I WOUND up the last preceding chapter of this chronicle with the
statement that we had definitely given up all hope of owning an
abandoned farm. After an interval of three years the time has now come
to recant and to make explanation, touching on our change of heart and
resolution. For at this writing I am an abandoned farmer of the most
pronounced type and, with the assistance of my family, am doing my level
best to convert or, as it were, evangelize one of the most thoroughly
abandoned farms in the entire United States. By the same token we
are also members in good standing of the Westchester County--New
York--Despair Association.
The Westchester County Despair Association was founded by George Creel,
who is one of our neighbors. In addition to being its founder he is its
perpetual president. This association has a large and steadily growing
membership. Any citybred person who moves up here among the rolling
hills of our section with intent to get back to Nature, and who, in
pursuance of that most laudable aim, encounters the various vicissitudes
and the varied misfortunes which, it would seem, invariably do befall
the amateur husbandman, is eligible to join the ranks.
If he builds a fine silo and promptly it burns down on him, as so
frequently happens--silos appear to have a habit of deliberately going
out of their way in order to catch afire--he joins automatically. If his
new swimming pool won't hold water, or his new road won't hold anything
else; if his hired help all quit on him in the busy season; if the
spring freshets flood his cellar; if his springs go dry in August; if
his horses succumb to one of those fatal diseases that are so popular
among expensive horses; if his prize Jersey cow chokes on a turnip;
if his blooded hens are so busy dying they have no time to give to
laying--why, then, under any one or more of these heads he is welcomed
into the fold. I may state in passing that, after an experimental test
of less than six months of country life, we are eligible on several
counts. However, I shall refer to those details later.
Up until last spring we had been living in the city for twelve years,
with a slice of about four years out of the middle, during which we
lived in one of the most suburban of suburbs. First we tried the city,
then the suburb, then the city again; and the final upshot was, we
decided that neither city nor suburb would do for us. In the suburb
there was the daily commuting to be considered; besides, the suburb was
neither city nor country, but a commingling of the drawbacks of the city
and the country, with not many of the advantages of either. And the city
was the city of New York.
Ours, I am sure, had been the common experience of the majority of
those who move to New York from smaller communities--the experience of
practically all except the group from which is recruited the confirmed
and incurable New Yorker. After you move to New York it takes several
months to rid you of homesickness for the place you have left; this
period over, it takes several years usually to cure you of the lure
of the city and restore to you the longing for the simpler and saner
things.
To be sure, there is the exception. When I add this qualification I
have in mind the man who wearies not of spending his evenings from
eight-thirty until eleven at a tired-business-man's show; of eating
tired-business-man's lunch in a lobsteria on the Great White Way from
eleven-thirty p. m. until closing time; of having his toes trodden upon
by other tired business men at the afternoon-dancing parlor; of twice
a day, or oftener, being packed in with countless fellow tired business
men in the tired cars of the tired Subway--I have him in mind, also the
woman who is his ordained mate.
But, for the run of us, life in the city, within a flat, eventually gets
upon our nerves; and life within the city, outside the flat, gets upon
our nerves to an even greater extent. The main trouble about New York
is not that it contains six million people, but that practically all of
them are constantly engaged in going somewhere in such a hurry. Nearly
always the place where they are going lies in the opposite direction
from the place where you are going. There is where the rub comes, and
sooner or later it rubs the nap off your disposition.
The everlasting shooting of the human rapids, the everlasting portages
about the living whirlpools, the everlasting bucking of the human cross
currents--these are the things that, in due time, turn the thoughts
of the sojourner to mental pictures of peaceful fields and burdened
orchards, and kindfaced cows standing knee-deep in purling brooks, and
bosky dells and sylvan glades. At any rate, so our thoughts turned.
Then, too, a great many of our friends were moving to the country to
live, or had already moved to the country to live. We spent week-ends
at their houses; we went on house parties as their guests. We heard them
babble of the excitement of raising things on the land. We thought they
meant garden truck. How were we to know they also meant mortgages? At
the time it did not impress us as a fact worthy of being regarded as
significant that we should find a different set of servants on the
premises almost every time we went to visit one of these families.
