The Idyl of Twin Fires

“But I fear it is time for my supper,” she said, with a little nervous laugh. “The thrush has evidently gone for his.”

“Birds eat early,” said I. “They have to, because they get up so early, after that worm.”

Her laugh was once more an up-gushing gurgle. The tenseness was broken. I found myself walking by her side through the maples, and pointing out my house.

She clapped her hands ecstatically. “Oh,” she cried, “they made the front door out of a highboy! How jolly! Is it as nice inside?”

“It’s going to be nicer,” said I. “Come and see.”

“I’ll peep through the windows,” she smiled.

I led her to my new south door, proudly showing my new lawn and the terrace, and telling her where the roses were to be, and the sundial, and dilating on the work my own hands had done. With a silly, boyish enthusiasm, I even displayed the callouses and invited her to feel of them, which she did as one humours a child, while I thrilled quite unchildishly at the touch of her finger tips. Then we peeped through the glass doors. The low sun was streaming in through the west window and disclosed the old oak beam across the ceiling. Hard Cider had erected the frame of the bookcase and double settle, which would perfectly match the mantels as soon as the molding was on. One side of the settle faced toward one smoky old fireplace, the other toward the second.

“Two fireplaces! What luxury!” she exclaimed.

“You see,” said I, “when I get tired of reading philosophy at the east fireplace, I’ll just come around the corner and read ’Alice in Wonderland’ at the west chimney nook.”

“Double fireplaces–twin fireplaces–twin fires! That’s it, Twin Fires! That ought to be the name of your house.”

“You’re right!” I cried, delighted. “I’ve never been able to think of a name. That’s the inevitable one–that’s Flaubert’s one right word. You must come to my christening party and break a bottle of wine on the hearth.”

She smiled wistfully, as she turned away from the window. “I must surely go to supper,” she said. “Good-bye, and thank you for your wonderful concert.”

We walked to the road, but to my surprise she did not turn toward the village but toward Bert’s. A sudden light came.

“Are you the broken-down boarder?” I cried.

The gurgle welled up, and the blue eyes twinkled, but she made no reply.

“Just for that,” said I, “I won’t carry back Mrs. Bert’s basket.”

As we entered the Temple’s yard, Mrs. Bert stood in the kitchen door.

“Well, you two seem to have got acquainted,” she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. “Miss Goodwin, this is Mr. Upton I told you about. Mr. Upton, this is Miss Goodwin I told you about.”

“Mrs. Temple,” said I, “you are another. You didn’t tell me.”

“Young man,” she retorted, “where’s my basket?”

“I left it behind–on purpose,” said I.

“Then you’ll hev ter come home to yer dinner to-morrow,” she said.

“Well, I’m willing,” I answered.

“I guess you be,” said she.

At supper she returned to the theme, which appeared to amuse her endlessly. “Miss Goodwin,” she said, “I want ter warn you thet Mr. Upton’s terrible afraid somebody’s goin’ ter advise him how ter build his garden. He’s a regular man.”

I replied quickly: “Your warning is too late,” said I; “Miss Goodwin has already begun by naming my place.”

“You can change the name, you know,” the girl smiled.

“How can I?” I answered, with great sternness. “It’s the right one.”

Whereupon I went up to my work, and listened to the sounds of soft singing in the room across the hall.

Chapter VII
THE GHOST OF ROME IN ROSES

“From the dictionary,” she replied.

“The which?” said I.

“The dictionary. Would you like me to sing you a song of the things that begin with ’hy’?”

She laughed again, and began to chant in burlesque Gregorian, “Hyopotamus, hyoscapular, hyoscine, Hyoscyameæ, hyoscyamine, Hyoscyamus––-”

“Stop!” I cried. “You will have me hypnotized. See, I’m on the ’hy’s’ myself! Please explain–not sing.”

“Well,” she laughed, “you see it’s this way. I have to eat, drink, and try to be merry, or to-morrow I die, so to postpone to-morrow I am working on a new dictionary. Somebody has to work on dictionaries, you know, and justify the pronunciation of America to man. I’m sort of learned, in a mild, harmless, anti-militant way. It isn’t fair to keep the truth from you–I have a degree in philology! My doctor’s thesis was published by the press of my kind University, at $1.50 per copy, of which as many as seventeen were sold, and I’m still paying up the money I borrowed while preparing it. I stood the dictionary pretty well down to the ’hy’s,’ and then one day something snapped inside of me, and I began to cry. That wouldn’t have been so bad, if I hadn’t made the mistake of crying on a sheet of manuscript by a learned professor, about Hyoscyamus (which is a genus of dicotyledonous gamopetalous plants), and the ink ran. Then I knew I should have to take a rest in the cause of English, pure and well defined. So here I am. The doctor tells me I must live out of doors and saw wood.”

“Madam,” I cried, “God has sent you! I shall get my orchard cleaned up at last!”

“Breakfast!” called Mrs. Bert.

“Miss Goodwin,” I announced at that meal, “is going to saw up the dead wood in my orchard this morning.”

“No, she ain’t. The idee!” cried Mrs. Bert. “She’s jest goin’ ter rest up for the next four weeks, an’ grow fat.”

