going through one old house after another and eating our lunch by the side of a brook or in a bit of woods.

I think there must have been something in our blood inherited from our ancestors, for we took to the open road as though we’d been born by its side. Oh, but those were good days—those days when we wandered about at our will in search of a home. It was June and the fields were full of flowers and the air full of birds. Ruth knew them every one and greeted them like old friends, pointing them out to me. I could tell a crow from a robin and a daisy from a buttercup, but that was about all, and yet to me also these wild things were like old friends. I had never missed them, but after the first day I knew I could never do without them again. It was just as I had felt about Ruth from the first time I saw her.

I suppose too that the contrast with our narrow quarters of the last few years had something to do with our joy in the broader prospect. Not that we had ever felt crowded. We had in our tenement all the room we needed and our lives had been so full that we didn’t notice our quarters anyway. Our lives were still full but with more leisure and less strain we wanted more than we needed. We were like pioneers—content at the start with a log cabin or even a tent, but with prosperity desiring larger and better quarters more as a matter of comfort than necessity. We were now ready for a few of the luxuries of life but we recognized frankly the fact that our new inclinations were luxuries. If success had been longer in coming than it was, we would have remained where we were in perfect contentment.

It was hard for us to decide on any of the many old houses we explored because to us they all looked attractive. The thing we both liked about them in spite of signs of decay was that they all seemed so firmly established. There was nothing flimsy about them. They looked as though they had become rooted in the soil like the big elms which grew before so many of them. It was as though the winds and the sun and the rain had tested them and found them honest. As Ruth said, in going into them you wouldn’t feel as though you were beginning life again as you might in a brand new house, but were only starting where the last owner left off.

After our experiences during the last few years we appreciated such details as those. There had been times in the emigrant days when way down deep in our hearts we had felt a little bit like people without a country. We were pioneers and we gloried in that, but we were pioneers without a fatherland. We had no sunny Italy, no emerald isle, no gay France, not even a grim Russia to talk about over a pipe at the end of the day as our neighbors had. We had to go back a century or more to get home, and vivid as that past seemed at times it was distinctly a past in which we had played no part. Now out here in the country where we saw stone walls built by our forefathers, where the land had been tilled by them, where trees planted by them were still growing, where if not direct descendants of our own, descendants of the old stock still lived, we felt closer to that history. So we thought that if we went into one of the old houses built by our forefathers, it would bring us still nearer home.

We spent almost a month this way, anxious to draw out the pleasure as long as possible.

“I’ll know our home as soon as I see it,” said Ruth; “I’ll recognize it like an old friend.”

And so she did. One day toward nightfall—when in the country all the world seems to get mellow—we came upon a little story and a half house connected by a shed with a ramshackly looking barn. It was half hidden behind trees and lilac bushes on the top of a knoll which sloped to a small lake some fifty rods distant. There wasn’t another house within sight of it—just woodland and pasture and fields. Standing there on the old granite doorstep, you wouldn’t have believed there was a city within a long day’s journey.

We had the key and went inside. The rooms were low studded and the windows came down to within two feet of the floor. The ceilings were discolored and the paper was off in great patches where the roof had leaked. But in spite of this the place somehow was like home. Ruth took my arm with a tight squeeze and looked up at me.

“This is it, Billy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure as she was until all excited she began to tell me what she was going to do. With the birds singing outside and the lazy sun streaming through the windows slantwise, she led me through every room, selecting her papers, making her changes, and placing her furniture.

“We don’t want a single new thing in this house,” she exclaimed. “We want to keep it just as it was and don’t you see how it was?”

I hadn’t ever lived in the country and so I didn’t, but she made it so vivid to me before we left that evening that I felt as though I had been born here.

“We must visit all the houses in the neighborhood and buy what furniture we can right here,” she said. “Maybe there’ll be an auction. Country people are always selling off their old stuff so we must keep our eyes open.”

“I should think it would be a lot simpler to buy what we want in town and be done with it,” I said.

