Dear, Nice Lady: I’m lying here on the rug, my tail quite tired after a hard day’s work, looking up in Mr. John’s face. His face is kind of glum and his eyes sort of faraway looking. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He’s been that way nights for two or three weeks now, which makes me sad, too; only he goes to the post-office often, which makes me glad, ’cause I love to walk or to run behind the buggy, and there’s a collie pup on the way who is very nice. What do you suppose is the trouble? Sometimes he goes to the brook and sits on a stone by a pool there, while I go wading and get my stummick wet and drippy and cool. I wish you’d come back. I didn’t get to know you so awful well, but I liked you, and a house with just one glum, stupid man in it ain’t–I mean isn’t–very nice, ’specially as Peter’s still at school. Schools last awful late up here.
I am yours waggishly–
“Here, Buster,” said I. The pup rose and snuggled his nose into my lap. I picked him up, held his forepaw firmly and put some ink on it with the end of a match. Then I held the paper below it, pressed the paw down, and made a signature, wiping the paw afterward with a blotter. Buster enjoyed the strange operation, and wagged his tail furiously. I sealed and addressed the letter, and went to bed.
A few days later a box came addressed to Buster in my care. I opened it in Buster’s presence, indeed literally beneath his nose. On top was a small package, tied with blue ribbon, and labelled “For Buster.” It proved to be a dog biscuit, which the recipient at once took to the hearth and began upon. Beneath this was a note, which I opened with eager fingers. It began:
Darling Buster: Your waggish epistle received and contents noted. While most of us at times agree with him who said that the more he saw of men the better he liked dogs, nevertheless the canine intelligence is in some ways limited. Pray do not misunderstand me, dear Buster. In its limits lies its loyalty! No man is a hero to his valet, but every man to his dog. However, these same limits of the canine intelligence, which logic compels me to assume that you also possess, are probably responsible for your mistake in assigning the term glumness to what you observe in Master John, when it is really lack of occupation. You see, dear Buster, he has got Twin Fires so far under way that he doesn’t work at it all the time, so he ought to be at his writing of stories, made up of big dictionary words which I am defining or inventing for him down here in a very hot, dirty, dusty, smelly town. He isn’t doing that, is he? Won’t you please tell him to? Tell him that’s all the trouble. He has a reaction from his first farming enthusiasm, and doesn’t realize that the thing to do is to go to work on the new line, his line. For it is his line, you know, Buster.
Underneath this you’ll find something to give him, with my best wishes for sunshine on the dear garden. I’d kiss you, Buster, only dogs are terribly germy.
Stella.
P.S. That is a nice pool, isn’t it?
I sat on the floor with the letter in my lap, smiling happily over it. Then I took the last package out of the box. It was heavy, evidently metal. Removing the papers, I held in my hand an old bronze sundial plate, a round one to fit my column, and upon it, freshly engraved, the ancient motto–
My first thought was of its cost. She couldn’t afford it, the silly, generous girl! She’d bought it, doubtless, at one of those expensive New York antique shops, and then taken it to an engraver’s, for further expense. I ought not accept it. Yet how could I refuse? I couldn’t. I hugged it to my heart, and fairly ran to the dial post, Buster at my heels. It was already nearly noon, so I set it on the pedestal, got a level and a pot of glue, which was the only means of securing it to the post which I had, and watch in hand waited for the minute of twelve. At the minute, I set the shadow between the noon lines, levelled it with thin bits of match underneath, and glued it down. Then I stood off and surveyed it, sitting there in the sun–her dial! Then I ran for my camera.
I developed the film at once, and made a print that afternoon. When it was made, I went out into the vegetable garden, on a sudden impulse to work off physical energy, took the wheel hoe away from Mike, and began to cultivate.
Did you ever spend an afternoon with a wheel hoe, up and down, up and down, between rows of beets and carrots and onions, between cauliflower plants and tomato vines, between pepper plants and lettuce? It requires a certain fixity of attention to keep the weeders or the cultivator teeth close to the plants without also injuring them. But there is a soothing monotony in the forward pushes of the machine, and a profound satisfaction in seeing the weeds come up, the ground grow clean and brown and broken on each side of the row behind you, and to feel, too, how much you are accomplishing with the aid of this comparatively simple tool.
My early peas were ready for market. Mike announced that he was going to take the first lot over in the morning. They had been planted very late, but fortune had favoured them, and now they were hardly more than a week behind Bert’s, which had been planted early in April. The foot-high corn was waving in the breeze, the long rows of delicate onion tops, of beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce plants were as characteristically different as the vegetables themselves. I fixed their characteristics in my vision. I suddenly found myself taking a renewed interest in the farm. As I paused to wipe my bronzed forehead or relight my pipe, I would raise my head and look back over the rows, or through the trellis aqueduct to the house, seeing the sundial telling the hours on the lawn, and think of Stella, think of her down in the hot city, where I knew at last that I should not let her stay.
Yes, I had no longer any doubts. I wanted her. I should always want her. Twin Fires was incomplete, I was incomplete, life was incomplete, without her. I pushed the hoe with redoubled zeal, long after Mike had milked the cows and departed.