“You are both wrong,” laughed the young lady. “I’m not going to begin on Mr. Upton’s wood pile this morning, but I expect to finish it before I go away.”

“If thet’s how you feel, I got a wood pile,” said Bert.

She refused to come down to Twin Fires with me that morning, so I toiled alone, getting out more of the brush from the orchard–all of the small stuff, in fact, which wasn’t fit to save for fuel. In the afternoon she consented to come. As I looked at her hands and then at mine, I realized how pale she was.

“It’s wrong for anybody to be so pale as that,” I thought, “to have to be so pale as that!”

I was beginning to pity her.

When we reached the farm, I took her around under the kitchen window and showed her my seed beds, where the asters were already growing madly, some other varieties were up, and the weeds were busy, too; but in the present uncertainty of my horticultural knowledge I didn’t dare pull up anything. I hadn’t realized till that moment that half the fun of having a new place is showing it to somebody else and telling how grand it is going to be.

“And where are you going to put these babies when you set them out?” she asked.

“That’s just the point,” I cried. “I don’t know. I want you to help me.”

“After Mrs. Bert’s warning, I shouldn’t dare advise you,” she smiled.

“Well, let’s ask Hiroshige,” said I. “Come on.”

“Is he your gardener? The name sounds quite un-Hibernian.”

I scorned a reply, and we went around to the shed where all my belongings were stored, still unpacked. I got a hammer and opened the box containing pictures, drawing forth my two precious Japanese prints. Then I led Miss Goodwin through the kitchen in spite of her protests of propriety, through the fragrance of new flooring, into the big south room, where Hard had nearly completed his main work and was getting in the new door frames while his assistants were patching up the floor. She sat down on the new settle, while I climbed on a box and hung the pictures, one over each mantel. Instantly the room assumed to my imagination something of its coming charm. Those two spots of colour against the dingy wood panels dressed up the desolation wonderfully. I hastily kicked some shavings and chips into the fireplaces and applied a match.

“The first fires on the twin hearths!” I cried. “In your honour!”

The girl smiled into my face, and did not joke. “That is very nice,” she said. Then she rose and put out her hand. “Let me wish Twin Fires always plenty of wood and the happiness which goes with it.”

We shook hands, while the fire crackled, and already the spot seemed to me like home. Then she looked up at the prints. “Now,” she cried, “how is honourable Hiroshige going to advise you? Here is a blue canal and a lavender sky in the west, and bright scarlet temple doors–and all the rest snow. Lavender and bright scarlet is rather a daring colour scheme, isn’t it?”

“Not if it’s the right scarlet,” I replied. “But it’s not the colour I’m going to copy. Neither is it the moon bridges in this other temple garden. It’s the simplicity. Out here south of this room is my lawn and garden. Now I want it to be a real garden, but I don’t want it to dwarf the landscape. I don’t want it to look as if I’d bought a half acre of Italy and deposited it in the middle of Massachusetts, either. I’ve never seen a picture of a real Japanese garden yet that didn’t look as much like a natural Japanese landscape as a garden. I want my garden to be an extension of my south room which will somehow frame the real landscape beyond.”

We went through the glass door, and I showed her where the grape arbour was to be, at the western side of the lawn, and how a lane of hollyhocks would lead to it from the pergola end, screening the kitchen windows and the yet-to-be-built hotbeds.

“Now,” said I, “I’m going to build a rambler rose trellis along the south; there’s your red against the lavender of the far hills at sunset! But how shall the trellis be designed, and where shall the sundial be, and where the flower beds?”

The girl clapped her hands. “Oh, the fun of planning it all out from the beginning!” she cried. “My, but I envy you.”

“Please don’t envy; advise,” said I.

“Oh, I can’t. I don’t know anything about gardens.”

“But you know what you like! People always say that when they are ignorant, don’t they?”

“Don’t be nasty,” she replied, running down the plank from the terrace to the lawn, and walking out to the centre. “I’d have the sundial right in the middle, where it gets all the sun,” she said, “because it seems to me a dial ought to be in the natural focus point of the light. Then I’d ring it with flowers, some low, a few fairly tall, all bright colours, or maybe white, and the beds not too regular. Then, right in line with the door, I’d have an arch in the trellis so you could see through into the farm. Oh, I know! I’d have the trellis all arches, with a bigger one in the centre, and it would look like a Roman aqueduct of roses!”

“A Roman aqueduct of roses,” I repeated, my imagination fired by the picture, “walking across the end of my green lawn, with the farm and the far hills glimpsed beneath! ’Rome’s ghost since her decease.’ Miss Goodwin, you are a wonder! But can you build it?”

“No,” she sighed, “I can only give you the derivation of ’aqueduct’ and ’rose’.”

“Come,” said I, “we will consult Hard Cider.”

“Heavens!” she laughed. “Is that anything like Dutch courage?”

Hard grunted, and came with us to the line of stakes where the rose trellis was to be. I sketched roughly the idea I wanted–a reproduction in simple trellis work, as it were, of High Bridge, New York.