What fascinated us was the presence of fresh vegetables upon the
table--not the car-sick, shopworn, wilted vegetables of the city
markets, but really fresh vegetables; the new-laid eggs--after eating
the other kind so long we knew they were new-laid without being told;
the flower beds outside and the great bouquets of flowers inside the
house; the milk that had come from a cow and not from a milkman; the
home-made butter; the rich cream--and all.
We heard their tales of rising at daybreak and going forth to pick from
the vines the platter of breakfast berries, still beaded with the dew.
They got up at daybreak, they said, especially on account of the berry
picking and the beauties of the sunrise. Having formerly been city
dwellers, they had sometimes stayed up for a sunrise; but never until
now had they got up for one. The novelty appealed to them tremendously
and they never tired of talking of it.
In the country--so they told us--you never needed an alarm clock to
rouse you at dawn. Subsequently, by personal experience, I found this
to be true. You never need an alarm clock--if you keep chickens. You may
not go to bed with the chickens, but you get up with them, unless you
are a remarkably sound sleeper. When it comes to rousing the owner, from
slumber before the sun shows, the big red rooster and the little brown
hen are more dependable than any alarm clock ever assembled. You might
forget to wind the alarm clock. The big red rooster winds himself. You
might forget to set the alarm clock. The little brown hen does her own
setting; and even in cases where she doesn't, she likes to wake up about
four-forty-five and converse about her intentions in the matter in a
shrill and penetrating tone of voice.
It had been so long since I had lived in the country I had forgotten
about the early-rising habits of barnyard fowl. I am an expert on the
subject now. Only this morning there was a rooster suffering from hay
fever or a touch of catarrh, or something that made him quite hoarse;
and he strolled up from the chicken house to a point directly beneath
my bedroom window, just as the first pink streaks of the new day were
painting the eastern skies, and spent fully half an hour there clearing
his throat.
But I am getting ahead of my story. More and more we found the lure of
the country was enmeshing our fancies. After each trip to the country
we went back to town to find that, in our absence, the flat had somehow
grown more stuffy and more crowded; that the streets had become more
noisy and more congested. And the outcome of it with us was as the
outcome has been with so many hundreds and thousands and hundreds of
thousands of others. We voted to go to the country to live.
Having reached the decision, the next thing was to decide on the site
and the setting for the great adventure. We unanimously set our faces
against New Jersey, mainly because, to get from New Jersey over to New
York and back again, you must take either the ferry or the tube; and if
there was one thing on earth that we cared less for than the ferry it
was the tube. To us it seemed that most of the desirable parts of Long
Island were already preëmpted by persons of great wealth, living, so we
gathered, in a state of discriminating aloofness and, as a general rule,
avoiding social association with families in the humbler walks of life.
Round New York the rich cannot be too careful--and seldom are. Most of
them are suffering from nervous culture anyhow.
Land in the lower counties of Connecticut, along the Sound, was too
expensive for us to consider moving up there. But there remained what
seemed to us then and what seems to us yet the most wonderful spot for
country homes of persons in moderate circumstances anywhere within the
New York zone, or anywhere else, for that matter--the hill country of
the northern part of Westchester County, far enough back from the Hudson
River to avoid the justly famous Hudson River glare in the summer, and
close enough to it to enable a dweller to enjoy the Hudson River breezes
and the incomparable Hudson River scenery.
Besides, a lot of our friends lived there. There was quite a colony
of them scattered over a belt of territory that intervened between the
magnificent estates of the multi-millionaires to the southward and
the real farming country beyond the Croton Lakes, up the valley. By a
process of elimination we had now settled upon the neighborhood where
we meant to live. The task of finding a suitable location in this
particular area would be an easy one, we thought.
I do not know how the news of this intention spread. We told only a
few persons of our purpose. But spread it did, and with miraculous
swiftness. Overnight almost, we began to hear from real-estate agents
having other people's property to sell and from real-estate owners
having their own property to sell. They reached us by mail, by
telephone, by messenger, and in person. It was a perfect revelation
to learn that so many perfectly situated, perfectly appointed country
places, for one reason or another, were to be had for such remarkable
figures. Indeed, when we heard the actual amounts the figures were more
than remarkable--they were absolutely startling. I am convinced that
nothing is so easy to buy as a country place and nothing is so hard to
sell. This observation is based upon our own experiences on the buying
side and on the experiences of some of my acquaintances who want to
sell--and who are taking it out in wanting.