At six I stopped, amazed to find the plot of a story in my head. Heaven knows how it got there, but there it was, almost as full-statured as Minerva when she sprang from the head of Jove, though considerably less glacial. I even had the opening sentence all ready framed–to me always the most difficult point of story or essay, except the closing sentence. Nor did this tale appear to be one I had incubated in the past, and which now popped up above the “threshold” from my subconsciousness. It was a brand-new plot, a perfect stranger to me. The phenomenon interested me almost as much as the plot. The tale grew even clearer as I took my bath, and haunted me during supper, so that I was peremptory in my replies to poor Mrs. Pillig and refused to aid Peter that evening with his geography.
“To-morrow,” said I, vaguely, going into my study and locking the door.
I worked all that evening, got up at midnight to forage for a glass of milk and a fresh supply of oil for my lamp, and returned to my desk to work till four, when the sun astonished me. The story was done! Instead of going to bed, I went down in the cool of the young morning, when only the birds were astir, and took my bath in Stella’s pool. Then I went to the dew-drenched pea vines and began to pick peas.
Here Mike found me, with nearly half a bushel gathered, when he appeared early to pick for market.
“It’s the early bird gets the peas,” said I.
“It is shurely,” he laughed. “You might say you had a tiliphone call to get up–only these ain’t tiliphones.”
“Mike!” I cried, “a pun before breakfast!”
“Shure, I’ve had me breakfast,” said he.
Which reminded me that I hadn’t. I went in the house to get it, reading over and correcting my manuscript as I ate. After breakfast I put on respectable clothes, tucked the manuscript in my pocket, and mounted the seat of my farm wagon, beside Mike. Behind us were almost two bushels of peas and several bunches of tall, juicy, red rhubarb stalks from the old hills we found on the place. Mike had greatly enriched the soil, and grown the plants in barrels.
“Well, I’m a real farmer now,” said I.
“Ye are, shurely,” Mike replied. “Them’s good peas, if they was planted late.”
We drove past the golf links and the summer hotel, to the market, where I was already known, I found, and greeted by name as I entered.
“I’ll buy anything you’ll sell me,” said the proprietor, “and be glad to get it. Funny thing about this town, the way folks won’t take the trouble to sell what they raise. Most of the big summer estates have their own gardens, of course, but there’s nearly a hundred families that don’t, and four boarding-houses, and the hotels. Why, the hotels send to New York for vegetables–if you can beat that! Guess all our farmers with any gumption have gone to the cities.”
“Well,” said I, “I’m not in farming for my health, which has always been good. I’ve got more than a bushel of peas out there.”
“Peas!” cried the market man. “Why, I have more demands for peas than I can fill. The folks who could sell me peas won’t plant ’em ’cause it’s too much trouble or expense to provide the brush. I’ll give you eight cents a quart for peas to-day.”
“This is too easy,” I whispered to Mike, as we went out to get the baskets.
I sold my rhubarb also, and came away with a little book in which there was entered to my credit $4.16 for peas and $1.66 for rhubarb. I put the book proudly in my pocket, for it represented my first earnings from the farm, and mounting the farm wagon again told Mike to drive me to the hotel.
As we pulled up before the veranda, the line of old ladies in rockers focussed their eyes upon us.
“Shure,” whispered Mike, “they look like they was hung out to dry!”
I went up the steps and into the office, where the hotel proprietor suavely greeted me, asked after my health, and inquired how my “estate” was getting on.
“You mean my farm,” said I.
He smiled politely, but not without a skepticism which annoyed me. I hastened from him, and left my manuscript with the stenographer, who had arrived for the summer.
“I’ll call for the copy to-morrow noon,” said I. Then I went to the telegraph booth and sent a day letter to Stella. “Buster sending me to thank you,” it read. “Meet me Hotel Belmont six to-morrow. Sold over a bushel of peas to-day. Prepare to celebrate.”
“Mike,” said I, returning to the cart, “drop me at the golf club. Tell Mrs. Pillig not to expect me to lunch.”
It was ten o’clock when we arrived at the entrance to the club. I jumped out and Mike drove on. The professional took my name, and promised to hand it to the proper authorities as a candidate. Then I paid the fee for the day, borrowed some clubs from him, and we set out. I had not touched a club since the winter set in. How good the driver felt in my hand! How sweetly the ball flew from the club (as the golf ball advertisements phrase it), on the first attempt! I sprang down the course in pursuit, elated to see that I had driven even with the pro. Alas! my second was not like unto it! His second spun neatly up on the green and came to rest. Mine went off my mashie like a cannon ball, and overshot into the road. My third went ten feet. But it was glorious. Why shouldn’t a farmer play golf? Why shouldn’t a golfer run a farm? Why shouldn’t either write stories? Heavens, what a lot of pleasant things there are to do in the world, I thought to myself, as I finally reached the green and sank my putt. Poor Stella, sweltering over a dictionary in New York! Soon she’d be here, too. She should learn to play golf, she should dig flower beds, she should wade in a brook. I flubbed my second drive.
“You’re taking your eye off,” said the pro.
“I’m taking my mind off,” said I. “Give me a stroke a hole from here, for double the price of the round, or quits?”
“You’re on,” said he.
I stung him, too! I felt so elated that I went back to the hotel for an elaborate luncheon, and returned for eighteen holes more. The feats a man can perform the first day after he has had no sleep are astonishing. The second day it is different. In fact, I began to get groggy about the tenth hole that afternoon, so that the pro. got back his losses, as in a burst of bravado I had offered to double the morning bet. He came back with an unholy 68 that afternoon, confound him! They always do when the bet is big enough, which is really why they are called professionals.