Hard pondered a moment, and then departed for the shed. He returned with several pieces of trellis lumber, a spade, some tools, a small roll of chicken wire, and a step-ladder, all on a wheelbarrow. At his direction, I dug a post-hole at the extreme east end of the lawn, another two feet away, a third four feet beyond that, and a fourth again two feet to the west. Hard then mounted the 3 x 3 chestnut joists, levelled them as I set them, and connected the tops, leaving a space for the next connection on the final post to the west.

“But where is the arch?” I cried.

Hard climbed down from the wheelbarrow in silence, cut off something over four feet from the three-foot wide chicken wire, and then cut a circumference into this wire which, in the centre, came within a foot of the top. He twisted the loose ends back and tacked the flat arch thus made to the top and inner posts of the trellis. Then he connected the two posts on each side with stripping. Thus I had the first arch of my aqueduct, nine feet high, with two-foot piers of trellis work and a four-foot arch with eight feet clear space under the centre.

“It ain’t pretty,” said Hard, “but when it’s painted green and covered with vines it won’t show. Guess most of your roses will bloom on the south side of it, though, away from the house.”

My face fell. “Golly, I hadn’t thought of that!” said I.

“Oh, they’ll peep over and all around it,” said Miss Goodwin cheerfully.

“What could I have done else?” said I.

“Nothin’, ’cept turned your house around,” Hard replied. “You can buy wire arches so’s you could plant your roses east and west, but that wouldn’t give you no level top like a bridge. You could set those boughten arches on the south side of this trellis, though, so’s you’d get the effect of something solid, lookin’ through, without losin’ your top.”

“Guess I’ll get you paid first,” I laughed, as Hard went back to his work.

“And now,” I added to the girl at my side, “shall we see if we can build the next arch?”

Again she clapped her hands delightedly, and ran with me around the house for the tools and lumber.

I let her dig the first post-hole, though it was evident that the effort tired her, and then I took the spade away, while she marked off the trellis strips into the proper lengths, and sawed them up, placing each strip across the wheelbarrow and holding it in place first with a hand which looked quite inadequate even for that small task, and, when the hand failed, with her foot.

She laughed as she put her foot on the wheelbarrow, hitching her skirt up where it bound her knee. “The new skirts weren’t made for carpenters,” she said, as she jabbed away with the saw. I darted a glance at the display of trim ankles, and resumed my digging in the post-holes. This was a new and disturbing distraction in agricultural toil!

The post-holes were soon dug, and while I held the posts, she adjusted the level against them, our hands and faces close together, and we both kicked the dirt in with our feet. Then I climbed on the step-ladder and levelled the top piece, which I nailed down. Then, while I was cutting a semicircle out of the wire, for the arch, she nailed the trellis strips across the piers, grasping the hammer halfway up to the head, and frowning earnestly as she tapped with little, short, jablike blows. She was so intent on this task that I laughed aloud.

“What are you laughing at?” said she.

“You,” said I. “You drive a nail as if it were an abstruse problem in differential calculus.”

“It is, for me,” she answered, quite soberly. “I don’t suppose I’ve driven a dozen nails in my life–only tacks in the plaster to hang pictures on. And it’s very important to drive them right, because this is a rose trellis.”

“When I first came here,” said I, “I was pretty clumsy with my hands, too. I’d lost my technique, as you might say. I remember one afternoon when I was trimming the orchard that I didn’t think a single thought beyond the immediate problem each branch presented. And yet it was immensely stimulating. Personally, I believe that the educational value of manual dexterity has only begun to be appreciated.”

Miss Goodwin marked off the place for the next strip, and started nailing. At the last blow she relaxed her frown.

“Maybe,” she said. “No, probably. But the manual work, it seems to me, has got to be connected up in some way with–well, with higher things. I can’t think of a word to fit, because my head is so full of the ’hy’ group. You, for instance, were sawing your own orchard, and you were working for better fruit, and more beautiful trees, and a lovely home. You saw the work in its higher relations, its relations to the beauty of living.”

“And your nails?” I asked.

“I see the aqueduct of roses,” she smiled.

“You will see them, I trust,” said I. “You shall see them. You must stay till they bloom.”

Her brow suddenly clouded, and she shook her head. “I–I shall have to go back to the ’I’s,’” she said. “But I shall know the roses are here. You must send me a picture of them.”

Somehow I was less enthusiastic over the next arch, but her spirits soon came back, and she sawed the next batch of stripping with greater precision and skill in the use of the saw–and a more reckless show of stocking. “See!” she cried, “how much I’m improving! I didn’t splinter any of the ends this time!”

“Fine,” said I. “You can tackle the firewood in the orchard soon!”

We got up two more arches, working close together, intent upon our task. As each arch, with its piers, took up eight feet, and the central arch would take up twelve, we should need exactly a dozen arches to complete the trellis. Here were four of them done!

“Hooray!” cried the girl, as the fourth was finished. “How we are getting on!”

“I could never have done it alone,” said I. “You have really been a great help.”

“Oh, I hope so!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t had so much fun in years.”

We looked into the vegetable garden, and saw that Mike had gone, and Joe, too. My watch and the lengthening shadows warned me it was approaching six. Hot and pleasantly tired, we packed up the tools on the barrow, and wheeled them to the shed.