In addition to agents and owners, there came also road builders, well
diggers, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, general contractors,
an architect or so, agents for nurseries, tree-mending experts,
professional foresters, persons desiring to be superintendent of our
country place, persons wishful of taking care of our livestock for us--a
whole shoal of them. It booted us nothing to explain that we had not yet
bought a place; that we had not even looked at a place with the prospect
of buying. Almost without exception these callers were willing to sit
down with me and use up hours of my time telling me how well qualified
they were to deliver the goods as soon as I had bought land, or even
before I had bought it.
From the ruck of them as they came avalanching down upon us two or three
faces and individualities stand out. There was, for example, the chimney
expert. That was what he called himself--a chimney expert. His specialty
was constructing chimneys that were guaranteed against smoking, and
curing chimneys, built by others, which had contracted the vice. The
circumstance of our not having any chimneys of any variety at the moment
did not halt him when I had stated that fact to him. He had already
removed his hat and overcoat and taken a seat in my study, and he
continued to remain right there. He seemed comfortable; in fact, I
believe he said he was comfortable.
From chimneys he branched out into a general conversation with me upon
the topics of the day.
In my time I have met persons who knew less about a wider range of
subjects than he did, but they had superior advantages over him. Some
had traveled about over the world, picking up misinformation; some had
been educated into a broad and comprehensive ignorance. But here was a
self-taught ignoramus--one, you might say, who had made himself what he
was. He may have known all about the habits and shortcomings of flues;
but, once you let him out of a chimney, he was adrift on an uncharted
sea of mispronounced names, misstated facts and faulty dates.
We discussed the war--or, rather, he erroneously discussed it. We
discussed politics and first one thing and then another, until finally
the talk worked its way round to literature; and then it was he told me
I was one of his favorite authors. “Well,” I said to myself, at that,
“this person may be shy in some of his departments, but he's all right
in others.” And then, aloud, I told him that he interested me and asked
him to go on.
“Yes, sir,” he continued; “I don't care what anybody says, you certainly
did write one mighty funny book, anyhow. You've wrote some books that I
didn't keer so much for; but this here book, ef it's give me one laugh
it's give me a thousand! I can come in dead tired out and pick it up
and read a page--yes, read only two or three lines sometimes--and just
natchelly bust my sides. How you ever come to think up all them comical
sayings I don't, for the life of me, see! I wonder how these other
fellers that calls themselves humorists have got the nerve to keep on
tryin' to write when they read that book of yours.”
“What did you say the name of this particular book was?” I asked,
warming to the man in spite of myself.
“It's called Fables in Slang,” he said.
I did not undeceive him. He had spoiled my day for me. Why should I
spoil his?
Then, there was the persistent nursery-man's agent, with the teeth.
He was the most toothsome being I ever saw. The moment he came in, the
thought occurred to me that in his youth somebody had put tooth powders
into his coffee. He may not have had any more teeth than some people
have, but he had a way of presenting his when he smiled or when he
spoke, or even when his face was in repose, which gave him the effect of
being practically all teeth. Aside from his teeth, the most noticeable
thing about him was his persistence. I began protesting that it would
be but a waste of his time and mine to take up the subject of fruit and
shade trees and shrubbery, because, even though I might care to invest
in his lines, I had at present no soil in which to plant them. But he
seemed to regard this as a mere technicality on my part, and before I
was anywhere near done with what I meant to say to him he had one
arm round me and was filling my lap and my arms and my desk-top with
catalogues, price lists, illustrations in color, order slips, and other
literature dealing with the products of the house he represented.
I did my feeble best to fight him off; but it was of no use. He just
naturally surrounded me. Inside of three minutes he had me as thoroughly
mined, flanked and invested as though he'd been Grant and I'd been
Richmond. I could tell he was prepared to stay right on until I
capitulated.
