Most of our friends, Jonathan's and mine, are occupying their summers in
"reclaiming" old farms. We have an old farm, too, but we, I fear, are
not reclaiming it, at least not very fast. We have made neither formal
gardens nor water gardens nor rose arches; we have not built marble
swimming-tanks, nor even cement ones; we have not naturalized
forget-me-nots in the brook or narcissus in the meadows; we have not
erected tea-houses on choice knolls, and after six years of occupancy
there is still not a pergola or a sundial on the place! And yet we are
happy.
To be happy on a farm like ours one must, I fancy, be either very old or
very unprogressive. While we are waiting to grow comfortably old, we are
willing to be considered unprogressive.
Very old and very, very unprogressive is the farm itself. There is
nothing on it but old apple trees, old lilac bushes, old rocks, and old
associations--and, to be sure, the old red house. But the old rocks,
piled on the hillsides, are unfailingly picturesque, whether dark and
dripping in the summer rains or silver gray in the summer suns. The
lilacs are delightful, too. In June they send wave upon wave of
fragrance in through the little windows, penetrating even to the
remotest corners of the dim old attic, while all day long about their
pale lavender sprays the great yellow and black butterflies hang
flutteringly. Best of all is the orchard; the old apple trees blossom
prodigally for a brief season in May, blossom in rosy-white, in
cream-white, in pure white, in green-white, transforming the lane and
the hill-slopes into a bower, smothering the old house in beauty,
brooding over it, on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of
sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a drenching rain, and tears away
all the pretty petals and buries them in the grass below. But there are
seldom any apples; all this exuberance of beauty is but a dream of
youth, not a promise of fruitage. Jonathan, indeed, tells me that if we
want the trees to bear we must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the
ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls; but under these conditions I
would rather not have the apples. The orchard is old; why not leave it
to dream and rest and dream again?
The old associations are, I admit, of a somewhat mixed character. There
is the romance of the milk-room door, through which, in hoary ages past,
the "hired girl," at the ripe age of twelve, eloped with her
sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of the cellar nail, a
shuddery one, handed down from a yet more remote antiquity; there are
tales of the "ballroom" on the second floor, of the old lightning-riven
locust stump, of the origin of the "new wing" of the house--still called
"new," though a century old. Not a spot, indoors or out, but has its
clustering memories.
Such an enveloping atmosphere of associations, no matter what their
quality, in a place where generations have lived and died, is of itself
a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with tradition, like a ship weighted
with barnacles, moves more and more slowly; the past appears more real
than the present. To the old this seems natural and right, to others it
is often depressing; but Jonathan and I like it. Our barnacle-clogged
ship pleases us--pleases me because I love the slow, drifting motion,
pleases Jonathan because--I regret to admit it--he thinks he can get all
the barnacles off--and then!--
For, whereas my unprogressiveness is absolute and unqualified,
Jonathan's is, I have discovered, tainted by a sneaking optimism, an
ineradicable desire and hope of improvement, which, though it does not
blossom rankly in pergolas and tea-houses, is none the less there, a
lurking menace. It inspired his suggestion regarding pigs in the
orchard, it showed itself even more clearly in the matter of the hens.
I have always liked hens. I doubt if mine are very profitable,--the farm
is not, in general, a source of profit, and we cherish no delusions
about it,--but I do not keep them for pecuniary gain. If they chance to
lay eggs, so much the better; if they furnish forth my table with
succulent broilers, with nutritious roasters, with ambrosial
chicken-pasties, I am not unappreciative; but I realize that all these
things might be had from my neighbors' barnyards. What I primarily value
my own hens for is their companionship. Talk about the companionship of
dogs and cats! Cats walk about my home, sleek and superior; they make me
feel that I am there on sufferance. One cannot even laugh at them, their
manner is so perfect. Dogs, on the other hand, develop an unreasoning
and tyrannous devotion to their masters, which is not really good for
either, though it may be morbidly gratifying to sentimental natures.
But hens! No decorous superiority here, no mush of devotion. No; for
varied folly, for rich and highly developed perversities, combining all
that is choicest of masculine and feminine foible--for this and much
more, commend me to the hen. Ever since we came to the farm, my sister
the hen has entertained me with her vagaries. Jaques's delight at his
encounter with Touchstone is pale compared with mine in their society.
Nothing cheers me more than to sit on a big rock in the barnyard and
watch the hens walking about. Their very gait pleases me--the way they
bob their heads, the "genteel" way they have of picking up their feet,
for all the world as though they cared where they stepped; the absent
and superior manner in which they "scratch for worms," their gaze fixed
on the sky, then cock their heads downwards with an indifferent air,
absently pick up a chip, drop it, and walk on! Did any one ever see a
hen really find a worm? I never did. There are no worms in our barnyard,
anyhow; Jonathan must have dug them all up for bait when he was a boy. I
have even tried throwing some real worms to them, and they always
respond by a few nervous cackles, and walk past the brown wrigglers with
a detached manner, and the robins get them later. And yet they continue
to go through all these forms, and we continue to call it "scratching
for worms."