“Now shall we go and hear the hermit?” I asked.

She nodded, and we went down through the orchard, past the pool where the iris buds were already showing a spike of greenish white, through the maples, and into the pines. There we stood, side by side, in the quiet hush of coming sunset, and waited for the fairy horn. A song sparrow was singing out by the road, and the thin, sweet flutings of a Peabody came from the pasture. But the thrush was silent.

“Please sing, Mr. Thrush!” she pleaded, looking at me after she spoke, with a wistful little smile of apology for her foolishness. “I want so to hear him again,” she said. “We don’t hear thrushes in New York, nor smell pine trees, nor feel this sweet, cool silence. Oh, the good pines!”

“He will sing to-morrow,” said I. “There is no opera on Thursdays.”

Her eyes twinkled once more. “Perhaps he has that terrible disease, ’sudden indisposition’,” she laughed. “Come, we must go home to supper. It will take me hours to get clean.”

Out in the open, she looked at her hands. “See, I’ve begun to get callouses, too!” she exclaimed, holding out her palms proudly.

“You’ve got blisters,” said I. “No work for you to-morrow! Let me see.”

I touched her hand, as we paused beneath a blossoming apple tree, with the fragrance shedding about us. Our eyes met, too, as I did so. She drew her hand back gently, as the colour came to her cheeks. We walked on in silence, as far as the pump. Mike had finished milking, and had gone home. The stable was closed. Inside, we could hear the animals stamp. Suddenly I put my head under the pump spout, and asked her to work the handle. Laughing, she did so, and as I raised my dripping head, I saw her standing with the low western sun full upon her, her eyes laughing into mine, her nose and lips provocative, her plain blouse waist open at the throat so that I could see the gurgle of laughter rise.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, arrested, perhaps, by something in my gaze.

“Because,” I answered, “there’s a ghost lives in this well, and maybe with your aid I shall pump it out.”

“Don’t you like the ghost?” she said.

“Very much,” said I, as we climbed the slope to Bert’s.

That evening Mrs. Bert sent her off to bed, and I toiled cheerfully at my manuscripts till the unholy hour of eleven.

Chapter VIII
I PICK PAINT AND A QUARREL

Evidently they had never greatly troubled Miss Goodwin, or she was not disposed to let them trouble her now, for ten minutes later we went down the road together, and found the painters already unloading their wagon. The reliable Hard Cider, true to his word, had procured them for me, which, as I afterward have discovered, was something of a feat in Bentford, where promises are more common than fulfilment.

“It seems a pity to paint the outside of the house,” said Miss Goodwin; “it’s such a lovely weathered gray now. What colour is it going to be?”

“No colour,” said I. “White, with green blinds, of course. But the inside will be done first.”

We entered, with the boss painter, and went into the south room, which had already become the natural centre of the house.

“Now,” said I, “I’m not going to paper any rooms if I can help it. I want the walls calcimined. They look pretty sound to me, barring some places where you’ll have to patch the plaster. Can it be done?”

The painter walked about the room carefully, then examined the hall, the north room, and the dining-room, while the girl and I followed him.

“Sure,” he said.

“All right; then I want this room done first, as I’m anxious to get my books unpacked and my desk set up. Now, what colour shall it be?” I turned toward Miss Goodwin as I spoke.

She shook her head. “I’m not going to say a word,” she answered. “This is your room.”

“I suppose you want the woodwork white?” the painter suggested. “Those old mantels, for instance.”

“Cream white, not dead white,” said I. “Wait a minute.” I ran to the shed and brought back two more of my pictures, an etching by Cameron which our professor of fine arts had once given me, and an oil painting acquired in a moment of rash expenditure several years before–the long line of Beacon Street houses across the Charles with the church spires rising here and there, and to the left Beacon Hill piling up to the golden dome of the State House.

“Now,” said I, “the walls have got to set off both these pictures, and books besides. They’ve got to be neutral. I want a greenish, brownish, yellowish olive, with the old beam in the centre of the ceiling in the same key, only a bit darker.”

The girl and the painter both laughed.

“You are so definite,” said she.

“But I want an indefinite tint,” I replied.

Again she laughed, though the painter looked puzzled.

“I’ll get my colours,” he said.

He mixed what he considered an olive tint, and laid a streak of it on the plaster.

“Too green,” said I.

He added something and tried again.

“Too gray,” said Miss Goodwin, forgetful, and then quickly supplemented, “isn’t it?”

He added something else.

“Too brown,” said I.

Once more he patiently mixed.

“Too muddy coloured,” I corrected.

“It must be fun to be a painter,” said the girl.

“Oh, we get used to it,” said he.

“Try a little yellow,” I suggested. “I want that tint warmed up a trifle.”

He did so, and something emerged which looked right to me.

“That’s a queer olive, though,” said the girl.

“Well, it’s a greenish, brownish, yellowish olive, isn’t it?” I replied. “That’s what I asked for! Do the walls in this colour, and paint the woodwork, mantels, and the panels over them and the bookcase and settles a creamy white, with a creamy white on the ceiling, and oil up this old floor and stain the strip of new boards where the partition was, and my room is ready!”