So, in order for me to be able to live my own life, it became necessary
to give him an order. I made it as small an order as possible, because,
as I have just said and as I told him repeatedly, I had no place in
which to plant the things I bought of him, and could not tell when I
should have a place in which to plant them. That petty detail did not
concern him in the least. He promised to postpone delivery until I had
taken title to some land somewhere; and then he smiled his all-ivory
smile and released me from captivity, and took his departure.
Two months later, when we had joined the landed classes, the consignment
arrived--peach, pear, quince, cherry and apple. I was quite shocked at
the appearance of the various items when we undid the wrappings. The
pictures from which I had made my selections showed splendid trees,
thick with foliage and laden with the most delicious fruit imaginable.
But here, seemingly, was merely a collection of golf clubs in a crude
and unfinished state--that is to say, they were about the right length
and the right thickness to make golf clubs, but were unfinished to the
extent that they had small tentacles or roots adhering to them at their
butt ends.
However, our gardener--we had acquired a gardener by then--was of the
opinion that they might develop into something. Having advanced this
exceedingly sanguine and optimistic belief, he took out a pocket-knife
and further maimed the poor little things by pruning off certain minute
sprouts or nubs or sprigs that grew upon them; and then he stuck them in
the earth. Nevertheless, they grew. At this hour they are still
growing, and in time I think they may bear fruit. As a promise of future
productivity they bore leaves during the summer--not many leaves, but
still enough leaves to keep them from looking so much like walking
sticks, and just enough leaves to nourish certain varieties of worms.
I sincerely trust the reader will not think I have been exaggerating
in detailing my dealings with the artificers, agents and solicitors who
descended upon us when the hue and cry--personally I have never seen a
hue, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever heard one; but it is
customary to speak of it in connection with a cry and I do so--when, as
I say, the presumable hue and the indubitable cry were raised in regard
to our ambition to own a country place. Believe me, I am but telling
the plain, unvarnished truth. And now we come to the home-seeking
enterprise:
Sometimes alone, but more frequently in the company of friends, we
toured Westchester, its main highways and its back roads, its nooks and
its corners, until we felt that we knew its topography much better
than many born and reared in it. Reason totters on her throne when
confronted with the task of trying to remember how many places we looked
at--places done, places overdone, places underdone, and places undone.
Wherever we went, though, one of two baffling situations invariably
arose: If we liked a place the price for that place uniformly would be
out of our financial reach. If the price were within our reach the place
failed to satisfy our desires.
After weeks of questing about, we did almost close for one estate. It
was an estate where a rich man, who made his money in town and spent it
in the country, had invested a fortune in apple trees. The trees were
there--several thousand of them; but they were all such young trees. It
would be several years before they would begin to bear, and meantime
the services of a small army of men would be required to care for the
orchards and prune them, and spray them, and coddle them, and chase
insects away from them. I calculated that if we bought this place it
would cost me about seven thousand dollars a year for five years ahead
in order to enjoy three weeks of pink-and-white beauty in the blossoming
time each spring.
Besides, it occurred to me that by the time the trees did begin to bear
plentifully the fashionable folk in New York might quit eating apples;
in which case everybody else would undoubtedly follow suit and quit
eating them too. Ours is a fickle race, as witness the passing of the
vogue for iron dogs on front lawns, and for cut-glass vinegar cruets
on the dinner table; and a lot of other things, fashionable once but
unfashionable now.
Also, the house stood on a bluff directly overlooking the river, with
the tracks of the New York Central in plain view and trains constantly
ski-hooting by. At the time of our inspection of the premises, long
restless strings of freight cars were backing in and out of sidings not
more than a quarter of a mile away. We were prepared, after we had moved
to the country, to rise with the skylarks, but we could not see the
advantage to be derived from rising with the switch engines. Switch
engines are notorious for keeping early hours; or possibly the engineers
suffer from insomnia.
At length we decided to buy an undeveloped tract and do our own
developing. In pursuance of this altered plan we climbed craggy heights
with fine views to be had from their crests, but with no water anywhere
near; and we waded through marshy meadows, where there was any amount
of water but no views. This was discouraging; but we persevered, and
eventually perseverance found its reward. Thanks to some kindly souls
who guided us to it, we found what we thought we wanted.