“But we don’t want to be done with it, Billy,” she answered. “We can’t come slam bang into an old house like this. We must grow into it.”

She was so happy that I didn’t say anything more. I knew that she was right, whatever I thought. I’d trust Ruth’s instinct against my judgment any time.

I found that I could secure some fifty acres around the house and this was what pleased me. The lot included woodland, pasture and field, but mostly pasture grown up to alders and scrub pine. But however poor the land was, it was land, and that was what I was hungry for. I wanted to look out the windows and see land and walk over it and feel it beneath my feet, knowing I owned it. I wanted to feel that I had a certain section of these United States of America which belonged to me and my heirs forever and ever. To have this would seem like being taken into the firm.

When I came to look up the deeds I felt this more keenly than ever. I was able to trace the title back to an old Indian grant, for it had been held in one family over two hundred years and had changed title only twice since then. This in itself brought history mighty close.

I bought the land and house for twenty-eight hundred dollars—the house being practically thrown in. Because it was lop-sided and old and in need of repair it had no market value whatever. A flimsily built modern bungalow would have brought more. And yet when I examined the timbers I found them of oak, handhewn, and sound as a nut. The underpinning was made of great granite slabs and was as good as the day it was put in, though it had worked askew from the frost. Even the floors, though uneven and needing propping, were sound. The roof boards and shingles had of course rotted, but here again the timbers supporting them had with time only become seasoned. When our great grandfathers built houses they didn’t build for decades but for centuries. They didn’t reckon the cost of the lumber. In a cottage they used beams big enough to support a church, matched them true and fastened them with hand-made spikes a foot long. I couldn’t have bought the lumber alone for what I paid for the house. I couldn’t have bought it anyway. You can’t buy such timber as that any more.

I started work upon it at once, because we wanted to get in as soon as possible. From the moment I paid the first installment—I bought it on time as a matter of convenience—we felt this to be our home. I couldn’t spare any of my own men just then and felt anyway that as far as possible I ought to use local labor, so after considerable effort I rounded up three men to help me.

I came to know these fellows better later on, but at the start they were almost as foreign to me as though they had come from another country. One of them was a man of fifty, another a man of forty and the third was a young chap not more than twenty-two or three. I’ll call the oldest one Hadley—though that wasn’t his name. The last name doesn’t count for much anyway, because at the end of the week I was calling him Jim and he was calling me Bill. In less than two weeks the children who used to come over to watch us were calling me Bill.

Seth Sprague and Josh Chase will do as names for the other two and come pretty close to what their names really were. Josh was the young fellow—a tall, bony lad with shoulders already well rounded, and in many other ways looking as old as Seth, who might have been his father.

All three of them had been born in the neighborhood and had lived here ever since. All three of them came from old New England stock and had inherited small farms from their fathers. And I must say that their personal appearance was no great credit to that stock. This impressed me right off. Not only were their bodies undersized and spare but their faces were thin and sallow. They didn’t look healthy. They didn’t look as healthy as the average emigrant. And yet they had been living in the country all their lives with out-of-door work in this fine air for a tonic and with country food to nourish them. They didn’t look dissipated—just scrawny and underfed. If I had met one of them in the slums I would have said he was a case for the associated charities. I doubt if Seth could have got past the emigration officials. The first time they opened their dinner pails, however, I saw that I had missed my guess about their being starved. I never saw any three human beings get outside of as much food as they did. Three or four eggs, half a loaf of bread, a big slab of pie and two or three doughnuts to a pail, was their average lunch. They saw my surprise and Jim told a story fixing it on Seth, though I suspect it was an old one round the neighborhood.

He said that Seth happened into the grocery one day just after a drummer had opened a large tin of canned beef. The drummer took off a slice which he ate with some crackers, and then shoved the can along to Seth with the invitation to join him. Seth took out his pocket knife and began. He finished that pound can with the rest of the crackers and allowing that this sort of whetted his appetite ordered a second can. When he finished this the drummer who had been watching in amazement said, “Don’t quit now; have another.” Seth replied that he didn’t mind if he did and ate the contents of the third can. Then closing his knife and running the back of his hand across his mouth, he gave a sigh of satisfaction. “My,” he said, “but that was a juicy morsel.”