We went into the little hall, where the front door stood open, and we could see Hard on a ladder mending the beautiful carved door cap outside.

“This hall the same colour,” said I, “with the rails of the baluster in the cream white of the trim.”

We went into the northeast room and the dining-room behind it.

“Same colour here?” asked the painter.

I was about to answer yes, when Miss Goodwin spoke. “I should think you’d want these rooms lighter in colour,” she said, “as they face the north.”

“The lady’s right,” said the painter.

“They always are,” I smiled. “You two fix up the colour for this room, then. We can decide on the other rooms after these downstairs are done.”

“No,” cried the girl, “I won’t do anything of the kind! You might not like what I picked.”

“Incredible!” said I. “I’ve really got to get to work outside now.” And I ran off, leaving her looking a little angrily, I thought, after me.

I was so impatient to see how my lawn was going to look that I went to the shed to hunt up a dummy sundial post which I could set up and mark off my beds around it, getting them manured for planting. At first I could find nothing, except some old logs, but looking up presently into a loft under the eaves, I saw the dusty end of what looked like a Doric pillar poking out. I scrambled up and pulled forth, to my joy, a wooden pillar about nine feet long, in excellent preservation. How it got there, I had no idea. The dust had evidently accumulated on it for years. It had once been painted white. I dragged the heavy column down, and ran to get Hard Cider.

He grunted. “All yer side porch pillars wuz them kind when I wuz a boy,” he said. “Old man Noble’s fust wife didn’t like the porch–thought it kept light out o’ the kitchen, an’ hed it took down. His second wife hed it put back, but some o’ the columns hed got lost, or burnt up, I reckon, so’s they put it back with them square posts yer hev now. I reckon that column’s nigh on a century old.”

I sawed off the upper four feet carefully, and stowed the remainder back in the loft. Then I made a square base of planking, a temporary one till I could build a brick foundation, washed off the dust, and took my pedestal around to the lawn. With a ball of twine tied to the centre of the south room door I ran a line directly out to the rose trellis, and midway between the trellis and where the edge of my pergola was to be I placed the pillar. Then I took out my knife, and thrust the blade lightly in at an angle, to simulate the dial marker, and turned to call Miss Goodwin.

But she was already standing in the door.

“Oh!” she cried, running lightly down the plank and across the ground, “a sundial already, and a real pedestal! Come away from it a little, and see how it seems to focus all the sunlight.”

We stood off near the house, and looked at the white column in mid-lawn. It did indeed seem to draw in the sunlight to this level spot before the dwelling, even though it rose from the brown earth instead of rich greensward, and even though beyond it was but the unsightly, half-finished, naked trellis. Even as we watched, a bird came swooping across the lawn, alighted on my knife handle, and began to carol.

“Oh, the darling!” cried Miss Goodwin. “He understands!”

I was very well content. I had unexpectedly found a pedestal, and was experiencing for the first time the real sensation of garden warmth and intimacy and focussed light which a sundial, rightly placed, can bring. I did not speak, and presently beside me I heard a voice saying, “But I forgot that I am angry at you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you had no right to leave me to pick out the paint for your dining-room,” said she.

“Why not?” said I. “You picked out the name of my house and the style of the rose trellis.”

“That was different,” she replied.

“I don’t see why.”

“Then you are extremely stupid,” she answered.

“Doubtless,” said I. “But that doesn’t help me any to understand, you know.”

“Come,” she replied, “and see if the paint suits you. Then I must go home and write some letters.”

The paint and calcimine tint suited me, of course. They were a warm, golden cream and a very delicate buff, which made the rooms seem lighter. I thanked her as heartily as I could, and watched her depart up the road, pausing only long enough to press to her nose the first bud on the great lilac tree at the corner.

The place seemed curiously deserted after she had gone. I went out into the vegetable area to see if Mike and Joe were getting on all right, and to watch them planting, that I might learn how it was done.

“Aren’t we pretty late with all these seeds?” I asked.

Mike shook his head. “There’s some things, like peas, ye can’t get in too soon,” he said, “and some like termaters and cauliflowers that ye got to start under glass; but up here in these mountains, with the frosts comin’ and the cold nights, ye don’t know when, ye can wait till the middle o’ May and dump on the manure and get yer crop with the next man.”

“Well, I’m trusting you,” said I. “But next year we’ll start earlier, just the same. I don’t want to be with the next man. I want to beat him. I don’t see why that isn’t what a farmer should do as well as a merchant.”

“Sure, it is,” said Mike, “only the God almighty don’t like it, and sinds frosts down upon yer presoomin’.”

“You talk like a Calvinist,” I laughed.

“Sure, I dunno what that is,” Mike replied. “How much of this last plantin’ of corn shall I put in? It’s Stowell’s Evergreen. Maybe it’s the frosts will get it all, come September.”

“We’ll take a chance,” said I. “I’m a gambler. Put in all you’ve got room for.”

“Yes, sor,” said he, “and it’s pea brush we’ll be needin’ soon for them early peas I planted late. Is it Joe I shall sind to cut some in the pasture lot behind the barn?”

I hadn’t thought of my ten-acre pasture across the road. In fact, I had scarcely been in it. “What’s there to cut?” I asked.