That night I slept ten hours, worked over my manuscripts most of the next morning, packed a load of them in my suitcase, and after an early dinner got Peter to drive me to the train, for his school had now closed.
“Peter,” said I at the station, “your job is to take care of your mother, and keep the kindlings split, and drive to market for Mike when he needs you. Also to water the lawn and flower beds with the spray nozzle every morning. Mind, now, the spray nozzle! If I find you’ve used the heavy stream, I’ll–I’ll–I’ll sell Buster!”
That amiable creature tried to climb aboard the train with me, and Peter had to haul him off by the tail. My last sight of Bentford was a yellow dog squirming and barking in a small boy’s arms.
The train was hot and stuffy. It grew hotter and stuffier as we came out of the mountains into the Connecticut lowlands, and we were all sweltering in the Pullman by the time New York was reached. As I stepped out of the Grand Central station into Forty-second Street my ears were assaulted by the unaccustomed din, my nose by the pungent odour of city streets, my eyes smarted in a dust whirl. But my heart was pounding with joy and expectation as I hurried across the street.
I climbed the broad steps to the lobby of the hotel, and scarcely had my feet reached the top than I saw a familiar figure rise from a chair. I ran toward her, waving off the boy who rushed to grab my bag. A second later her hand was in mine, her eyes upon my eyes.
“It–it was nice of Buster to send you,” she said.
“You look so white, so tired,” I answered. “Where is all your tan?”
“Melted,” she laughed. “Have you business in town? It’s awfully hot here, you poor man.”
“Yes,” said I, “I have business here, very important business. But first some supper and a spree. I’ve got ’most two bushels of peas to spend!”
We had a gay supper, and then took a cab, left my grip at my college club, where I had long maintained a non-resident membership, and drove thence to Broadway.
“How like Bentford Main Street!” I laughed, as we emerged from Fourty-fourth Street into the blaze of grotesque electric signs which have a kind of bizarre beauty, none the less. “Where shall we go?”
“There’s a revival of ’Patience’ at the Casino,” she suggested, “and there are the Ziegfeld Follies––”
“Not the Follies,” I answered. “I’m neither a drummer nor a rural Sunday-school superintendent. Gilbert and Sullivan sounds good, and I’ve never heard ’Patience.’”
We found our places in the Casino just as the curtain was going up, and I saw “Patience” for the first time. I was glad it was for the first time, because she was with me, to share my delight. As incomparable tune after tune floated out to us the absurdest of absurd words, her eyes twinkled into mine, and our shoulders leaned together, and finally, between the seats, I squeezed her fingers with unrestrainable delight.
“Nice Gilbert and Sullivan,” she whispered.
“It’s a masterpiece; it’s a masterpiece!” I whispered back. “It’s as perfect in its way as–as your sundial! Oh, I’m so glad you are with me!”
“Is it worth coming way to New York for?”
“Under the conditions, around the world for,” said I.
She coloured rosy, and looked back at the stage.
After the performance she would not let me get a cab. “You’ve not that many peas on the place,” she said. So we walked downtown to her lodgings, through the hot, dusty, half-deserted streets, into the older section of the city below Fourteenth Street. I said little, save to answer her volley of eager questions about the farm. At the steps of an ancient house near Washington Square she paused.
“Here is where I live,” she said. “I’ve had a lovely evening. Shall I see you again before you go back?”
I smiled, took the latchkey from her hand, opened the door, and stepped behind her, to her evident surprise, into the large, silent, musty-smelling hall. She darted a quick look about, but I ignored it, taking her hand and leading her quickly into the parlour, where, by the faint light from the hall, I could see an array of mid-Victorian plush. The house was silent. Still holding her hand, I drew her to me.
“I am not going back–alone,” I whispered. “You are going with me. Stella, I cannot live without you. Twin Fires is crying for its mistress. You are going back, too, away from the heat and dust and the town, into a house where the sweet air wanders, into the pines where the hermit sings and the pool is thirsty for your feet.”
I heard in the stillness a strange sob, and suddenly her head was on my breast and her tears were flowing. My arms closed about her.
Presently she lifted her face, and our lips met. She put up her hands and held my face within them. “So that was what the thrush said, after all,” she whispered, with a hint of a happy smile.
“To me, yes,” said I. “I didn’t dream it was to you. Was it to you?”
“That you’ll never know,” she answered, “and you’ll always be too stupid to guess.”
“Stupid! You called me that once before about the painters. Why were you angry about choosing the dining-room paint?”
She grew suddenly wistful. “I’ll tell you that,” she said. “It was–it was because you let a third person into our little drama of Twin Fires. I–I was a fool, maybe. But I was playing out a kind–a kind of dream of home building. Two can play such a dream, if they don’t speak of it. But not three. Then it becomes–it becomes, well, matter-of-facty, and people talk, and the bloom goes, and–you hurt me a little, that’s all.”
I could not reply for a moment. What man can before the wistful sweetness of a woman’s secret moods? I could only kiss her hair. Finally words came. “The dream shall be reality now,” I said, “and you and I together will make Twin Fires the loveliest spot in all the hills. To-morrow we’ll buy a stair carpet, and–lots of things–together.”
“Still with the pea money?” she gurgled, her gayety coming back. “No, sir; I’ve some money, too. Not much, but a little to take the place of the wedding presents I’ve no relatives to give me. I want to help furnish Twin Fires.” She laid her fingers on my protesting lips. “I shall, anyway,” she added. “We are two lone orphans, you and I, but we have each other, and all that is mine is yours, all–all–all!”