We found a sixty-acre tract on a fine road less than a mile and a half
from one of the best towns in the lower Hudson Valley. It combined
accessibility with privacy; for after you quitted the cleared lands at
the front of the property, and entered the woodland at the back, you
were instantly in a stretch of timber which by rights belonged in the
Adirondacks. About a third of the land was cleared--or, rather, had been
cleared once upon a time. The rest was virgin forest running up to the
comb of a little mountain, from the top of which you might see, spread
out before you and below you, a panorama with a sweep of perhaps forty
miles round three sides of the horizon.
There were dells, glades, steep bluffs and rolling stretches of fallow
land; there were seven springs on the place; there was a cloven rift in
the hill with a fine little valley at the bottom of it, and the first
time I clambered up its slope from the bottom I flushed a big cock
grouse that went booming away through the underbrush with a noise like
a burst of baby thunder. That settled it for me. All my life I have been
trying to kill a grouse on the wing, and here was a target right on the
premises. Next day we signed the papers and paid over the binder money.
We were landowners. Presently we had a deed in the safe-deposit box and
some notes in the bank to prove it.
Over most of our friends we had one advantage. They had taken
old-fashioned farms and made them over into modern country places. But
once upon a time, sixty or seventy years back, the place of which we
were now the proud proprietors had been the property of a man of means
and good taste, a college professor; and, by the somewhat primitive
standards of those days, it had been an estate of considerable
pretensions.
This gentleman had done things of which we were now the legatees. For
example, he had spared the fine big trees, which grew about the dooryard
of his house; and when he had cleared the tillable acres he had left in
them here and there little thickets and little rocky copses which stood
up like islands from the green expanses of his meadows. The pioneer
American farmer's idea of a tree in a field or on a lawn was something
that could be cut down right away. Also the original owner had planted
orchards of apples and groves of cherries; and he had thrown up stout
stone walls, which still stood in fair order.
But--alas!--he had been dead for more than forty years. And during most
of those forty years his estate had been in possession of an absentee
landlord, a woman, who allowed a squatter to live on the property, rent
free, upon one unusual condition--namely, that he repair nothing, change
nothing, improve nothing, and, except for the patch where he grew his
garden truck, till no land. As well as might be judged by the present
conditions, the squatter had lived up to the contract. If a windowpane
was smashed he stuffed up the orifice with rags; if a roof broke away
he patched the hole with scraps of tarred paper; if a tree fell its
molder-ing trunk stayed where it lay; if brambles sprang up they
flourished unvexed by bush hook or pruning blade.
Buried in this wilderness was an old frame residence, slanting tipsily
on its rotted sills; and the cellar under it was a noisome damp hole,
half filled with stones that had dropped out of the tottering foundation
walls. There was a farmer's cottage which from decay and neglect seemed
ready to topple over; likewise the remains of a cow barn, where no
self-respecting cow would voluntarily spend a night; the moldy ruins
of a coach house, an ice house and a chicken house; and flanking these,
piles of broken, crumbling boards to mark the sites of sundry cribs and
sheds.
The barn alone had resisted neglect and the gnawing tooth of time. This
was because it had been built in the time when barns were built to stay.
It had big, hand-hewn oak sticks for its beams and rafters and sills;
and though its roof was a lacework of rotted shingles and its sides were
full of gaps to let the weather in, its frame was as solid and enduring
as on the day when it was finished. This, in short and in fine, was what
we in our ignorance had acquired. To us it was a splendid asset. Persons
who knew more than we did might have called it a liability.
All our friends, though, were most sanguine and most cheerful
regarding the prospect. Jauntily and with few words they dismissed the
difficulties of the prospect that faced us; and with the same jauntiness
we, also, dismissed them.
“Oh, you won't have so very much to do!” I hear them saying. “To be
sure, there's a road to be built--not over a quarter of a mile of
road, exclusive of the turnround at your garage--when you've built your
garage--and the turn in front of your house--when you've built your
house. It shouldn't take you long to clear up the fields and get them
under cultivation. All you'll have to do there is pick the loose stones
off of them and plow the land up, and harrow it and grade it in places,
and spread a few hundred wagonloads of fertilizer; and then sow your
grass seed. That old horsepond yonder will make you a perfectly lovely
swimming pool, once you've cleaned it out and deepened it at this end,
and built retaining walls round it, and put in a concrete basin, and
waterproofed the sides and bottom. You must have a swimming pool by all
means!