“Poverty birch,” said Mike. “Sure, it’s walkin’ up from the brook like it was a weed, which it are, and eatin’ the good grass up. The pasture will be better for it out.”

“Cut away, then,” said I. “But, mind you, no other trees!”

I went back to my sundial, between two rows of cauliflower plants Bert had given to me, and which Mike had set out thus early for an experiment, between threads of sprouting radishes, lines of onion sets, and other succulent evidences of the season to come. As I started to mark out the beds around the pedestal, I found myself wishing Miss Goodwin were there to advise me. I made a few marks on the ground, surveyed the pattern, didn’t like it, could think of nothing better, and resolved to await her return. I took a few steps toward the house. Then I stopped.

“No, you fool,” I said to myself. “This is your house. You are going to live in it. If you can’t plan it yourself, you’d better go back to teaching.”

I returned to the dial and went to work again. She had suggested a ring of low flowers, and some taller ones, irregularly set. I measured off a six-foot circle about the pedestal, as the inner ring of the beds, and left four breaks in it, to the four cardinal points of the compass, where the turf or paths could come in to the dial. Then I extended the sides of these four beds on the straight axes of the paths for three feet, and made the rear sides not on the regular arc of the inner edges, but full of irregularities, almost of bulges, where I would set clumps of tall flowers. “She’ll like that, I guess,” I reflected, and then caught myself at it, and grinned rather sheepishly.

I rose and went to the barn for a load of manure. The great pile which had been there when I bought the place was already used up, but I secured enough litter with a rake to cover the beds and brought it back. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late to spade it under, so I went into the house to see if the painters were getting the colour right. They were, or as nearly right as it seems to be humanly possible for house painters to do, and I plodded up the road to dinner. As I passed my potato field, I saw rows of green shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure, sitting in the shadow on the stone wall.

I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles of potatoes toward her.

“It is time for dinner,” I said meekly.

She looked up. “Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk.”

“What was he saying?” I asked.

“Things you wouldn’t understand,” said she.

“About words in ’hy’?”

She shook her head. “Not at all; nothing quite so stupid–but nearly as saddening.” She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine, enigmatically wistful.

“I missed you after you went away from Twin Fires,” said I suddenly. “I don’t know whether I got the sundial beds right or not. Won’t you please come back to tell me? Or am I stupid again, and mustn’t you advise me about that?”

Her eyes twinkled a little. “You are still very stupid,” she said, “but perhaps I will consent to give my invaluable advice on this important subject.”

“Good!” I cried. “And we’ll build some more trellis if your hands are better.”

“My hands are all right,” she said, with the faintest emphasis on the noun, which made a variety of perplexing interpretations possible and kept me silent as I helped her over the wall into Bert’s great cauliflower field, and we tramped through the soft soil toward the house.

Chapter IX
WE SEAT THOREAU IN THE CHIMNEY NOOK, AND I WRITE A SONNET

“Forget the dictionary!” I cried. “You are going to stay here a long time–till these roses bloom, or at any rate till the sundial beds have come to flower. Besides, there’ll be a lot of things about my house where your advice cannot be spared.”

She darted a quick look at me, and turned back to the trellis, where she was nailing on strips. She did not speak, and when I came over to face her, with a post for the next arch, I saw that her eyes were moist. She turned her face half away, blinking her eyelids hard, bit her lip, then picked up the level and set it with a smack against the post. I put my hand over hers–both our hands were dirty!–and said, “What is the matter? Are you tired?”

“Please, please–level this post,” she replied.

“Are you tired?”

“No, I’m not tired. I’m a fool. Come, we must finish the arch!”

“I guess we won’t do any more arches to-day,” I replied, “or you won’t, at any rate. You’ll go home and rest.”

She looked at me an instant with just the hint of her twinkle coming back. “I’m so unused to taking orders,” she said, “that I’ve lost the art of obedience. Move the post a little to the right, please.”

I did so, and we worked on in silence. We had built the wide central arch by the time the sun began to drop down into our faces. There were only five arches more to build.

“I shall write to-night and have the roses hurried along,” said I.

We walked back toward the house and looked over the lawn, past the sundial, and saw the farm through the trellis, and beyond the farm the trees at the edge of my clearing, and then a distant roof or two, and the far hills. The apple blossoms were fragrant in the orchard. The persistent song sparrows were singing. The shadow of the dial post stretched far out toward the east.

“It is pointing toward the brook,” said I. “Shall we go and ask the thrush to sing?”

She shook her head. “Not to-night,” she said briefly, and I walked, grieved and puzzling, up the road by her side.

The next day she pleaded a headache, and I went to the farm alone. The south room was shining with its first coat of paint. Hard was, as he put it “seein’ daylight” in his work, and I realized that soon I should be sending for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter and moving away from Bert’s. Somehow the idea made me perversely melancholy. The house seemed lonely as I wandered through it, sniffing the strong odour of fresh paint.