Suddenly she threw her arms about my neck, and I was silent in the mystery of her passion.
Chapter XVII
I DO NOT RETURN ALONE
Many people, I presume, long to fly from New York during a late June and early July hot spell. But nobody who does not possess a new place in the country, still unfurnished, with a garden crying for his attention and a brook wandering amid the pines, can possibly realize how the dust and heat of town affected me in the next ten days. It affected me the more because I saw how pale Stella was, how tired when the evenings came. With her woman’s conscientiousness, she was struggling to do two weeks’ work in one before leaving the dictionary. She even toiled several evenings, denying herself to me, while I wandered disconsolate along Broadway, or worked over my manuscripts at the club, surrounded by siphons of soda. At the luncheon hour and between five and six we shopped madly, getting a stair carpet, dining-room chairs (a present from her to herself and me, as she put it–fine Chippendale reproductions), a few rugs–as many as we could afford–and other necessary furnishings, including stuff for curtains. For the south room the curtains were gay Japanese silk from an Oriental store, to balance the Hiroshiges, and while we were buying them she slipped away from me and presently returned, the proud possessor of two small ivory elephants.
“Look, somebody has sent us another present!” she laughed. “Folks are so good to us! These are to stand on the twin mantels, under the prints.”
“From whom are they?” I asked.
“Your best friend and my worst enemy,” she answered.
For three days after she left the office of the dictionary I saw little of her. “There are some things you can’t buy for me–or with me,” she smiled. Then we went down together to the City Hall for our license, sneaking in after hours, thanks to the kindly offices of a classmate of mine, the city editor of a newspaper. The clerk beamed upon us like a municipal Cupid.
That last evening she left me, to pack her trunks, and I went back to the club, and found there a letter from the magazine where I had submitted my story. It was a letter of acceptance! Misfortunes are not the only things which never come singly. I danced for joy. If the stores had been open I should have rushed out then and there and bought the mahogany secretary we had seen a few days before and wistfully passed by. Fortunately, they were not open.
In the morning my cab stopped in front of the old house near Washington Square, and Stella came forth with a friend, a sober little person who appeared greatly impressed with her responsibilities, and bore the totally inappropriate name of Marguerite.
“Dear, dear!” she said, “I’ve never attended a bride before. It’s very trying. And it’s very mean of you, Mr. Upton, to take Stella from us, and leave me with a new and stupid co-worker. How do you expect the dictionary to come out?”
“I don’t,” said I, “nor do I care if it doesn’t. There are too many words in the world already.”
Bill Chadwick, another classmate of mine, came up from downtown, and met us at the church door. The rector was a friend and fellow alumnus of ours. It was like a tiny family party, suddenly and solemnly hushed by the organ as we stood before the altar, and in the warm dimness of the great vacant church Stella and I were made man and wife. The four of us went out to the cab again, and Bill insisted on a wedding breakfast at Sherry’s.
“Good Lord!” he said, “you two gumshoe into an engagement, and get married without so much as a reporter in the church, and then expect to make a getaway like a pair of safe breakers! No, sir, you come with me, and get one real civilized meal before you go back to your farm fodder.”
Bill had the solemn little bridesmaid laughing before the luncheon was over, but the last we saw of them they were waving us good-bye from behind the grating as we went down the platform to our train, and the poor girl was mopping her eyes.
“Isn’t the best man supposed to fall in love with the bridesmaid?” I asked. “At least I hope he’ll dry her tears.”
“Good gracious, yes!” cried Stella. “I never thought of that. You don’t know what we’ve done! Marguerite is a dear girl and an excellent cross-indexer, but she’s no wife for your gay friend William. You’d best send him a telegram of warning.”
“Never!” said I. “Bill has cruised so long in Petticoat Bay as a blockade runner that I hope she shoots him full of holes and boards him in triumph. Besides, everybody ought to get married.”
Stella’s eyes looked up at mine, deep and happy below their twinkle, and we boarded the train.
The train started, it left New York behind, it ran into the suburbs, then into the country, and at last the hills began to mount beside the track, and a cooler, fresher air to come in through the windows. Still her eyes smiled into mine, but she said little, save now and then to lean forward and whisper, “Is it true, John, is it true?”
So we came to Bentford station, in the early dusk of evening, and the air was good as we alighted, and the silence. Suddenly Buster appeared, undulating with joyous yelps along the platform, and sprang at Stella’s face. He almost ignored me.
Peter was waiting with the buggy. We sat him between us and drove home.
“Home–your home, our home,” I whispered, pressing her hand behind Peter’s back.
“Sold a lot o’ peas and things,” said Peter. “I got ’em all down in the book. Gee, I drove over ’most every day, an’ I’m goin’ to be on the ball team in the village, an’ I wanter join the Boy Scouts, but ma won’t let me ’less you say it’s all right, an’ ain’t it?”
“We’ll think it over, Peter,” said I.
Stella was bouncing up and down on the seat with excitement as the buggy rattled over the bridge. Lamplight was streaming from Twin Fires. On the kitchen porch stood Mrs. Pillig, dressed in her best, and Mrs. Bert and Bert. As we climbed from the buggy, Bert raised his hand, and a shower of rice descended upon us. Stella ran up the path, and Mrs. Bert’s ample arms closed about her. Both women were half laughing, half crying, when I got there with the grips.
“Ain’t that jest like the sex?” said Bert, with a jerk of his thumb–“so durn glad they gotter cry about it!”