“And then, by running a hundred-foot dam across that low place in the
valley you can have a wonderful little lake. You surely must have a lake
to go with the swimming pool! Then, when you've dug your artesian well,
you can couple up all your springs for an emergency supply. You know you
can easily pipe the spring water into a tank and conserve it there. Then
you'll have all the water you possibly can need--except, of course, in
very dry weather in mid-summer.
“And, after that, when you've torn the old house down and put up your
new house, and built your barn and your stable, and your farmer's
cottage and your ice house, and your greenhouses, and your corn-crib,
and your tool-shed, and your tennis court, and laid out some terraces
up on that hillside yonder, and planned out your flower gardens and your
vegetable garden, and your potato patch and your corn patch, and stuck
up your chicken runs, and bought your work stock and your cows and
chickens and things--oh, yes, and your kennels, if you are going in for
dogs--No? All right, then; never mind the kennels. Anyhow, when you've
done those things and set out your shrubs and made your rose beds and
planted your grapevines, you'll be all ready just to move right in and
settle down and enjoy yourselves.”
I do not mean that all of these suggestions came at once. As here
enumerated they represent the combined fruitage of several conversations
on the subject. We listened attentively, making notes of the various
notions for our comfort and satisfaction as they occurred to others.
If any one had advanced the idea that we should install a private race
track, and lay out nine holes, say, of a private golf course, we should
have agreed to those items too. These things do sound so easy when
you are talking them over and when the first splendid fever of land
ownership is upon you!
Had I but known then what I know now! These times, when, going along the
road, I pass a manure heap I am filled with envy of the plutocrat who
owns it, though, at the same time, deploring the vulgar ostentation that
leads him to spread his wealth before the view of the public. When I
see a masonry wall along the front of an estate I begin to make mental
calculations, for I understand now what that masonry costs, and know
that it is cheaper, in the long run, to have your walls erected by a
lapidary than by a union stonemason.
And as for a bluestone road--well, you, reader, may think bluestone is
but a simple thing and an inexpensive one. Just wait until you have
had handed to you the estimates on the cost of killing the nerve and
cleaning out the cavities and inserting the fillings, and putting in the
falsework and the bridgework, and the drains and the arches--and all!
You might think dentists are well paid for such jobs; but a professional
road contractor--I started to say road agent--makes any dentist look a
perfect piker.
And any time you feel you really must have a swimming pool that is all
your very own, take my advice and think twice. Think oftener than twice;
and then compromise on a neat little outdoor sitz bath that is all your
very own.
But the inner knowledge of these things was to come to us later. For the
time being, pending the letting of contracts, we were content to enjoy
the two most pleasurable sensations mortals may know--possession and
anticipation: the sense of the reality of present ownership and, coupled
with this, dreams of future creation and future achievement. We were on
the verge of making come true the treasured vision of months--we were
about to become abandoned farmers.
No being who is blessed with imagination can have any finer joy than
this, I think--the joy of proprietorship of a strip of the green
footstool. The soil you kick up when you walk over your acres
is different soil from that which you kick up on your neighbor's
land--different because it is yours. Another man's tree, another man's
rock heap, is a simple tree or a mere rock heap, as the case may be; and
nothing more. But your tree and your rock heap assume a peculiar value,
a special interest, a unique and individual picturesqueness.
And oh, the thrill that permeates your being when you see the first
furrow of brown earth turned up in your field, or the first shovel-load
of sod lifted from the spot where your home is to stand! And oh, the
first walk through the budding woods in the springtime! And the first
spray of trailing arbutus! And the first spray of trailing poison ivy!
And the first mortgage! And the first time you tread on one of those
large slick brown worms, designed, inside and out, like a chocolate
éclair!
After all, it's the only life! But on the way to it there are pitfalls
and obstacles and setbacks, and steadily mounting monthly pay rolls.
As shall presently develop.