CHAPTER V. IN WHICH WE BORE FOE WATER
We joined the Despair Association finally by reason of our water problem. However, that was to come into our lives later. Through the springtime we had more water than we could possibly hope to use, and we focused our attentions and our energies upon hacking a homestead out of the briar patch we had bought.
A painful acre at a time, we cleared lands that once had been cleared. As I may have stated already, forty-odd years of disuse had turned lawn space, garden space and meadow into one conglomerate jungle of towering weeds and tangled thorny underbrush, stretching from the broken fences along the highroad straight back to the dooryard of the moldering tumbledown dwelling. With a gang of men under a competent foreman, and a double team of hired horses, we assaulted that tangle, bringing to the undertaking much of the same ardor and some of the same fortitude which I imagine must have inspired Stanley on the day when he began chopping his way through the trackless wilds of the dark forest to find Doctor Livingstone.
It gave one the feeling of being a pioneer and a pathfinder—no, not a pathfinder; a pathmaker—to stand by, superintending in a large, broad, general, perfectly ignorant fashion the job of opening up those thickets of ours to the sunlight that had not visited them for ever so long. Off of one segment of our property, a slope directly behind the main house, we took over four hundred wagonloads of stumps, roots, trunks, boughs and brush—the fruitage of nearly two months of steady labor on the part of men and horses.
The brambles were shorn down and piled in heaps to be burned. The locusts, thousands of them, varying in size from half-grown trees to switchy saplings, were by main force snatched out of the ground bodily. A number of long-dead chestnuts and hickories, great unsightly snags that reared above the uptom harried earth like monuments to past neglect, were felled and sawed into cordwood lengths and carted away.
What emerged after these things had been done more than repaid us for all our pains. When the rumpled soil had been smoothed back and plowed and harrowed, and sown to grass, and when the grass had sprouted as promptly as it did, there stood forth a dimpling green expanse where before had been a damp, moldy and almost impenetrable tangle, hiding treasure-troves of old tin cans, heaps of rusted and broken farming implements and here and there the bleached-out bones of a dead cow or a deceased horse.
To our abounding astonishment, we found ourselves the owners of a considerable number of old but healthy apple trees and a whole grove of cherry trees that we hadn't known were there at all, so thoroughly had they been buried in the locusts and the sumacs. It was just like finding them. Indeed, it was finding them.
The old house came down next, with some slight assistance from a crew of wreckers. Being almost ready to come down of its own accord it met them halfway. They had merely to pry into the foundations, hit her a hard wallop in the ribs, and then run for their lives. From the wreckage we reclaimed, out of the cellar, which was pre-Revolutionary, some hand-hewn oak beams in a perfect state of preservation; and out of the upper floors, which were pre-James K. Polk, a quantity of interior trim, along with door frames and window sashes.
Incidentally we dispossessed a large colony of rats and a whole synod of bats, a parish of yellow wasps and a small but active congregation of dissenting cats—half-wild, glary-eyed, roach-backed, mangy cats that resided under the broken flooring. In all there were fourteen of these cats—swift and rangy performers, all of them. One and all, they objected to being driven from home. They hung about the razed wreckage, and by night they convened in due form upon a bare knoll hard by, and held indignation meetings.
Parliamentary disputes arose frequently, with the result that the proceedings might be heard for a considerable distance. I took steps to break up these deliberations, and after several of the principal debaters had met a sudden end—I am a very good wing shot on cats—the survivors saw their way clear to departing entirely from the vicinity. Within a week thereafter the song birds, which until then had been strangely scarce upon the premises, heard the news, and began coming in swarms. We put up nesting boxes and feeding shelves, and long before June arrived we had hundreds of feathered boarders and a good many pairs of feathered tenants.
One morning in the early part of the month of June I counted within sight at one time fourteen varieties of birds, including such brilliantly colored specimens as a scarlet tanager and his mate; a Baltimore oriole; a bluebird; an indigo bunting; a chat; and a flicker—called, where I came from, a yellow hammer. Robins were probing for worms in the rank grass; two brown thrashers and a black-billed cuckoo were investigating the residential possibilities of a cedar tree not far away; and from the woods beyond came the sound of a cock grouse drumming his amorous fanfare on a log.
Think of what that meant to a man who, for the better part of twelve years, had been hived up in a flat, with English sparrows for company, when he craved a bit of wild life!
What had been a gardener's cottage stood at the roadside a hundred yards away from the site of the main house. On first examination it seemed fit only for the scrap heap; but one of those wise elderly persons who are to be found in nearly every rural community—a genius who was part carpenter, part mason, part painter, part glazier and part plasterer—was called into consultation, and he decided that, given time and material for mending, he might be able to do something with the shell. Modestly he called himself an odd-jobs man; really he was a doctor to decrepit and ailing structures.
From neglect and dry rot the patient was almost gone; but he nursed it back to a new lease on life, trepanning its top with new rafters, splinting its broken sides with new clapboards. He cured the cellar walls of rickets, the roof of baldness, and the inside woodwork of tetter; and he so wrought with hammer and saw and nails, with lime and cement, with paintbrush and putty knife, that presently what had been a most disreputable blot on the landscape became not only a livable little house but an exceedingly picturesque one, what with its wide overhanging gables, its cocky little front veranda, and its new complexion of roughcast stucco.
While this transformation was accomplished in the lower field, we were doing things to the barn up on the hillside. It had good square lines, the barn had; and, though its outer casing was in a woeful state of nonrepair, its frame, having been built sixty or seventy years ago of splendid big timbers, stood straight and unskewed. Thanks to the ability of our architect to dream an artistic dream and then to create it, this structure, without impairment of its general lines and with no change at all in its general dimensions, presently became a combination garage and bungalow.