“You shet up,” said Mrs. Bert. “For all you know, I’m pityin’ the poor child!”
Mrs. Pillig had an ample dinner ready for us, with vegetables and salad fresh from the garden, and, as a crowning glory, a magnificent lemon pie.
“This is much better than anything at Sherry’s,” cried Stella, beaming upon her.
We sat a long while looking at each other across the small table, and then we wandered out into the dewy evening and our feet took us into the pines, where in the darkness we stopped by a now sacred spot and held each other close in silence. Then we went back into the south room.
“Oh, if the curtain stuff would only hurry up and come!” cried my wife.
“You must learn patience–Mrs. Upton,” said I, while we both laughed sillily over the title, as others have done before us, no doubt. Presently Mrs. Pillig’s anxious face appeared at the door. She seemed desirous of speaking, and doubtful how to begin.
“What is it, Mrs. Pillig?” I asked.
“Well, sir,” she said, hesitantly, “I suppose now you are married you won’t need me, after all.” She paused. “I rented my house,” she added.
“Need you!” I cried. “Why now I shall need you more than ever!”
She smiled faintly, still looking dubious. Stella went over to her. “What he means is, that I’m a poor goose who doesn’t know any more about keeping house than Buster does about astronomy,” she laughed. “Of course you’ll stay, Mrs. Pillig, and teach me.”
“Thank you, Miss–I mean Missus,” said Mrs. Pillig, backing out.
“Be careful,” I warned. “If you let Mrs. Pillig think you’re so very green, she’ll begin to boss you.”
“That would be a new sensation,” laughed Stella. “I like new sensations as much as Peter Pan did. Oh, it’s a new sensation having a home like this, and living in the country, and smelling good, cool air and–and having you.”
She was suddenly beside me on the settle. We heard Mrs. Pillig going up to bed. The house was still. Outside the choral song of night insects sounded drowsily. Buster came softly in and plopped down on the rug. We were alone in Twin Fires, together, and she would not rise to go up the road to Bert’s. She would never go! So we sat a long, long while–and the rest shall be silence.
Chapter XVIII
WE BUILD A POOL
It was the strangest, sweetest sensation I had ever known to wake in the morning and hear soft singing in the room where a fresh breeze was wandering. I saw Stella standing at the window, her hair about her shoulders, looking out. She turned when I stirred, came over to kiss me, while her hair fell about my face, and then cried, “Hurry! Hurry! I must get out into the garden!”
Presently, hand in hand, we went over the new lawn to the sundial which stood amid a ring of brilliant blooms–which, however, had become unbelievably choked with weeds in the ten days of my absence. The gnomon was throwing a long shadow westward across the VII. We filled the bird bath, which Peter had neglected. We hurried through the orchard to the brook, to see the flowers blooming there, and there, alas! we found the volume of the stream shrunk to less than half its former size. We ran to the rows of berry vines to see how many had survived, and found the greater part of them sprouting nicely; we went up the slope into the rows of vegetables and inspected them; we rushed to see if all the roses were alive; we went to the barn where Mike had just begun to milk, and sniffed the warm, sweet odour.
“Yes, it’s better for any man to be married,” I heard Mike saying to her, as I moved back toward the door. Then he added something I could not hear, and she came to me with rosy face. “The horrid old man!” She was half laughing to herself.
The goods we had ordered began to arrive after breakfast, Bert bringing them from the freight house in his large wagon. I took the day off, and devoted the morning to laying a stair carpet, probably the hottest job I ever tackled. Thank goodness, the stairs went straight up, without curve or angle! As I worked, small feet pattered by me, up and down, and garments from a big trunk in the lower hall brushed my face as they were being carried past–brushed their faint feminine perfume into my nostrils and made my hammer pause in mid-air. After the carpet was laid, there were a thousand and one other things to do. There were pictures of Stella’s to be hung, and them we put in the hitherto vacant room at the front of the house, next to the dining-room, where Stella’s wall desk was also placed, and a case of her books, and some chairs.
“Now I can work here when you want to create literature in your room, or I can receive my distinguished visitors here when you are busy,” she laughed, setting some ornaments on the mantel. “My, but I’ve got a lot of curtains to make! I never did so much sewing in my life.”
Bureaus were carried upstairs with Mike’s assistance, and the ivory backs of a woman’s toilet articles appeared upon them; open closets showed me rows of women’s garments; glass candlesticks were unpacked and set upon the dining-table, and the new dining-chairs “dressed up” the room remarkably. Everywhere we went Mrs. Pillig followed with dust pan and broom, slicking up behind us. When night came it was still an incomplete house–“Oh, a million things yet to get,” cried Stella, “just one by one, as we can afford it, which will be fun!”–but a house that spoke everywhere of a dainty mistress. Outside, by the woodshed, was a pile of packing-boxes and opened crates and excelsior.
“There’s your work, Peter,” I said, pointing.
Peter looked rueful, but said nothing.
That evening I tried to work, but found it difficult, for watching my wife sew.
“You’ve no technique,” I laughed.
She made a little moue at me, and went on hemming the curtains, getting up now and then to measure them. “Why should I have?” she said presently. “You knew I was a Ph. D. when you married me. These curtains be on your own head! I’m doing the best I can.”
There was suddenly the suspicion of moisture in her eyes, and I ran to comfort her.
“I–I so want to make Twin Fires lovely,” she added, pricking her finger. “Oh, tell me I can, if I am only a highbrow!”
