He ran out of the side door, under the wistaria-covered trellis, and
down the slippery stone steps to the vegetable garden.
“Here comes daddy, now,” shrilled to him from Martha.
He lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and stood in profound
meditation before the orderly, dignified, and extraordinarily
vigorous rows of beans. They were in blossom--bees were tumbling the
delicate lilac-pink little hoods. Clouds of fragrance came up from
them. The crickets were beginning to tune up for the evening. The sun
was poised above the black water tower on the far hill.
Martha and Marjorie began giggling mysteriously behind the lilacs.
“My hoe!” he wailed.
The hoe was thrust out from behind the lilacs.
“If anybody should drive up in a scarlet taxi,” he said to Martha,
accepting the hoe, “and inform you that your soul is free, don’t
believe him. Tell him he’s a liar. Point me out to him as a symbol of
the abject slavery that all life is. Say that I’m a miserable thrall
to wife, children, and beans--particularly beans. I spend my days on
my knees before my beans.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Martha.
He held his hoe under his arm and walked solemnly among the beans.
The two girls followed him.
“Here’s a caterpillar, daddy!”
“Kill him!”
“Here’s another--a funny green one with red sparkles on his back. Oh,
look at him!”
“Don’t look at him! Kill him!”
“He squirts out like green tooth-paste.”
“Don’t, Martha!” he cried, pained. “Don’t say such things! Spare your
neurotic father.”
He shrank visibly and strode off to the corner where his peas were
planted and started methodically hoeing the rows, turning the rich
loam up about the pale stalks. Now and again a pebble clinked, he
stooped and threw it off into the meadow. Mary, the youngest, came
to the top of the steps and cried. Martha and Marjorie went to
her, and he forgot them. The rising and falling of the hoe-blade,
shiny with much polishing in the brown soil, hypnotized him, and
his thoughts fell into a sort of rhythm, came and went without his
interference. “Ridiculous!” he thought, “that this solemn singular
biped, whom other bipeds for convenience call Andrew, should stand
here with a stick and scratch the skin of this aged planet. What does
he expect to get for it? It pleases the aged planet. She stretches
herself in the twilight, purrs like an old cat, and expresses her
pleasure in the odd and useful effluvium we call peas. And this
biped wears clothes. Think of it! He wears clothes; things made out
of plant-fibre and sheep’s wool cunningly and hideously made to fit
his arms and legs. He has in his pocket--a small pouch made in these
singular garments--a watch, a small shiny round object in which he
has reduced to feeble but regular iambics the majestic motions of
the sun, earth and stars. He takes it out and looks at it with an
air of comprehension and puts it back again. Why doesn’t he laugh at
himself?”... He chuckled.... “This object tells him that he has time
for two more rows before dinner. Clink, clink. Damn these pebbles.
My antediluvian anthropoid ape of an ancestor had to walk round
them, they were so huge. He sat on them, cracked nuts against them,
chattered with his family. He had no watch, and his trousers grew
like grass.... Thank the Lord they’ve become pebbles.”
He sighed, and for a moment rested his chin on the hoe-handle,
peering out towards the tree-encircled swamp. The hylas were
beginning to jingle their elfin bells. A red-winged blackbird sailed
in the last sunlight from one apple-tree to another.
“All a vicious circle--and all fascinating. Utterly preposterous and
futile, but fascinating.”
He dropped the hoe and trundled the wheelbarrow to the edge of the
strawberry-bed.
“Why can’t you stay where you’re put?” he said. “Why do you grow all
over the place like this?”
With a trowel he began digging up the runners and placing them on
the wheelbarrow. It delighted him to part the soft cool soil with
his fingers, to thrust them sensitively among the finely filamented
roots. The delicate snap, subterranean, of rootlets gave him a
delicious pang. “Blood flows--but it’s all for the best; in the
best of all possible worlds. Yield to me, strawberries, and you
shall bear. I am the resurrection and the life.” When he had a
sufficient pile of plants, he trundled the wheelbarrow to the new
bed, exquisitely prepared, rich, warm, inviting. With the hoe he made
a series of holes, and then, stooping, thrust the hairy roots back
into the earth, pressing the soil tenderly about them. Then he rose,
stretched his back, and lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and
enshrining the flame, which danced, in the hollow of his stained
hands. The cloud of smoke went up like incense.
“Water!” he cried. “Water! Water!”
Martha appeared, after a moment, bringing the watering-pot. She held
it in front of her with both hands.
“Quick, Martha, before they die. Their tongues are turning black.”
“Silly!” Martha replied.
The earth about each plant was darkened with the tilted water, and
the soiled leaves and stems were brightened.
“Listen, daddy! They’re smacking their lips.”
“They are pale, they have their eyes shut, they are reaching
desperately down into the darkness for something to hold on to. They
grope and tickle at atoms of soil, they shrink away from pebbles,
they sigh and relax.”
“When the dew falls, they’ll sing.”
“Ha! ha! what fools we are.”
He flung the hoe across the wheelbarrow and started wheeling it
towards the toolhouse.
“Bring the watering-pot.”
Martha ran after him and put it in the wheelbarrow.
“That’s right--add to my burden--never do anything that you can make
somebody else do.”
Martha giggled in response and skipped towards the house. When she
reached the stone steps she put her feet close together and with dark
seriousness hopped up step after step in that manner. He watched her
and smiled.
“O Lord, Lord,” he said, “what a circus we are.”
He trundled the bumping wheelbarrow and whistled. The red sun,
enormous in the slight haze, was gashing itself cruelly on a black
pine tree. The hylas, by now, had burst into full shrill-sweet chorus
in the swamp, and of the birds all but a few scraping grackles
were still. “Peace--peace--peace,” sang the hylas, a thousand at
once. Silver bells, frailer than thimbles, ringing under a still
and infinite sea of ether.... “Peace--peace,” he murmured. Then he
dropped the wheelbarrow in horror, and put his hands to his ears.
“The enemy!” he cried. “Martha! hurry! Martha!” This time Martha
seemed to be out of earshot, so he was obliged to circumvent the
enemy with great caution. The enemy was a toad who sat by preference
near the toolhouse door: obese, sage, and wrinkled like a Chinese
god. “Toad that under cold stone.” Marvelous compulsion of rhythm....
He thrust the wheelbarrow into the cool pleasant-smelling darkness
of the toolhouse, and walked towards the kitchen door, which just at
that moment Hilda opened.
“Hurry up,” she said. Her voice had a delicious mildness in the still
air and added curiously to his already overwhelming sense of luxury.
He had, for a moment, an extraordinarily satisfying sense of space.