The garage part was down below, occupying the space formerly given over to horse stalls and cow sheds. Here, also, a furnace room, a laundry and a servant's room were built in. Above were the housekeeping quarters—three bedrooms; two baths; a big living hall, with a wide-mouthed fireplace in it; a kitchen, and a pantry. This floor had been the haymow; but I'll warrant that if any of the long-vanished hay which once rested there could have returned it wouldn't have known the old place.
The roof of the transmogrified mow was sufficiently high to permit the construction of a roomy attic, with accommodations for one sleeper at one end of it, and ample storage space besides.
At the back of the building, where the teams had driven in, a little square courtyard of weathered brick was laid; a roof of rough Vermont slate was laid on in an irregular splotchy pattern of buff and yellow and black squares; and finally, upon the front, at the level of the second floor, the builder hung on a little Italian balcony, from which on clear days, looking south down the Hudson, we have a forty-mile stretch of landscape and waterscape before us.
On the nearer bank, two miles away, the spires of the market town show above the tree tops; on the further bank, six miles away, the rumpled blue outlines of the Ramapo Hills bulk up against the sky line; and back of those hills are sunsets such as ambitious artists try, more or less unsuccessfully, to put on canvas.
All this had not cost so much as it might have, because all the interior trim, all the doors and windows, and all the studs and joists and beams had been reclaimed from the demolished main building. The chief extravagances had been a facing of stonework for the garage front and a stucco dress for the upper walls. We broke camp and moved in.
For a month or so we went along swimmingly. One morning we quit swimming. All of a sudden we woke up to find there was no longer sufficient water for aquatic pastimes.
The absolutely unprecedented dry spell that occurs every second or third year in this part of the North Temperate Zone had descended upon us, taking us, as it were, unawares. The brooks were going dry; the grass on hillsides where the soil was thin turned from a luscious green to a parched brown; and the mother spring of our seven up the valley, which had gushed so plenteously, now diminished overnight, as it were, into a puny runlet. There were no indications that the spring would be absolutely dry; but there was every indication that it would continue to lessen in the volume of its output—which it did. We summoned friends and well-wishers into consultation, and by them were advised to dig an artesian well.
We did not want to bother with artesian wells then. We were living very comfortably upstairs over the garage and we were planning the house we meant to build. We had drawn plans, and yet more plans, torn them up and started all over again; and had found doing this to be one of the deepest pleasures of life. Time without end we had conferred with friends who had built houses of their own, and who gave us their ideas of the things which would be absolutely indispensable to our comfort and happiness in our new house. We had incorporated these ideas with a few of our own, and then we had found that if we meant to construct a house which would please all concerned, ourselves included, there would be needed a bond issue to float the enterprise and the completed structure would be about the size of a cathedral. So then we would trim down, paring off a breakfast porch here and a conservatory there, until we had a design for a compact edifice not much larger than an averagesized railroad terminal.
Between times, when not engaged in the pleasing occupation of building our house on paper, we chose the site where it should stand. This, also, consumed a good many days, because each time we decided on a different location. One of our favorite recreations was shifting the house we meant to build about from place to place. We put imaginary wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us was we had too much latitude. With half an acre of land at our disposal, we should have been circumscribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you have to be reasonably definite about where you are going to build; slide too far one way or the other, and you are committing trespass, and litigation ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick and to choose—sixty acres, with desirable sites scattered all over the tract.
No sooner had we absolutely and positively settled on one spot as the spot where the house must stand than we would find half a dozen others equally desirable, or even more so; and then, figuratively speaking, we would pick up the establishment and transport it to one of the newly discovered spots, and wheel it round to face in a different direction from the direction in which it had just been facing. If a thing that does not yet physically exist may have sensations, the poor dizzy thing must have felt as if it were a merry-go-round.
Likewise we were very busy putting in our road. Up until a short time ago Miss Anna Peck, who makes a specialty of scaling supposedly inaccessible crags, was probably the only living person who could have derived any pleasure from penetrating to our mountain fastness, either afoot or otherwise. When we heard an engine in difficulties coughing down under the hill, followed by the sound of a tire blowing out, or by the smell of rubber scorching as the brakes clamped into the fabric, we knew some of our friends had been reckless enough to undertake to climb up by motor. So, unless we wanted to become hermits, we felt it incumbent upon us to put in a road.
When we got the estimates on the job we decided that the contractor must have figured on building our road of chalcedony or onyx or moss agate or some other of the semi-precious stones. It didn't seem possible that he meant to use any native material—at that price. It turned out, though, that his bid was fairly moderate—as processed blue-stone roads go in this climate; and ours has cost us only about eight times as much as I had previously supposed a replica of the Appian Way would cost. However, it has been pronounced a very good road by critics who should know; not a fancy road, but a fair average one.
It would look smarter, of course, with wide brick gutters down either side of it for its entire length; and I should add brick gutters, too, if I were as comfortably fixed, say, as Mr. Charles Schwab, and felt sure that I could get some of the Vanderbilt boys to help me out in case I ran short of funds before the job was completed. Still, for persons who live simply it does very well.
With all these absorbing employments to engage us, we naturally were loath to turn our attentions to water. We had lived too long in a flat where, when you wanted water, you merely turned a faucet. To us water had always been a matter of course. But now the situation was different. With each succeeding day the flow from our spring was slackening. In its present puniness it was no more than a reminder of the brave stream of the springtime.
There was a water witch, so called, in the neighborhood—a gentleman water witch. We were recommended to avail ourselves of his services. It was his custom, we were told, to arm himself with a forked peach-tree switch and walk about over the land, holding the wand in front of him by its two prongs, meantime muttering strange incantations. When he came to a spot where water lay close to the surface the other end of his divining rod would dip magically toward the earth. You dug there, and if you struck water the magician took the credit for it; and if you didn't strike water it was a sign the peach-tree switch had wilfully deceived its proprietor, and he cut a fresh twig off another and more dependable tree and gave you a second demonstration at half rates. However, before opening negotiations with this person, I bethought me to interview the man who had contracted to do the boring.