Of course the finger had to be kissed, and she had to be kissed, and the hem had to be inspected and praised, and now, long, long afterward, I smile to think how alike we all of us are on a honeymoon.
It was the next morning that we resolved to begin the pool. “I don’t expect to be married again for several years,” said I, “and so I’m going to take a holiday this week. We’ll carry the vegetables to market and bring back the cement, and begin on our water garden.”
Mike loaded the wagon with peas, the last of the rhubarb, and ten quarts of currants picked by Peter, and off we started.
“What is this horse’s name?” asked Stella, taking the reins to learn to drive.
“He has none, I guess. Mike calls him ’Giddup.’”
“No, it’s Dobbin. He looks just like a Dobbin. He has a kind of conventional, discouraged tail, like a Dobbin. Giddup, Dobbin!”
The horse started to trot. “There, you see, it is his name!” she laughed.
On Bentford Main Street we passed several motors and a trap drawn by a prancing span, and all the occupants stared at us, or rather at Stella, who was beaming from her humble seat on the farm wagon more like an eighteenth century shepherdess than a New England farmer’s wife. We added over $3 more in the account book with the market, and read with delight the grand total of $40.80 already in two weeks.
“Next year,” said I, “I’ll double it!”
Then I spent the $3, and some more, for Portland cement.
We got into our oldest clothes when we reached home, I put on rubber boots, and we tackled the pool. Even with the brook as low as it was, the engineering feat was not easy for our unskilful hands. Peter soon joined us, and lent at least unlimited enthusiasm.
“Peter,” said I, “you never worked this hard splitting kindlings.”
Peter grinned. “Ho, I like to make dams,” he said.
The first thing we did was to divert the brook by digging a new channel above the spot where we were to build the dam, and letting the water flow around to the left, close to one of the flower beds. Then, when the old channel had dried out a little, I spaded a trench across it and two feet into the banks on each side, and with Peter helping, filled the trench nearly full of the largest, flattest stones we could find, which we all then tramped upon to firm down. Then, a foot apart, we stood two boards on edge across the space, to make a mould for the concrete above the stones. I sent Peter with a wheelbarrow to pick up a load of small pebbles in the road, of the most irregular shape he could find, and I myself dug deeper in the hole where I had got the sand when we built the bird bath, and brought loads of it to the brookside. We dumped sand, pebbles, and cement into a big box, one pail of cement to one pail of pebbles and three of sand, and Peter and Stella fought for the hoe to mix them, while I poured in the water from a watering-pot, for I had read and seen the reason for the fact that the success of the cement depends upon every particle being thoroughly mixed. As fast as we had a box full of mixture prepared, we dumped it into the mould between the boards. It took an astonishing quantity of cement–quite all we had, in fact–and to finish off the top smooth and level I had to get the quarter bag left from my orchard work and the bird bath. It was evening when we had it done, and Peter, who had deserted us soon after dinner to play ball, returned to beg us to take the boards away, and grew quite unreasonable when we refused.
That night there was a shower, and the brook rose a trifle. When we hastened down through the orchard after breakfast the new channel had curved itself still farther, as streams do when once they get started off the straight line, and had washed the southeast flower bed half away. Stella, with a cry of grief, ran down the brook into the pines, and came back with sadly bedraggled Phlox Drummondi plants in her hands, their trailing roots washed white, their blooms broken. “Horrid brook,” she said. “Let’s put it right back into its proper place. I don’t like it any more.”
“A sudden change of habit is always dangerous,” said I. “Put the plants in the mud somewhere till we can set ’em in again.”
We now took away the boards from the new dam, which had begun to harden nicely. The next thing to do was to stake out the pool above it. As the dam was 10 feet below the line between the proposed bench and the front door of the house, the other end of the pool was marked off 20 feet upstream, and between the two extremes we dug out the soil into an oval basin. This was easily accomplished by chopping out the turf with a grub hoe, and then hitching Dobbin to the drag scraper. The soil was a black, loamy sand, which came up easily, and was hauled over and dumped for dressing on the site of our little lawn beyond the pool. When we had the basin excavated to a depth of about a foot, all three of us (for Peter was once more on the job) scattered to find stones to hold the banks.
New England farms are traditionally stony–till you want stones. We ended by taking some here and there from the stone walls after we had scoured the pasture behind the barn for half a barrow load. When once the circumference of the pool had been ringed with stones, stood up on edge, we raked the bottom smooth, sprinkled clean sand upon it, and were ready to let the water against the dam as soon as the concrete hardened. We gave it one more day, and then shovelled away the temporary dam, filled up the new channel where it turned out of the old, and stood beside the dam while the current, with a first muddy rush, swirled against it, eddied back, and began very slowly to rise.
“She holds, she holds!” I cried. “But we’ve forgotten to put stones for the water to fall over upon. It will undermine the structure if we don’t.”
“’Structure’ is good,” laughed Stella, regarding our little six-foot long and eighteen-inch high piece of engineering.
We shouted for Peter, and ran to the nearest stone wall, tugging back some flat stones which we placed directly below the dam for the overflow to fall on. Then, while Stella sat on the bank and watched the water rise, I shovelled some of the earth removed from the basin into the now abandoned temporary channel, and packed it down.
“Say, we can have fish in here,” cried Peter, who was also watching the water rise.