This started a yarn from Seth and he fixed his on Jim. They were full of these stories and would stop work a dozen times a day to drawl them out. Seth said that a man who lived on the edge of the town had a wife who was a mighty good cook. One spring she planned to go away for a week and visit some relatives but before going she cooked up enough food to last her husband a week. He was a hearty eater, so she spent three or four days at the task. When it came time for supper, the first day she left, the man felt so lonesome that he went out of the house and looked for someone to join him. He met Jim and asked him in. Jim said that he had just had supper and wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, but that he would join in a cup of tea just to be sociable. He sat down at the table and ate up a two quart pot of beans and the man brought on a second pot. Jim ate that too. Then the man brought out a pie and Jim ate that. A second one followed, and to cut a long story short, Jim before he finished ate up every single thing there was in the house. His host didn’t say anything until Jim rose from the table. “Well,” said his host, “I’m glad you didn’t come along when you were hungry.”

I had more trouble handling those three men than I’ve ever had with a gang of a hundred foreign laborers. They didn’t know enough to do the work properly by themselves and they knew too much to obey orders. When it came to straightening up the underpinning I let them go ahead for a while on their own responsibility. This was a simple task which three men with crow bars ought to have done in half a day. At the end of the first half day they had succeeded in harmonizing their various opinions as to how it ought to be done to the point where they determined they needed a jack screw. One of them went off to borrow this and when he returned it was lunch time. Then I took hold and it was only by doing most of the work myself that we finished this job in two days. I used them to help only where I needed more muscle and at that the three together couldn’t lift as much as one of my stocky, close-knit Italian laborers.

I found it impossible either to lead or drive them. My attempts resulted in nothing but longwinded arguments or sulky threats of leaving. And I was paying them a dollar and seventy-five cents a day for unskilled labor. They were both lazy and incompetent. That’s the frank truth.

I kept them along until the fourth day, which was cloudy with at times a light drizzling rain. I had got up at four o’clock in order to be at the house on time, for I was anxious to get this outside work done as soon as possible. At seven o’clock not one of the men had put in an appearance. I waited until half past eight and then went off to see what the trouble was. I found Seth at home smoking a pipe by the side of the kitchen stove. His wife was a pleasant faced woman and the inside of the house was as neat as wax—in marked contrast to the clutter around the outside.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“Dunno of any trouble,” he answered as though surprised by my question.

“I’ve been down to the house over an hour waiting for you,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“Aren’t you going to work any more?”

“Don’t expect a man to work in the rain, do you?” he answered.

“I guess it’s too much to expect work of you in any sort of weather,” I said.

I paid him for his four days and left him growling uncomplimentary remarks about me to his wife. I received the same reply from Jim. I paid him off too and went on in search of young Chase. I thought the boy and I together might be able to clear up some of the odd jobs. He wasn’t at home. His mother thought he might be at the grocery store. I went down there and found him lolling against the counter.

“You aren’t afraid of rain too, are you?” I demanded. There were three other men there and he looked ashamed.

“It’s my rheumatiz,” he answered, feeling of his leg. “It’s botherin’ me a powerful lot to-day.”

“Then you refuse to come to work?”

“I’d like to accommodate ye,” he answered. “But honest—”

“I don’t want you to accommodate me,” I said. “I want you to work for me.”

He straightened up a little at this and answered back. “I won’t work in the rain for no man.”

He glanced toward the others and I saw them nod their approval. This stand was more than I had expected of him. It showed that he had some spirit of a certain kind after all.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s your money.”

When I was leaving, he roused himself once more. “I reckon what you want mister ain’t a man—it’s a Dago.”

“You’re partly right,” I said; “I reckon what I want is a Dago.”