The latter gentleman proved to be the most noncommittal man I ever met in my life. He was as chary about making predictions as to the result of operations in his line as the ticket agent of a jerkwater railroad down South is about estimating the probable time of arrival of the next passenger train—always conceding that there is to be any next train; and that is as chary as any human being can possibly be. Only upon one thing was he positive, which was that no peach-tree switch in the world could be educated up to the point where it could find water that was hidden underground.
Man and boy, he had been boring wells for thirty years, he said; and it was all guess. One shaft would be put down—at three dollars a foot—until it pierced the roof of Tophet, and the only resultant moisture would be night sweats for the unhappy party who was footing the bills. Or the same prospector might dig his estate so full of circular holes that it would resemble honeycomb tripe, and never get anything except monthly statements for the work to date. On the other hand, a luckier man, living right across the way, had been known to start sinking a shaft, and before the drill had gone twenty feet it became necessary to remove the women and children to a place of safety until the geyser had been throttled down.
This particular well digger's business, as he himself explained, was digging wells, not filling them after they were dug. He guaranteed to make a hole in the ground of suitable caliber for an artesian well, but Nature and Providence must do the rest. With this understanding, he fetched up his outfit and greased himself and the machinery all over, and announced that he was ready to start.
So we picked out a spot where it would be convenient to build a pump house afterward, and he fixed up the engine and began grinding away. And he ground and ground and ground. Every morning, whistling a cheerful air, he would set his drills in circular motion, and all day he would keep it turning and turning. At eventide I would call on him and he would report progress—he had advanced so many feet or so many yards in a southerly direction and had encountered such and such a formation.
“Any water?” At first I would put up the question hopefully, then nervously, and finally for the sake of regularity merely.
“No water,” he would reply blithely; “but this afternoon about three o'clock I hit a stratum of the prettiest white quartz you ever saw in your life.” And, with the passion of the born geologist gleaming in his eye, he would pick up a handful of shining specimens and hold them out for me to admire; but I am afraid that toward the last any enthusiasm displayed by me was more or less forced.
And the next night it would be red sandstone, or gray mica, or sky-blue schist, or mottled granite, or pink iron ore—or something! This abandoned farm of ours certainly proved herself to be a mighty variegated mineral prospect. In the course of four weeks that six-inch hole brought forth silver and solder, soda and sulphur, borax and soapstone, crystal and gravel, amalgam fillings and a very fair grade of moth balls.
It brought forth nearly everything that may be found beneath the surface of the earth, I think, except radium—and water. On second thought, I am not so sure about the radium. It occurs to me that we did strike a trace of something resembling radium at the two-hundred-foot level—I won't be positive. But I am absolutely sure about the water. There wasn't any.
At the end of a long and expensive month we abandoned that hole, fruitful though it was in mineral wealth, moved the machinery a hundred yards west, and began all over again. We didn't get any water here, either; but before we quit we ran into a layer of wonderful white marble. If anybody ever discovers a way of getting marble for monuments and statuary out of a hole six inches in diameter and a hundred and seventy-five feet deep our fortunes are made. We have the hole and the marble at the bottom of it; all he will have to provide is the machinery.
By now we were desperate, but determined. We sent word to George Creel to rush us application blanks for membership in his Despair Association. We transferred the digging apparatus to a point away down in the valley, and the contractor retuned his engine and inserted a new steel drill—his other one had been worn completely out—and we began boring a third time. And three weeks later—oh, frabjous joy!—we struck water—plenteous oodles of it; cold, clear and pure. And then we broke ground for our new house.
That isn't all—by no means is it all. Free from blight, our potatoes are in the bin; our apples have been picked; and our corn has been gathered, and in a rich golden store, it fills our new corncrib. We are eating our own chickens and our own eggs; we are drinking milk from our own cow; and we are living on vegetables of our own raising.
Until now I never cared deeply for turnips. Turnips, whether yellow or white, meant little in my life. But now I know that was because they were strange turnips, not turnips which had grown in our own soil and for which I could have almost a paternal affection. Last night for dinner I ate a derby hatful of mashed turnips, size seven and an eighth.
Let the servants quit now if they will—and do. Only the day before yesterday the laundress walked out on us. It was our new laundress, who had succeeded the old laundress, the one who stayed with us for nearly two consecutive weeks before the country life palled upon her sensitive spirit. And the day before that we lost a perfect treasure of a housemaid. She disliked something that was said by some one occupying the comparatively unimportant position of a member of the family, and she took umbrage and some silverware and departed from our fireside. We've had our troubles with cooks, too.
When the latest one showed signs of a gnawing discontent I offered to take lessons on the ukulele and play for her in the long winter evenings that are now upon us. I suggested that we think up charades and acrostics—I am very fertile at acrostics—and have anagram parties now and then to while away the laggard hours. But no; she felt the call of the city and she must go. We are expecting a fresh candidate to-morrow. We shall try to make her stay with us, however brief, a pleasant one.
But these domestic upsets are to us as nothing at all; for we have struck water, and we are living, in part at least, on our own home-grown provender, and shortly we shall start the home of our dreams. And to-day something else happened that filled our cup of joy to overflowing. In the middle of the day a dainty little doe came mincing down through our garden just as confidently as though she owned the place.
We are less than an hour by rail from the Grand Central Station; and yet, as I write this line, a lordly cock grouse is strutting proud and unafraid through the undergrowth not fifty yards from my workroom! Last night, when I opened my bedroom window—in the garage—to watch the distant reflection of the New York lights, flickering against the sky to the southward, I heard a dog fox yelping in the woods!