“You can have a four-legged fish,” laughed Stella, as Buster came down the bank with a gleeful bark and went splash into the pool, emerging to shake himself and spray us all.
I had scarce finished filling in the temporary trench, and was setting the poor uprooted plants back into the bed, with my back turned, when I heard a simultaneous shout from Peter and Stella.
“One, two, three–and over she goes!” cried Stella.
I faced around just in time to see the first line of the water crawling over the top of the dam, and a second later it splashed on the stones below; behind it came the waterfall.
Stella was dancing up and down. “Oh, it’s a real waterfall!” she cried. “I’ve got a real waterfall all my own! Come on downstream and look back at it!”
From the grove below it certainly did look pretty, flashing in the morning sun. “And when there are iris blossoms, great Japanese iris, nodding over it!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, can’t we plant those right away?” she asked.
“No,” said I. “Gardens are like Rome, I’m afraid.”
We went back and surveyed our pool at close range. It was clearing now. But the second pile of earth remained to be removed from the west side. Peter and I carted that off in wheelbarrows at once, dumping part of it into the hole where we had dug the sand, and the rest into a heap behind some bushes upstream for future compost. Then we climbed the orchard slope for dinner. Midway we looked back. There glistened our pool, a twenty-foot brown crystal mirror, with the four flower beds all askew about it, the ragged weeds and bushes pressing them close, and beyond it only the rough ground I had cleared with a brush scythe, and the scraggly trees by the wall.
“Alas” said I, “now we’ve built the pool, we’ve got to build a whole garden to go with it!”
“But it tinkles! Hear it tinkle!” cried Stella.
We listened, hand in hand. The tiny waterfall was certainly tinkling, a cool, delicate, plashy sound, which mingled with the sound of the breeze in the trees above our heads, and the sweet twitterings of birds.
“Oh, John, it’s a very nice dam, and a very nice world!” she whispered, as we went through the door. “And, after all, it seems to me the greatest fun of gardening is all the nice other things it makes you want to do after you’ve done the first one.”
“That,” said I sententiously, “is perhaps the secret of all successful living.”
Chapter XIX
THE NICE OTHER THINGS
A pool of water twenty feet long shining in the sun, or glimmering deeply in the twilight, that and nothing else save a few straggling annuals wrongly placed about it–yet it made Twin Fires over, it caused us weeks of toil, it got into our dreams, it got into our pockets, too.
“Now I know why sunken gardens are so called,” said Stella, as she figured out the cost of the fall bulb planting we had already planned. “It’s because you sink so much money in ’em!”
Of course there was little that we could do to the margin of the pool that summer, but there was plenty to do beyond the margin. The first thing of all was to place the flower beds differently. This took considerable experimenting, and Stella, being ingenious, hit upon a scheme for testing various possible arrangements. She filled all sorts of receptacles, from tumblers to pitchers, with cut flowers, low and high, and stood them in masses here and there, till the spot was found where they looked the best. As the pool centred on the line between the front door of the house and the yet-to-be-built garden bench against the stone wall, and as the orchard came down to within forty feet of the brook on the slope from the house, it was something of a problem to lead naturally from a grassy orchard slope into a water feature and a bit of almost formal gardening, without making the transition stiff and abrupt. We finally solved it with the aid of a lawn mower, flower beds, and imagination.
Going over the grass between the last apple trees and the brook again and again with the mower, I finally reduced that section to something like a lawn, and also kept mowed a straight path from the pool up to the front door. Then, beginning just beyond the last shadows, we cut a bed, thirty inches wide, on each side of the line of the path, running parallel with it to within ten feet of the pool; then they swung to left and right, following the curve of the bank until they flanked the pool. By planting low flowers at the beginning, and gradually increasing their height till we had larkspur and hollyhocks and mallow in the flanking beds, we could both make the transition from orchard to water feature, and also screen off the pool, increasing its intimacy, without, however, hiding it from the front door, where it was glimpsed down a path of trees and flowers. Of course we had no flowers now in mid-July to put into those beds, save what few we could dig up from elsewhere, setting poor little annual phloxes two feet apart; but we could, and did, use them for seed beds for next year’s perennials, and to the eye of faith they were beautiful.
Now we were confronted by the problem of the other side of the pool, which included the problem of how to get to the other side! Stella suggested tentatively a tiny Japanese moon bridge above the pool, but I would have none of it.
“The only way to build a Japanese garden in New England is to utilize New England features,” I insisted. “We won’t copy anybody.”
“All right,” she answered, “then we want stepping-stones above the pool, and some more down below the dam, where we can see the waterfall.”
“More suitable–and much easier,” I agreed.
Once more we robbed the stone wall, building our two flanking paths of stepping-stones to the other side of the brook.
On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds in the open, merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We would clear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the centre of the circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubbery on the sides, which was chiefly the wild red osier dogwood (cornus stolonifera). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe, and a rake, and we went to work.
Work is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush and the tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which was hardly more than thirty feet in diameter, but to spade up the black soil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witch grass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of innumerable little trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spread evenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduce it all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I had bargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond her strength; but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had it ready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grass seed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low, moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to the bench.
“Gracious, you have to be everything to be a gardener, don’t you?” Stella laughed, as we tried to draw a sketch first, which should satisfy us. “The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top of the front door. But I’m sure I don’t know how we’re going to make it.”
“Patience,” said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensive marble garden furniture. “Just a simple design of the classic period will do. Colonial furniture was based on the Greek orders.”
