_And how the family did grow up!_
As I look back now, that first year on our abandoned farm seems a good
deal like the years that followed it; but it could not have been so, for
when I consider to-day's aspect and circumstance I realize that each of
our twelve years of ownership furnished events that were to us unusual,
some of them, at the time, even startling.
We must have enjoyed a kind of prosperity, I suppose, for we seem always
to have been planning or doing something to enlarge the house or
improve its surroundings, and quite a good deal of money can be spent in
that way. I think it was about the second year that for the sake of
light and air we let out three dormer windows on the long roof, and I
remember that in order not to make a mistake in their architecture we
drove thirty miles one morning to see a house like ours which had owned
its windows from the beginning. We loved our old house, you see, and did
not wish to do it an injury. I think it was about the same time that we
pulled off the plaster from the living-room ceiling and left the exposed
beams--old hewn timbers which we tinted down with a dull stain. William
Deegan and I stained those beams together, and our friendship ripened
during that employment. William had been with us about a year at this
period--not steadily, because now and then would come a day when with
sadness and averted eyes he would say, "I think I'll be goin' now, for a
little while," after which the effacement of William for perhaps a week,
followed by his return some morning, pale, delapidated, as on the
morning of his first arrival.
In the beginning I had argued, even remonstrated, but without effect.
William only said, humbly: "It comes over me to be goin', and I have to
do it. I'll be dacent ag'in, whin I get back."
During one such period of absence there came a telephone call from the
sheriff of the nearest town of size.
"Do you know a man named William Deegan?"
"We do."
"He is in the calaboose here. His fine and costs amount to five dollars.
Do you want to redeem him?"
"We do."
Clearly William's vacation had been unusual, even for him. We sent up
the money and William was home that night, more crushed, more pale, more
dilapidated than ever. He had worn a new suit away. He returned with a
mere rag. We thought this might cure him, but nothing could do that. We
could redeem William, but he could not redeem himself. These occasional
lapses were the only drawback of that faithful, industrious soul, and we
let them go. We had been unable to forgive them in the light-headed,
literary Gibbs.
But William here is a digression; I was speaking of our improvements. We
decided one year that we must have more flowers--a real garden. We made
it on the side of the house where before had been open field--walled in
a space where there was an apple-tree, a place large enough to assemble
all the things we loved most and that grew with an economy of care. In a
little while it was a glorious tangle that we admired exceedingly, and
that our artist friends tried to paint.
Another year we converted my study behind the chimney into a pantry,
opened it into the kitchen, made the "best room" into a dining-room, and
left the long living-room with the big fireplace for library use only.
That was a radical change and I had to build me a study over on a cedar
slope--a good deal of a house, in fact, where I could gather my traps
about me, for with the years my work had somehow invited a
paraphernalia of shelves and files, and a variety of other furniture
that required room. It was better for a growing-up family, too. With me
out of the house, they had more freedom to grow up in, which, after all,
was their human right, and the growing-up machinery could revolve as
noisily as it pleased without furnishing a procrastinating author an
added excuse for not working. No author with a growing-up family should
work in his own home. He is impossible enough under even the best
conditions.
[Illustration]
And how the family did grow up. Why, once when they were home from
school I came from the study one day to find a young man in the house--a
strange young man, from somewhere in the school neighborhood. I couldn't
imagine what he was doing there until I was taken aside and it was
explained to me that he was there to see our eldest, the Pride. That
little girl, imagine! It is true she was eighteen--I counted, up on my
fingers to see--but the Pride! why, only yesterday she was bare-footed,
wading in the brook. Somehow I couldn't make it seem right.