Let Old Major Gloom, the human Dismal Swamp, come over now as often as pleases him. Our chalice is proof against his poison.
CHAPTER VI. TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE
As the reader will have no trouble in recalling, we broke ground for our house. That, however, was after we had altered the design so often that the first lot of plans and specifications got vertigo and had to be retired in favor of a new set. For one thing, we snatched one entire floor out of the original design—just naturally jerked it out from under and cast it away and never missed it either. And likewise this was after we had shifted the site of the house from one spot to another spot and thence to a third likely spot, and finally back again to the first spot. This, however, had one thing in its favor at least. It enabled us to do our moving without taking our household goods from storage, and yet during the same period to enjoy all the pleasurable thrill of shifting about from place to place. I find moving in your mind is a much less expensive way than the other way is and gives almost as much pleasure to a woman, who—being a woman—is naturally a mover at heart.
Finally, though, all this preliminary skirmishing came to an end and we actually started work on our house. I should say, we started work on what formerly we had thought was going to be our house. It turned out we were wrong. As it stands to-day, two years after the beginning, in a state approaching completion, it is a very satisfactory sort of house we think, artistically as well as from the standpoint of being practical and comfortable; but it is no longer entirely our house. The architect is responsible for the general scheme of things, for the layout and the assembling of the wood and the brick and the cement and the stonework and all that sort of thing, and to him largely will attach the credit if the effect within and without should prove pleasing to the eye. Likewise, here and there are to be found the traces of ideas which we ourselves had, but I must confess the structure is also a symposium of the modified ideas of our friends and well-wishers mated to our ideas.
To me human nature presents a subject for constant study. For a thing so widely distributed as it is, I regard it as one of the most interesting things there are anywhere. It seems to me one of the chief peculiarities of human nature is that it divides all civilized mankind into two special groups—those who think they could run any newspaper better than the man who is trying to run it, and those who think they could run any hotel better than the man who is hanging on as manager or proprietor of it. There are subdivisional classifications of course—for example, women who think they can tell any other woman how to bring up her children without spoiling them to death, and women who are absolutely sure no woman on earth can tell them anything about the right way to bring up their own children; which two groupings include practically all women. And I have yet to meet the man who did not believe that he was a good judge of either horses, diamonds, wines, women, salad dressings, antique furniture, Oriental rugs or the value of real estate. And finally all of these, regardless of sex and regardless, too, of previous experience in the line, know better how a house intended for living purposes should be designed and arranged than the individuals who are paying the bills and who expect to tenant the house as a home when it is done. By the same token—or by the inverse ratio of the same token—the persons who are building the house invariably begin to have doubts and misgivings regarding the worth of their own pet notions in regard to the said house the moment some outsider offers a counter argument. I do not know why this last should be so, but it is. It merely is one of the inexplicable phases of the common phenomenon called human nature.
In our own case the force of this fact applied with a pronounced emphasis. When the tentative draft of the house of our dreams was offered for our inspection it seemed to us a gem—perfect, precious and rare. Filled with pride as we were, we showed the drawings to every one who came to see us. Getting out the drawings when somebody called became a regular habit with us. Being ourselves so deeply interested in them, we couldn't understand why our friends shouldn't be interested too. And they were—I'll say that much for them; they were all interested. And why not? For one thing, it gave them a chance to show how right they were regarding the designing of a house; not our house particularly, but anything under a roof, ranging from St. Peter's at Rome to the façade of the government fish hatchery in Tupelo, Mississippi. For another thing, it gave them a chance to show us how completely wrong we were on this subject. Not a single soul among them but pounced at the opportunity. Until then I never realized how many born pouncers—not amateur pouncers but professional expert master pouncers—I numbered in my acquaintance. Right from the beginning the procedure followed a certain ritual. A caller or pouncer would drop in and have off his things and get comfortably settled. We would produce the sketches, fondling them lovingly, and spread them out and invite the attention of our guest to probably the only perfect design of a house fashioned by the mind of man since the days of the mound builders on this hemisphere. In our language we may not have gone quite so far as to say all this, but our manner indicated that such was the case.
He—for convenience in the illustration I shall make him a man, though in the case of a woman the outcome remained the same—he would consider the matchless work of inventive art presented for his consideration and then he would say; “An awfully nice notion—splendid, perfectly splendid! And still, you know, if I were——”
And so on.
Or perhaps it would be: “Oh, I like the general idea immensely! But—you'll pardon my making a little suggestion, won't you?—but if I were tackling this proposition—” And so on.
It has been my observation that all complimentary remarks uttered by a member of the human race in connection with a house which somebody else contemplates building end in “but.”
You just simply can't get away from it.
From the treasure-troves of my memory I continue to quote:
“But if I were tackling this proposition I would certainly not put the dining room here were you've got it. I'd switch it over there right next to the living room and give a vista through. See, like this!”
And out would come his lead pencil.
“But that would mean eliminating the main hall,” one of us would venture.
“Of course it would,” Brother Pounce would say. “Next to giving a vista through, cutting out the hall is the principal idea I had in mind. What do you want with a hall here? For that matter, what do you want with a hall any place that you can get along without it? Why, my dear people, don't you know that hallways are no earthly good except to catch dust and be drafty and make extra work for servants? And besides, in modern houses people are cutting the hallways down to a minimum—to an absolute minimum.”
We gathered that in a modern house—and, of course, a modern house was what we devoutly craved to own—persons going from one part of it to another didn't pass through a hall any more; they passed through a minimum. The idea seemed rather revolutionary to persons reared—as we had been—in houses with halls in them. Still, this person spoke as one having authority and we would listen with due respect to his words as he went on:
“All right, then, we'll consider the hallway as chopped out. By chopping it out that gives us a chance to put the dining room here in this place and give a vista through into the living room. Here, I'll show you exactly what I mean—what did I do with my lead pencil? Because no matter what else you do or do not have, you must have a vista through.”