I went out to find Mike, and learned that the small fruits had come–a hundred red raspberries, fifty blackcaps, twenty-five of the yellow variety, a hundred blackberries, not to mention currant bushes. We walked about the garden to find the best site for them, and finally chose for the berries the end of the slope between the vegetables and field crops and the pines and tamaracks. Here was a long, narrow stretch where the brook in times past had made the soil sandy, so that it drained well, but where the swampy land was close enough to offer the least danger of complete drying out. While Mike and Joe were ploughing the dressing under and harrowing, I took my garden manual in hand and carefully sorted out the varieties according to their bearing season. Then we began planting them in rows.

There is no berry so fascinating nor so delicious to me as a raspberry, especially at breakfast, half hidden under golden cream. There is something soft and cool and wild about it; it is the feline of berries. As we planted, I could almost smell the fruit. I could fancy the joy of walking between these dewy rows in the fresh morning sun and picking my breakfast. I could imagine the crates of ripe fruit sent to market.

In the pleasures of my fancy and the monotony of measured planting, I lost track of time, nor did I think of Miss Goodwin. But thought of her returned at noon, however, when Mrs. Bert told me her head had felt better and she had gone off for a day’s trolley trip to see the country. After all, it was rather selfish of me not to show her the country! Besides, I hadn’t seen it myself. I had been too busy. Why shouldn’t I take a day off? But I couldn’t do that till the berries were all in, and that afternoon was not enough to finish them. It took all of the next day as well, and most of the day following, for we had the double rows of wire to mount as supports for the vines, and the currant bushes to set in as a border to the garden six feet south of the rose trellis. Most of this work I did alone, leaving Mike free for other tasks, and Joe free to cut the pea brush. I saw Miss Goodwin only at meals. After supper I had to drive myself to my manuscripts.

“It will be you who will need a rest soon,” she said the second morning, as she came down to breakfast and found me hard at work out on the front porch.

“I’m going to take one–with you!” said I. “I want to see the country, too.”

She smiled a little, and picked a lilac bud, holding it to her nose. She seemed quite far away now. The first few days of our rapid intimacy had passed, and now she was as much a stranger to me as on that first meeting in the pines. I said nothing about her coming to the farm; I don’t know why. Somehow, I was piqued. I wished her to make the first move. In some way, it was all due to my asking her to choose the paint for my dining-room, and that seemed to me ridiculous. I fear my manner showed my pique a trifle, for I did not see her anywhere about when I left after breakfast.

That evening I found the second coat of paint practically dry in the south room, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t install my desk at last, order some kerosene for my student lamp, and do my work there, in my own new home, by my twin fires. The wind was east as I walked back to supper, and there was no sun to wake me in the morning, so that I slept till half-past six. Outside the rain was pouring steadily down, and I found Bert rejoicing, for it was badly needed. After breakfast I waylaid Miss Goodwin.

“No work on the trellis to-day,” said I, swallowing my pique; “so I’m going to fix up the south room. I’m going to make twin fires out of some of the nice, fragrant apple wood you haven’t sawed for me, and hang the Hiroshiges, and unpack the books, and have an elegant time–if you don’t make me do it alone.”

The girl shot a look around Mrs. Bert’s sitting-room, where a small stuffed owl stood on the mantel under a glass case and a transparent pink muslin sack filled with burst milkweed pods was draped over a crayon portrait of Bert as a young man. I followed her glance and then our eyes met.

“Just the same, they are dear, good souls,” she smiled.

“Of course,” I answered. “But to sit here on a cold, rainy day! You may read by the fire while I work. Only please come!”

“May I read ’The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,’ Doctor Upton?” she said.

“You may read the dictionary, if you wish,” I replied.

She went to get her raincoat. It was cold out of doors, and the rain drove in our faces as we splashed down the road. The painters had made a fire in the kitchen range, and as we stepped in the warmth greeted us in a curious, friendly way. I brought several logs of dead apple wood into the big room, made a second trip for kindlings, brought my one pair of andirons from the shed and improvised a pair with bricks for the other fireplace, and soon had the twin hearths cheerful with dancing flames. Then I went back to the shed, and brought the two cushions which had been on my window-seats at college, to place them on the settle. But as I came into the room, instead of finding the girl waiting to sit by the fire, I saw her with sleeves rolled up washing the west window. Her body was outlined against the light, her hair making an aura about her head. As she turned a little, I caught the saucy grace of her profile. She was so intent upon her task that she had not heard me enter, and I paused a full moment watching her. Then I dropped the cushions and cried, “Come, here’s your seat! That is no task for a Ph. D.”

“I don’t want a seat,” she laughed. “I’m having a grand time, and don’t care to have my erudition thrown in my face. I love to wash windows.”

“But ’The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century?’” said I.

“The whole nineteenth century is on these windows,” she replied. “I’ve got to scrub here to get at its foundations.”

“But you’ll get tired again,” I laughed, though with real solicitude. “I didn’t want you to come to work–only to be company.”

“I don’t know how to be company. Please get me some fresh hot water.”

I took the pail and fetched obediently. Then, while she worked at the windows, I began tugging things in from the shed, calling Joe from the barn to help me with the desk and bookcases. The desk, obviously, went by the west window, where the light would come from the left. My five bookcases, which had been made for my college rooms, of uniform size, were placed, four along the south wall, filling the spaces between the central door and the two windows, and the two windows and the end walls, with the fifth on the west wall between the window and the south, where I could have my reference books close to my desk chair. My piano, which had stood in the dining-room ever since the furniture had arrived, we unboxed, wheeled in to fill the space between the small east windows, and took the covers off.

