To the best of my ability I have been quoting Lady Maude verbatim; but
if unintentionally I have permitted any erroneous quotations to creep
into her remarks they will be corrected before these lines reach the
reader's eye, because the next time she and Scott come over--they are
neighbors of ours out here in Westchester--I mean to ask her to read
copy on this book. They drop in on us quite frequently and we talk
furnishings, and Scott sits by and smokes and occasionally utters low
mocking sounds under his breath, for as yet he has not been entirely won
over to antiques. There are times when I fear that Scott, though a most
worthy person in all other regards, is hopelessly provincial. Well, I
was a trifle provincial myself before I took the cure.
Perhaps I should say that sometimes we talk furnishings with Mistress
Maude, but more often we talk farming problems, with particular
reference to our own successes and the failures of our friends in the
same sphere of endeavor. Indeed, farming is the commonest topic of
conversation in our vicinity. Because, like us, nearly all our friends
in this part of the country were formerly flat dwellers and because,
like us, all of them have done a lot of experimenting in the line of
intensified, impractical agriculture since they moved to the country.
We seek to profit by one another's mistakes, and we do--that is, we
profit by them to the extent of gloating over them. Then we go and
make a few glaring mistakes on our own account, and when the word of it
spreads through the neighborhood, seemingly on the wings of the wind,
it is their turn to gloat. We have a regular Gloat Club with an open
membership and no dues. If an amateur tiller of the soil and his wife
drop in on us on a fine spring evening to announce that yesterday they
had their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines are still
in the blossoming state; or if in midsummer they come for the express
purpose of informing us that they have been eating roasting ears for
a week--they knowing full well that our early corn has suffered a
backset--we compliment them with honeyed words, and outwardly our manner
may bespeak a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in our souls all is
bitterness.
After they have left one catches oneself saying to one's helpmeet:
“Well, the Joneses are nice people in a good many respects. Jones would
loan you the last cent he had on earth if you were in trouble and needed
it, and in most regards Mrs. Jones is about as fine a little woman as
you'd meet in a day's ride. But dog-gone it, I wish they didn't brag so
much!” Then one of us opportunely recalls that last year their potatoes
developed a slow and mysterious wasting disease resembling malignant
tetter, which carried off the entire crop in its infancy, whereas we
harvested a cellarful of wonderful praties free from skin blemishes of
whatever sort; and warmed by that delectable recollection we cheer up
a bit. And if our strawberries turn out well or our apple trees bear
heavily or our cow has twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose no
time in going about the countryside to spread the tidings, leaving in
our wake saddened firesides and hearts all abrim with the concentrated
essence of envy.
Practically all our little group specialize. We go in for some line that
is absolutely guaranteed to be profitable until the expense becomes too
great for a person of limited means any longer to bear up under. Then
we drop that and specialize in another line, also recommended as being
highly lucrative, for so long as we can afford it; and then we tackle
something else again. It is a never-ending round of new experiences,
because no matter how disastrously one's most recent experiment has
turned out the agricultural weeklies are constantly holding forth the
advantages of a field as yet new and untried and morally insured to
be one that will yield large and nourishing dividends. It is my sober
conviction that the most inspired fiction writers in America--the men
with the most buoyant imaginations--are the regular contributors to
our standard agricultural journals. And next to them the most gifted
romancers are the fellows who sell bulbs and seeds. They are not
fabulists exactly, because fables have morals and frequently these
persons have none, but they are inspired fancifiers, I'll tell the
world.
Each succeeding season finds each family among us embarking upon some
new and fascinating venture. For instance, I have one friend who this
year went in for bees--Italian bees, I think he said they were, though
why he should have been prejudiced against the native-born variety I
cannot understand. He used to drop in at our place to borrow a little
cooking soda--he was constantly running out of cooking soda at his house
owing to using so much of it on his face and hands and his neck for
poulticing purposes--and tell us what charming creatures bees were and
how much honey he expected to lay by that fall. From what he said we
gathered that the half had never been told by Maeterlinck about the
engaging personal habits and captivating tribal customs of bees;
bees, we gathered, were, as a race, perhaps a trifle quicktempered and
hot-headed, or if not exactly hotheaded at least hot elsewhere, but ever
ready to forgive and forget and, once the heat of passion had passed,
to let bygones be bygones. A bee, it seemed from his accounts, was one
creature that always stood ready to meet you halfway.
He finally gave up bee culture though, not because his enthusiasm had
waned, for it did not, but for professional reasons solely. He is a
distinguished actor and when he got the leading rôle in a new play it
broke in on his study of the part to be dropping the manuscript every
few minutes and grabbing up a tin dish and running out in an endeavor,
by the power of music, to induce a flock of swarming bees to rehive
themselves, or whatever it is bees are supposed to do when favored with
a pie-pan solo. It seemed his bees had a perfect mania for swarming.
The least little thing would set them off. There must have been too much
artistic temperament about the premises for such emotional and flighty
creatures as bees appear to be.
Then there was another reason: After the play went on he found it
interfered with his giving the best that was in him to his art if he had
to go on for a performance all bumpy in spots; also he discovered that
grease paint had the effect of irritating a sting rather than soothing
it. The other afternoon he came over and offered to give me his last
remaining hive of bees. Indeed, he almost pressed them on me.