Before he had finished with this alteration and taken up with the next one we were made to understand that a house without a vista through was substantially the same as no house at all. Ashamed that we had been guilty of so gross an oversight, I would make a note, “Vista through,” on a scratch pad which I kept for that very purpose. Under the spell of his eloquence and compelling personality, I had already decided that first we would build a vista through, and then after that if any money was left we would sort of flank the vista through with bedrooms and a kitchen and other things of a comparatively incidental nature.
Having scored this important point, the king of the pouncers—now warming to his work and with his eyes feverishly lit by the enthusiasm of the zealot—would proceed to claw the quivering giblets out of another section of our plan. Hark to him: “And say, see here now, how about your sun parlor? I can see two—no, three places suitable for tacking on a sun parlor merely by moving some walls round and putting the main entrance at the east front instead of the south front—funny the architect didn't think of that! He should have thought of that the very first thing if he calls himself a regular architect—and I suppose he does. What's the idea, leaving off the sun parlor?”
Then weakly, with an inner sinking of the heart, we would confess that we had not calculated on including any sun parlors in the general scope and he for his part would proceed to show us how deadly an omission, how grievous an offense this would be.
It is a curious psychological paradox that we dreaded these suggestions and yet welcomed them, too. That is to say, we would begin by dreading them—resenting them would perhaps be a better term—and invariably would wind up by welcoming them. Nevertheless, there were times when I gave my celebrated imitation of the turning worm. Jarred off my mental balance by a proposed change which seemed entirely contrary to the trend of the style of house we had in mind for our house, I would offer at the outset a faint counter argument in defense, especially if a notion which was about to be offered as a sacrifice on the altar of friendly counsel had been a favorite little idea of my own—one that I had found in my own head, as the saying went in the Army. Though knowing in advance that I was fighting a losing fight, I would raise a meek small voice in protest. Never once did my protesting avail. There was one stock answer which my fellow controversialist always had handy—ready to belt me with.
“One moment!” he would say, smiling the superior half-pitying smile which was really responsible for Cain's killing Abel that time.
Abel smiled just exactly in that way and so Cain killed him, and if you're asking me, he got exactly what was coming to him. “One moment!” he would say. “You've never built a house before, have you?”
“No,” I would confess, “but—but—”
“Then, pardon me, but I have! What I am trying to do is to keep you from making the mistakes I made. Almost anybody will make mistakes building his first house. I only wish I'd had somebody round to advise me as I'm advising you before I O. K.'d the plans and signed the contract. As it was, it cost me four thousand dollars to pull out two walls so that we could have a sun parlor. If you go ahead and build your house without having a sun parlor you'll never regret it but once—and that'll be all the time you live in it. Look here now, while I show you how easily you can do it.” And so on and so forth until we would capitulate and I'd write “Memo—sun parlor, sure,” on my little pad.
Take for example the matter of sleeping porches.
Personally I have never been drawn greatly to the idea of sleeping outdoors. I used to think an outdoor bedroom must be almost as inconvenient as an outdoor bathroom, and with me bathing has always been a solitary pleasure. I have felt that I would not be at my best while bathing before an audience. That may denote selfishness on my part, but such is my nature and I cannot change it. I suppose this prejudice against bathing before a crowd is constitutional with me—hereditary, as it were. All my folks were awfully peculiar that way.
When they felt that they needed bathing they also felt that they needed privacy. I sometimes think that my family must have been descended from Susanna. She was a Biblical lady and so did not have any last name, but you probably recall her from the circumstance of her having been surprised while bathing by two snoopy elders. Whenever one of the Old Masters ran out of other subjects to paint, he would paint a picture of Susanna and the elders. In no two of their pictures did she look alike, but in all of them that I've ever seen she looked embarrassed. Yes, I dare say Susanna was our direct ancestress. Like practically all Southern families, ours is a very old family and I've always been led to believe that we go back a long way. True, I've never heard the Old Testament mentioned in this connection, but in view of the fact of our family being such an old or Southern family I reckon it is but fair to presume that we go back fully that far if not farther.
Indeed I have been told that in my infancy a friend of the family, a man who had delved rather into archeology, on calling one day remarked that I had a head shaped exactly like a cuneiform Chaldean brick. It was years later, however, before my parents learned what a cuneiform Chaldean brick looked like and by that time the person who had paid me the compliment was dead and it was too late to take offense at him. And anyhow, in the meantime the contour of my skull had so altered that it was now possible for me to wear a regular child's hat bought out of a store. I point out the circumstance merely as possible collateral evidence showing semiprehistoric hereditary influences to corroborate the more or less direct evidence that as a family we antedate nearly all—if not all—of these Northern families by going back into the very dawn of civilization. I have a great aunt who rather specializes in genealogies and especially our own genealogy and the next time I see her I mean to ask her to consult the authorities and find out whether there is a strain of the Susanna blood in our stock. If she confirms my present belief that there is I shall be very glad to let everybody know about it in an appendix to the next edition of this work.
As with taking a bath outdoors, so with sleeping outdoors; this always was my profound conviction. I had a number of arguments, all good arguments I thought, to offer in support of my position. To begin with, I am what might be called a sincere sleeper, a whole-souled sleeper. I have been told that when I am sleeping and the windows are open everybody in the vicinity knows I am actually sleeping and not lying there tossing about restlessly upon my bed. I would not go so far as to say that I snore, but like most deep thinkers I breathe heavily when asleep. On board a sleeping car I have been known to breathe even more heavily than the locomotive did. I know of this only by hearsay, but when twenty or thirty passengers, all strangers to you, unite in a common statement to the same effect you are bound to admit, if you have any sense of fairness in your make-up, that there must be an element of truth in what they allege.