We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicated in general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumber dealer in the next town for two twenty-four-inch wide chestnut planks, and was fairly staggered by the bill when it came. It appears that a twenty-four-inch wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, or some other distant point, and is rarer than charity, at least that is what they told me.
“I think it would be cheaper in marble,” said Stella. “And it looks to me as if you could make the bench out of one plank.”
“We want another bench on the sundial lawn,” said I, wisely.
“You do now,” said she.
“But if I hadn’t got two planks,” said I, “and had spoiled the first one, then we’d have had to wait two or three days again.”
“Oh, that was the reason!” she smiled.
I sawed one of the planks into one six-foot and two two-foot lengths, and rounded the edges of the long piece for the top. Then, on the two short lengths, we carefully drew from the picture the outline of the supports on the marble original, and went to work with rip saw, hatchet, and draw knife to carve them out. The seasoned chestnut worked hard, and we were half a day about our task. The next day we put the three pieces together with braces and long screws, planed and sandpapered the wood till we had it smooth, and then painted it with white enamel paint. While the first coat was drying, we made a deep foundation of coal ashes and flat stones for the bench to rest on, and the next afternoon, when the second coat, which Stella had applied before breakfast, was nearly dry, I hove the heavy thing on a wheelbarrow, and carted it around the road to the point where it was to go. We put a little fresh cement on the foundation stones to hold the two legs, and with Mike’s aid the bench was lifted over the stone wall, through the hedge of ash-leaf maples, put in place, and levelled. Stella hovered near, with the can of paint, to cover our fingermarks and give the top a final glistening coat.
“There,” I cried, as the job was done, “we have our pool and our garden bench! We have some of our flowers already planted for next year! We have our bit of lawn! Let’s go up the orchard to the front door and see how it looks.”
I left the wheelbarrow forgotten in the road, and we ran up the slope together, turned at the door, and gazed back. The pool shimmered in the afternoon sun. We could hear the water tinkling over the dam. Beyond the pool was the dark semicircle of fresh mould that was to be green grass backed by blossoms against the shrubbery, and finally, at the very rear, now stood the white bench, from this distance gleaming like marble.
“Fine! It looks fine!” I cried.
Stella’s eyes were squinted judicially. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I wish there was a cedar, a tall, slender, dark cedar, just behind the bench at either end. And, John, do you know we ought to have some goldfish in the pool?”
I sighed profoundly. “You are a real gardener,” said I. “Nothing is ever finished!”
“I’m afraid I am,” she answered. “But we will have the goldfish, won’t we?”
“Yes, and the cedars, too,” I replied. “I’ll ask Mike when is the best time to put ’em in.”
Mike was sure that spring was the best time, and there were some good ones up in our pasture.
“Oh, dear, spring is the best time for everything, it seems to me, and here it’s only July!” cried Stella. “Well, anyhow, I’m going to draw a plan of the pool garden, and hang it over my desk.”
She got paper and pencil and drew the plan, while I lay under an orchard tree listening to the tinkle of the waterfall and watching her while Buster came and licked my face.
The plan appears on the following page:
“I think your arrangement of iris on the edge is rather formal,” I was saying, “and it would be rather more decorous, if not decorative, for you to sit upon the bench, and––” when we heard a motor rumble over the bridge at the brook, and the engine stop by our side door.
Chapter XX
CALLERS
“Heavens!” cried Stella, leaping to her feet, “do you suppose it’s callers?”
She looked ruefully at her paint-stained fingers, at her old, soiled khaki garden skirt which stopped at least six inches from the ground, and then at my get-up, which consisted of a very dirty soft-collared shirt, no necktie, khaki trousers that beggared description, and soil-crusted boots. Some passengers from the motor were unquestionably coming up our side path–they were coming around the corner by the lilac bush to the front door–they were around the lilac bush–they were upon us!
We looked at them–at a large, ample female in a silk gown anything but ample, at a young woman elaborately dressed, at a smallish man with white hair, white moustache, and ruddy complexion, clad in a juvenile Norfolk jacket and white flannels.
“They are coming to call!” whispered Stella. “The Lord help us! John, I’m scared!”
We advanced to meet them, and as I glanced at my wife, and then at the ample female, I was curiously struck with their resemblance to a couple of strange dogs approaching each other warily. I fully expected to see the stout lady sniff; she had that kind of a nose.
“How do you do,” said she. “I’m Mrs. Eckstrom. I presume this is Mr. and Mrs. Upton?”
Stella nodded.
“We are your neighbours,” she continued, with an air which said, “You are very fortunate to have us for neighbours.” “We live in the first place toward the village. This is Mr. Eckstrom, and my daughter, Miss Julia.”
“We can hardly offer our hands,” said Stella. “Will you forgive us? You see, we are making a garden, and it’s rather messy work.”
“You like to work in the garden yourself, I see,” said Mrs. Eckstrom. “I, too, enjoy it. I frequently pick rose bugs. I pick them before breakfast, very early, while they are still sleepy. I find it is the only way to save my tea roses.”
“The early gardener catches the rose bug–I’ll remember that,” Stella laughed. “Perhaps you would care to see the beginnings of our little garden?”
We moved down through the orchard and surveyed the pool. I suppose it did look bare and desolate to the outsider, who did not see it, as we did, with the eye of faith–the bare soil green with grass, the lip ringed with iris blades, the shrubbery bordered with a mass of blooms. At any rate, the Eckstroms betrayed no enthusiasm.