I looked around. Already the place was assuming a homelike air, and the long room had contracted into intimacy. The girl dropped her rag into the pail, and stood looking about.

“Oh, the nice room!” she cried. “And oh, the dirty piano!”

I went out to begin on the books, and when I returned with the first load (I used a wheelbarrow, and wheeled a big load covered with my raincoat as far as the front door, and up into the hall on a plank), Miss Goodwin was scrubbing the keys. As I began to wipe off the books and set them into the cases, I could hear that peculiar dust-cloth glissando which denotes domestic operations on the piano, and which brings curiously home to a man memories of his mother. When I returned with the next load, I brought the piano bench, as well. The girl was busy with the east window, and I set the bench down in silence. She was seated upon it, when I arrived with the third load, and through the house were dancing the sounds of a Bach gavotte.

She stopped playing as I entered, and looked up with a little smile of apology.

“Please go on!” I cried.

“But you play,” she said, “and I just drum. It’s too silly.”

“I play with one finger only,” said I, “the forefinger of the right hand.”

“Then why do you have the piano?”

“For you,” I smiled. “Please play on. You can’t guess how pleasant it is, how–how–homelike.”

She wheeled back and let her hands fall on the keys, rippling by a natural suggestion into the old tune “Amaryllis.” The logs were crackling. The gay old measures flooded the room with sound. My head nodded in time, as I stacked the books on the shelves.

Suddenly the music stopped, and with a rustle of skirts the girl was beside me. “There! Now I must help you with the books!” she cried. “What’s this? Oh, you’re not putting them up right at all! Here’s James’s ’Pragmatism’ hobnobbing with ’The Freedom of the Will.’ Oh, horrors, and ’Cranford’ next to Guy de Maupassant! I’m sure that isn’t proper!”

“On the contrary,” said I, “it ought to prove a fine thing for both of them.”

She began to inspect titles, pulling out books here, substituting others there, carrying some to other cases. “You won’t know where anything is, anyhow, in these new surroundings,” she said, “so you might as well start right–separate cases for fiction, history, philosophy, and so on. Please have the poetry over the settle by the fire.”

“Surely,” said I. “That goes without saying. Here, I’ll lug the books in, and you put ’em up. Only I insist on the reference books going over by my desk.”

“Yes, sir, you may have them,” she laughed.

I wheeled in load after load. “Lord,” I cried, “of the making of many books, et cetera! I’ll never buy another one, or else I’ll never move again.”

“You’ll never move again, you mean,” said she. “Look, all the nice poetry by the west fireplace. Don’t the green Globe editions look pretty in the white cases? And Keats right by the chimney. Please, may I put the garden books, and old Mr. Thoreau, by the east fire?”

“Give old Mr. Thoreau any seat he wants,” said I, “only Mr. Emerson must sit beside him.”

“Where’s Mr. Emerson? Oh, yes, here he is, in a blue suit. Here, we’ll plant the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos!”

She took the set of Emerson and placed it in the top shelf by the east fireplace, above a tumbled heap of unassorted volumes, standing back to survey it with her gurgling laugh. “What is so decorative as books?” she cried. “They beat pictures or wall paper. Oh, the nice room, the nice books, nice old Mr. Emerson, nice twin fires!”

“And nice librarian,” I added.

She darted a look at me, laughed with heightened colour, and herself added, with a glance at her wrist watch, “And nice dinner!”

I brought back some of my manuscripts after dinner, in case the room should be completed before supper time. We attacked it again with enthusiasm, hers being no less, apparently, than mine, for it was indeed wonderful to see the place emerge from bareness into the most alluring charm as the books filled the shelves, as my two Morris chairs were placed before the fires, as my three or four treasured rugs were unrolled on the rather uneven but charmingly old floor which just fitted the old, rugged hearthstones, and finally as the two bright Hiroshiges were placed in the centre of the two white wood panels over the fireplaces, and the other pictures hung over the bookcases.

“Wait,” cried the girl suddenly. “Have you any vases?”

“A couple of glass ones,” I said. “Why?”

“Get them, and never mind.”

I found the barrel which contained breakables in the shed, unpacked it, and brought in the contents–a few vases, my college tea set, a little Tanagra dancing-girl. I placed the dancing figure on top of the shelf between the settles, and Miss Goodwin set the tea things on my one table by the south door. Then she got an umbrella and vanished. A few minutes later she returned with two clumps of sweet flag blades from the brookside, placed one in each of the small vases, and stood them on the twin mantels, beneath the Japanese prints.

“There!” she cried, clapping her hands. “Now what do you think of your room?”

I looked at the young green spears, at the bookcases with their patterns of colour, at the warm rugs on the floor, at my desk ready for me by the window, at the student lamp upon it, at the crimson cushions on the twin settles, at the leaping flames on the hearths, and then at the bright, flushed, eager face of the girl, raindrops glistening in her hair.