Very well, then, let us concede that I sleep with the muffler cut out open. In view of this fact I have felt that I would not care to sleep in the open where my style of sleeping might invite adverse comment. In such a matter I try to have a proper consideration for the feelings of others. Indeed I carried it to such a point that when we lived in the closely congested city, with neighboring flat dwellers just across a narrow courtyard, I placed the head of my bed in such a position that I might do the bulk of my breathing up the chimney.
Besides—so I was wont to argue—what in thunder was the good of having a comfortable cozy bedroom with steam heat and everything in it, and a night lamp for reading if one felt like reading, and a short cut down to the pantry if one felt hungry in the small hours, and then on a cold night deliberately to crawl out on a wind-swept porch hung against the outer wall of the house and sleep there? I once knew one of these sleeping-porch fiends who was given to boasting that in wintertime he often woke to find the snow had drifted in on the top of him while he slept. He professed to like the sensation; he bragged about it. From his remarks you gleaned that his idea of a really attractive boudoir was the polar bear's section up at the Bronx Zoo. I was sorry his name had not been Moe instead of Joe—which was what it was—because if it had only been the former I had thought up a clever play on words. I was going to catch him in company and trap him into boasting about loving to sleep in a snowdrift and then I was going to call him Eskimo, which should have been good for a laugh every time it was spontaneously sprung on a fresh audience.
In short, taking one thing with another, I have never favored sleeping porches. But after listening to friends who either had them or who were so sorry they didn't have them that they were determined we should have a full set of them on our house, we concurred in the consensus of opinion and decided to cast aside old prejudices and to have them at all hazards. I believe in the rule of the majority—of course with a few private reservations from time to time, as for instance, when the majority gets carried away by this bone-dry notion.
I recall in particular one friend who was especially emphatic and especially convincing in the details of offering suggestions and advice, and—where he deemed such painful measures necessary—in administering reproof for and correction of our faulty misconceptions of what a house should be. But then he was a Bostonian by birth and a Harvard graduate and had the manner—shall we call it the slightly superior manner?—which so often marks one who may boast these two qualifications. When you meet a well-bred native Bostonian who has been through Harvard it is as though you had met an egg which had enjoyed the unique distinction of having been laid twice and both times successfully. Our friend was distinctly that way. When he had rendered judgment there was no human appeal. It never occurred to us there could be any appeal.
So we incorporated sleeping porches and vistas through and sun parlors and a hundred other things—more or less—into the plan. Obeying the wills of stronger natures than ours, we figuratively knocked out walls and then on subsequent and what appeared to be superior counsel figuratively stuck them back in again. We lifted the roof for air and we lowered it for style. We tiled the floors and then untiled them and put down beautiful mental hardwood all over the place. We rejected paneled wainscotings in favor of rough-cast plaster and then abolished the plaster for something in the nature of a smooth finish for our walls. By direction we tacked on an ell here and an annex there. If we had kept all the additions which at one period or another we were quite sure we must keep in order to make our home complete we should have had a house entirely unsuitable for persons of our position in life to reside in, but could have made considerable sums of money by renting it out for national conventions.
On one point and only one point did we remain adamant. Otherwise we were as clay in the hands of the potter, as flax to the loom of the weaver; but there we were as adamant as an ant. We concurred in the firm and unswervable decision that—no matter what else we might have or might not have in our house—we would not have a den in it. By den I mean one of those cubby-holes opening off a living room or an entrance hall that is fitted up with woolly hangings and an Oriental smoking set where people are supposed to go and sit when they wish to be comfortable—only nobody in his right mind ever does. In my day I have done too much traveling on the Pullman of commerce to crave to have a section of one in my home. Call them dens if you will; I know a sleeping-car compartment when I see it, even though it be thinly disguised by a pair of trading-stamp scimitars crossed over the door and a running yard of mailorder steins up on a shelf. Several earnest advocates of the den theory tried their persuasive powers on us, but each time one or the other of us turned a deaf ear. When her deaf ear was tired from turning I would turn mine a while, and vice versa. There is no den in our home. Except over my dead body there never shall be one.
While on this general subject I may add that if anybody succeeds in sticking a Japanese catalpa on our lawn it will also be necessary to remove my lifeless but still mutely protesting remains before going ahead with the planting. I have accepted the new state income tax in the spirit in which it seems to be meant—namely, to confiscate any odd farthings that may still be knocking round the place after the Federal income tax has been paid, and a very sound notion, too. What is money for if it isn't for legislators to spend? Should the Prohibitionists put through the seizure-and-search law as a national measure I suppose in time I may get accustomed to waking up and finding a zealous gent with a badge and one of those long prehensile noses especially adapted for poking into other people's businesses, such as so many professional uplifters have, prowling through the place on the lookout for a small private bottle labeled “Spirits Aromatic Ammonia, Aged in the Wood.” With the passage of time I may become really enthusiastic over the prospect of having my baggage ransacked for contraband essences every time I cross the state line. My taste in pyjamas has been favorably commented on and there is no reason why my fellow travelers should not enjoy a treat as the inspector dumps the contents of the top tray out on the car floor. The main thing is to get used to whatever it is that we have got to get used to.
But I have a profound conviction that in the matter of a Japanese catalpa on the lawn, just as in the matter of a den opening off the living room and taking up the space which otherwise would make a first-rate umbrella-and-galosh closet, I could never hope to get used. Nor do I yearn for a weeping mulberry tree about the premises. I dislike its prevalent shape and the sobbing sound it makes when especially moved by the distress which chronically afflicts the sensitive thing. Nature endowed our abandoned farm with a plenteous selection of certain deciduous growths common to the temperate zone—elms and maples and black walnuts and hickories and beeches and birches and dogwoods and locusts; also pines and hemlocks and cedars and spruces. What the good Lord designed as suitable arboreal adornment for the eastern seaboard is good enough for me. I have no desire to clutter up the small section of North America to which I hold the title deeds with trees which do not match in with the rest of North America. I should as soon think of putting a pagoda on top of Pike's Peak or connecting the Thousand Islands with a system of pergolas.