Jonathan has nothing to do with my hens except to give advice. One of
his hobbies is the establishing of a breed of hens marked by
intelligence, which he maintains might be done by careful selection of
the mothers. Accordingly, whenever he goes to the roost to pick out a
victim for the sacrificial hatchet, he first gently pulls the tail of
each candidate in turn, and by the dim light of the lantern carefully
observes the nature of their reaction, choosing for destruction the one
whose deportment seems to him most foolish. In this way, by weeding out
the extremely silly, he hopes in time to raise the general intellectual
standard of the barnyard. But he urges that much more might be done if
my heart were in it. Very likely, but my heart is not. Intelligence is
all very well, but the barnyard, I am convinced, is no place for it.
Give me my pretty, silly hens, with all their aimless, silly ways. I
will seek intelligence, when I want it, elsewhere.
In another direction, too, Jonathan's optimistic temperament has found
little encouragement. This is in regard to the chimney swallows. When we
first came, these little creatures were one of my severest trials. They
were not a trial to Jonathan. He loved to watch them at dusk, circling
and eddying about the great chimney. So, indeed, did I; and if they had
but contented themselves with circling and eddying there, I should have
had no quarrel with them. I did not even object to their evolutions
inside the chimney. At first I took the muffled shudder of wings for
distant thunder, and when great masses of soot came tumbling down into
the fireplace, I jumped; but I soon grew accustomed to all this. I was
even willing to clean the soot out of my neat fireplace daily, while
Jonathan comforted me by suggesting that the birds took the place of
chimney-sweeps, and that soot was good for rose bushes. Yes, if the
little things had been willing to stick to their chimney, I should have
been tolerant, if not cordial. But when they invaded my domain, I felt
that I had a grievance. And invade it they did. At dawn I was rudely
awakened by a rush from the fireplace, a mad scuttering about the dusky
room, a desperate exit by the little open window, where the raised shade
revealed the pale light of morning. At night, if I went with my candle
into a dark room, I was met by a whirling thing, dashing itself against
me, against the light, against the walls, in a moth-like ecstasy of
self-destruction. In the mornings, as I went about the house pulling up
the shades and drawing back the curtains, out from their white folds
rushed dark, winged shapes, whirring past my ears, fluttering blindly
about the room, sinking exhausted in inaccessible corners. They were as
foolish as June bugs, fifty times bigger, and harder to catch. Moreover,
when caught, they were not pretty; their eyes were in the top of their
heads, like a snake's, their expression was low and cunning. They were
almost as bad as bats! Worst of all, the young birds had an untidy habit
of tumbling out of the nests down into the fireplaces, whether there was
a fire or not. Now, I have no conscientious objection to roasting birds,
but I prefer to choose my birds, and to kill them first.
One morning I had gathered and carried out of doors eight foolish,
frightened, huddling things, and one dead young one from the
sitting-room embers, and I returned to find Jonathan kneeling on the
guest-room hearth, one arm thrust far up the chimney. "What are you
doing, Jonathan?" The next moment there was the familiar rush of wings,
which finally subsided behind the fresh pillows of the bed. Jonathan
sprang up. "Wait! I'll get it!" He carefully drew away the pillow, his
hand was almost on the poor little quivering wretch, when it made
another rush, hurled itself against the mirror, upset a vase full of
columbines, and finally sank behind the wood-box. At last it was caught,
and Jonathan, going over to the hearth, resumed his former position.
"Jonathan! Put him out of doors!" I exclaimed. "Sh-h-h," he responded,
"I'm going to teach him to go back the way he came. There he goes! see?"
He rose, triumphant, and began to brush the soot out of his collar and
hair. I was sorry to dash such enthusiasm, but I felt my resolution
hardening within me.
"Jonathan," I said, "we did not come to the farm to train chimney
swallows. Besides, I don't wish them trained, I wish them _kept out_. I
don't regard them as suitable for household pets. If you will sink to a
pet bird, get a canary."
"But you wouldn't have an old house without chimney swallows!" he
remonstrated in tones of real pain.
"I would indeed."
It ended in a compromise. At the top of the chimney Jonathan put a
netting over half the flues; the others he left open at the top, but set
in nettings in the corresponding flues just above each fireplace. And
so in half the chimney the swallows still build, but the young ones now
drop on the nettings instead of in the embers, and lie there cheeping
shrilly until somehow their parents or friends convey them up again
where they belong. And I no longer spend my mornings collecting
apronfuls of frightened and battered little creatures. At dusk the
swallows still eddy and circle about the chimney, but Jonathan has lost
the opportunity for training them. Once more the optimist is balked.
But in these matters I am firm: I do not want the hens made intelligent,
or the orchard improved, or the swallows trained. There is, I am sure,
matter enough in other parts of the farm upon which one may wreak one's
optimism. I hold me to my tidy hearths, my comfortable hens, my old
lilacs, and my dreaming apple trees.