Having got that out of my system, let us get off the grounds and back to the house proper. As I was remarking just before being diverted from the main line, a den was about the only voluntary offering which we positively refused to take over. Every other notion of whatsoever nature was duly adopted and duly carried on to the architect He was a wonderful man. All architects, I am convinced, must be wonderful men, but him I would call one of the pick of his breed. How he managed to make practical use of some of the ideas we brought to him and fit them into the plan; how without hurting our feelings or the feelings of our friends he succeeded in curing us of sundry delusions we had acquired; how he succeeded in confining the ground plan to a scale which would not make the New York Public Library seem in comparison a puny and inconsequential edifice; and how taking a number of the suggestions which came to him and rejecting the others he yet preserved the structural balance and the suitable proportions which he had had in his mind all along—these, to my way of thinking, approximate the Eighth Wonder. No, it is the first wonder; the remaining seven finish place, show and also ran.
After a season of debate, compromise and conciliation, when the gray in his hair had perceptibly thickened and the lines in his face had deepened, though still he wore his chronic patient smile which makes strangers like him, the final specifications were blue-printed and the work was started. A lady to whom I have the honor of being very closely related by marriage removed the first shovel load of loam from the contemplated excavation. She is not what you would call a fancy shoveler and the net result of her labor, I should say offhand, was about a heaping dessert-spoonful of topsoil. Had I guessed what that inconsequential pinch of earth would subsequently mean to us in joy I should have put it in a snuffbox and carried it about with me as the first tangible souvenir of a great accomplishment and a reminder to me never again to look slightingly upon small things. Bulk does not necessarily imply ultimate achievement. If Tom Thumb had been two feet taller and eighteen inches broader than he was I doubt whether he would amounted to much as a dwarf.
Well, we reared the foundations and then one fine April morning our country abandoned its policy of watchful waiting for one of swatful hating. While we were at war it did not seem patriotic to try to go ahead. There was another reason—a variety of reasons rather. Very soon labor was not to be had, or materials either. Take the detail of concrete. Now that the last war is over and the next war not as yet started, I violate no confidence and betray no trust in stating that one of our chief military secrets had to do with this seemingly harmless product. We were shooting concrete at the Germans. In large quantities it was fatal; in small, mussy. And while the Germans were digging the gummy stuff out of their eyes and their hair our fellows would swarm over the top and capture them. And if you are not sure that I am telling the exact truth regarding this I only wish you had tried during active hostilities—as I did—to buy a few jorums and noggins of concrete. Trying would have made a true believer of you, too. And the same might be said for steel girders and cow hair to put into plaster so it will stick, and ten-penny nails. We were firing all these things at the enemy. It must have disconcerted him terribly to be expecting high explosives and have a keg of ten-penny nails or a bale of cow hair burst in his midst. Without desire to detract from the glory of the other branches of the service, I am of the opinion that it was ten-penny nails that won the war. And in bringing about this splendid result I did my share by not buying any in large amount for going on eighteen months.
I couldn't.
War having come and concrete having gone, the contractor on our little job knocked off operations until such time as Germany had been cured of what principally ailed her. Even through the delay, though, we found pleasure in our project. We would perch perilously upon the top of the jagged walls and enjoy the view the while we imagined we sat in our finished dream house. We could see it, even if no one else could. In rainy weather we brought umbrellas along. The fact that a passerby beheld us thus on a showery afternoon I suppose was responsible for the report which spread through the vicinity that a couple of lunatics were roosting on some stone ruins halfway up the side of Mott's Mountain. We didn't mind though. The great creators of this world have ever been the victims of popular misunderstanding. Sir Isaak Walton, sitting under an apple tree and through the falling of an apple discovering the circulation of the blood, is to us a splendid figure of genius; but I have no doubt the neighbors said at the time that he would have been much better employed helping Mrs. W. with the housework. And probably there was a lot of loose and scornful talk when Benjamin Franklin went out in a thunderstorm with a kite and a brass key and fussed round among the darting lightning bolts until he was as wet as a rag and then came home and tried to dry his sopping feet before one of those old-fashioned open fireplaces so common in that period. But what was the result?
The Franklin heater—that's what. With such historic examples behind us, what cared we though the tongue of slander wagged while we inhabited our site with the leaky heavens for a roof to our parlor and the far horizons for its wall. Not to every one is vouchsafed the double boon of spending long happy days in one's home and at the same time keeping out in the open air.
On the day the United Press scooped the opposition by announcing the cessation of hostilities some days before the hostilities really cessated, thereby scoring one of the greatest journalistic beats since the Millerites prognosticated the end of the world, giving day, date and hour somewhat prematurely in advance of that interesting event, which as a matter of fact has not taken place yet—on that memorable day the country at large celebrated the advent of peace. We also celebrated the peace, but on a personal account we celebrated something else besides. We celebrated the prospect of an early resumption of work in the construction of our house.
During the months that followed I learned a lot about the intricacies and the mysteries of house building. Beforehand, in my ignorance I figured that the preliminary plans might be stretched out or contracted in to suit the shifting mood of the designer and the sudden whim of his client, but that once the walls went up and the beams went across and the rafters came down both parties were thereafter bound by set metes and bounds. Not at all. I discovered that there is nothing more plastic than brickwork, nothing more elastic than a girder. A carpenter spends days of his time and dollars of your money fitting and joining a certain section of framework; that is to say, he engages in such craftsmanship when not sharpening his saw. It has been my observation that the average conscientious carpenter allows forty per cent of his eight-hour day to saw sharpening. It must be a joy to him to be able to give so much time daily to putting nice keen teeth in a saw, knowing that somebody else is paying him for it at the rate of ninety cents an hour. Watching him at work in intervals between saw filing, you get from him the impression that unless this particular angle of the wooden skeleton is articulated just so the whole structure will come tumbling down some day when least expected. At length he gets the job done to his satisfaction and goes elsewhere.
Along comes a steamfitter and he, whistling merrily the while, takes a chisel or an adze or an ax and just bodaciously haggles a large ragged orifice in the carpenter's masterpiece. Through the hole he runs a Queen Rosamond's maze of iron pipes. He then departs and the carpenter is called back to the scene of the mutilation. After sharpening his saw some more in a restrained and contemplative manner, he patches up the wound as best he can. Enter, then, the boss plumber accompanied by a helper. The boss plumber finds a comfortable two-by-four to sit on and does sit thereon and lights up his pipe and while he smokes and directs operations the assistant or understudy, with edged tools provided for that purpose, tears away some of the cadaver's most important ribs and several joints of its spinal column for the forthcoming insertion of various concealed fixtures.
Following the departure of these assassins the patient carpenter returns and to the best of his ability reduces all the compound fractures that he conveniently can get at, following which he sharpens his saw—not the big saw which he sharpened from eight-forty-five to ten-fifteen o'clock this morning, but the little buttonhole saw which he has not sharpened since yesterday afternoon; this done, he calls it a day and goes home to teach his little son Elmer, who expects to follow in the paternal footsteps, the rudiments of the art of filing a saw without being in too much of a hurry about it, which after all is the main point in this department of the carpentering profession.
And the next day the plumber remembers where he left his sack of smoking tobacco, or the steam fitter's attention is directed to the fact that when he stuck in the big pipe like a bass tuba he forgot to insert alongside it the little pipe like a piccolo, and therefore it becomes necessary to maltreat the already thrice-mangled remains of woodwork. A month or so later the plasterers arrive—they were due in a week, but a plasterer who showed up when he was expected or any time within a month after he had solemnly promised on his sacred word of honor that he meant to show up would have his card taken away from him and be put out of the union. Hours after Gabriel has blown his trump for the last call it is going to be incumbent upon the little angel bell hops to go and page the plasterers, else they won't get there for judgment at all.
Be that as it may and undoubtedly will be, in a month or so the plasterers arrive, wearing in streaks the same effects in laid-on complexion that so many of our leading débutantes are wearing all over their faces. The chief plasterer looks over the prospect and decides that in order to insure a smooth and unbroken surface for his plaster coat the plumbing and the heating connections must have their elbows tucked in a few notches, which ultimatum naturally requires the good offices of the carpenter, first to snatch out and afterward to hammer back into some sort of alignment the shreds and fragments of his original job. When this sort of thing, with variations, has gone on through a period of months, a house has become an intricate and complicated fabric of patchworks and mosaics held together, as nearly as a layman can figure, by the power of cohesion and the pressures of dead weights. The amazing part of it is that it stays put. I am quite sure that our house will stay put, because despite the vagaries—perhaps I should say the morbid curiosity—of various artificers intent on taking the poor thing apart every little while, it was constructed of materials which as humans compute mutabilities are reasonably permanent in their basic characters.
It was our desire to have a new house that would look like an old house; a yearning in which the architect heartily concurred, he having a distaste for the slick, shiny, look-out-for-the-paint look which is common enough in American country houses. In this ambition a combination of circumstances served our ends. For the lower walls we looted two of the ancient stone fences which meandered aimlessly across the face of our acres. According to local tradition, those fences dated back to pre-Revolutionary days; they were bearded thick with lichens and their faces were scored and seamed. In laying them up we were fortunate enough to find and hire a stonemason who was part artificer but mostly real artist—an Italian, with the good taste in masonry which seems to be inherent in his countrymen; only in this case the good taste was developed to a very high degree. Literally he would fondle a stone whose color and contour appealed to him and his final dab with the trowel of mortar was in the nature of a caress.
On top of this find came another and even luckier one. Three miles away was an abandoned brickyard. Once an extensive busy plant, it had lain idle for many years. Lately it had been sold and the new owners were now preparing to salvage the material it contained. Thanks to the forethought of the architect, we secured the pick of these pickings. From old pits we exhumed fine hard brick which had been stacked there for a generation, taking on those colors and that texture which only long exposure to wind and rain and sun can give to brick. These went into our upper walls. For a lower price than knotty, wavy, fresh-cut, half-green spruce would have cost us at a lumber yard, modern prices and lumber yards being what they are, we stripped from the old kiln sheds beautiful dear North Carolina boards, seasoned and staunch. These were for the rough flooring and the sheathing. The same treasure mine provided us with iron bars for reënforcing; with heavy beams and splendid thick wide rafters; with fire brick glazed over by clays and minerals which in a molten state had flowed down their surfaces; with girders and underpinnings of better grade and greater weight than any housebuilder of moderate means can afford these times. Finally, for roofing we procured old field slates of all colors and thicknesses and all sizes; and these by intent were laid on in irregular catch-as-catch-can fashion, suggestive when viewed at a little distance of the effect of thatching. Another Italian, a wood carver this time, craftily cut the scrolled beam ends which show beneath our friendly eaves and in the shadows of our gables. It was necessary only to darken with stains the newly gouged surfaces; the rest had been antiquated already by fifty years of Hudson River climate. Before the second beam was in place a wren was building her nest on the sloped top of the first one. We used to envy that wren—she had moved in before we had.