I declined though. I told him to unload his little playmates on some
stranger; that I valued his friendship and hoped to keep it; the more
especially, as I now confessed to him, since I had lately thought that
if literature ever petered out I might take up the drama as a congenial
mode of livelihood, and in such case would naturally benefit through the
good offices of a friend who was already in the business and doing
well at it. Not, however, that I felt any doubt regarding my ultimate
success. I do not mean by this that I have seriously considered
playwriting as a regular profession. Once I did seriously consider it,
but nobody else did, and especially the critics didn't. Remembering what
happened to the only dramatic offering I ever wrote, I long ago made up
my mind that if ever I wrote another play--which, please heaven, I shall
not--I would call it Solomon Grundy, whether I had a character of that
name in it or not. You may recall what happened to the original Solomon
Grundy--how he was born on a Monday, began to fail on Thursday, passed
away on Saturday of the same week and was laid to eternal rest on
Sunday. So even though I never do another play I have the name picked
out and ready and waiting.
No, my next venture into the realm of Thespis, should necessity direct
my steps thither, would land me directly upon the histrionic boards.
Ever since I began to fill out noticeably I have nourished this ambition
secretly. As I look at it, a pleasing plumpness of outline should be no
handicap but on the contrary rather a help. My sex of course is against
my undertaking to play The Two Orphans, otherwise I should feel no doubt
of my ability to play both of them, and if they had a little sister I
shouldn't be afraid to take her on, too. But I do rather fancy myself
in the title rôles of The Corsican Brothers. If I should show some
enterprising manager how he might pay out one salary and save another,
surely the idea would appeal to him; and some of these fine days I may
give the idea a try. So having this contingency in mind I gently but
firmly told my friend to take his bees elsewhere. I told him I had no
intention of looking a gift bee in the mouth.
We have another neighbor who has gone in rather extensively for blooded
stock with the intention ultimately of producing butter and milk for
the city market. During practically all his active life he has been a
successful theatrical manager, which naturally qualifies him for the cow
business. He is doing very well at it too. So long as he continues to
enjoy successful theatrical seasons he feels that he will be able to go
on with cows. Being a shrewd and far seeing business man he has it all
figured out that a minimum of three substantial enduring hits every
autumn will justify him in maintaining his herd at its present
proportions, whereas with four shows on Broadway all playing to capacity
he might even increase it to the extent of investing in a few more head
of registered thoroughbred stock.
From him I have gleaned much regarding cows. Before, the life of a cow
fancier had been to me as a closed book. Generally speaking, cows, so
far as my personal knowledge went, were divided roughly into regular
cows running true to sex, and the other kind of cows, which were
invariably referred to with a deep blush by old-fashioned maiden ladies.
True enough, we owned cows during the earlier stages of our rural life;
in fact, we own one now, a mild-eyed creature originally christened
Buttercup but called by us Sahara because of her prevalent habits. But
gentle bone-dry Sahara is just a plain ordinary cow of undistinguished
ancestry. In the preceding generations of her line scandal after scandal
must have occurred; were she a bagpipe solo instead of a cow scarcely
could she have in her more mixed strains than she has. We acquired her
at a bargain in an auction sale; she is a bargain to any one desiring a
cow of settled and steady habits, regular at her meals, always with an
unfailing appetite and having a deep far-reaching voice. There is also
an expectation that some future day we may also derive from her milk.
However, this contingency rests, as one might say, upon the laps of the
gods.
The point I am getting at though is that Sahara, whatever else of merit
she may possess in the matters of a kind disposition and a willingness
to eat whatever is put before her, is after all but a mere common
country-bred cow; whereas the cows whose society my wealthy neighbor
cultivates are the pedigreed aristocrats of their breed, and for buying
and selling purposes are valued accordingly. Why, from the way the
proprietors of registered cows brag about their ancient lineage and
their blue-blooded forbears you might think they were all from South
Carolina or Massachusetts--the cows, I mean, not necessarily the
proprietors.
So it is with the man of whom I have been speaking. Having become a
breeder of fancy stock he now appraises a cow not for what she can do on
her own intrinsic merits but for the size of her family tree, provided
she brings with her the documents to prove it. So far as cows are
concerned he has become a confirmed ancestor worshipper. I am sure he
would rather own a quarter interest in a collateral descendant of old
Prince Bullcon the First of the royal family of the Island of Guernsey,
even though the present bearer of the name were but an indifferent
milker and of unsettled habits, than to be the sole possessor of some
untitled but versatile cow giving malted milk and whipped cream. Such
vagaries I cannot fathom. In a democratic country like this, or at least
in a country which used to be democratic, it seems to me we should value
a cow not for what her grandparents may have been; not for the names
emblazoned on her genealogical record, but for what she herself is.
The other Sunday we drove over to his place ostensibly to pay a
neighborly call but really to plant distress in his fireside circle
by incidentally mentioning that our young grapevines were bearing
magnificently.
You see, a member of the Gloat Club is expected to work at his trade
Sundays as well as weekdays; and besides we had heard that his arbors,
with the coming of the autumn, had seemed a bit puny. So the opportunity
was too good to be lost and we went over.
After I had driven the harpoon into his soul and watched it sink into
him up to the barbs he took me out to see the latest improvements he had
made in his cow bam and to call upon the newest addition to his herd.
These times you can bed a hired hand down almost anywhere, but if you go
in for blooded stock you must surround them with the luxuries to which
they have been accustomed, else they are apt to go into a decline. He
invited my inspection of the porcelain-walled stalls and the patent
feeding devices and the sanitary fixtures which abounded on every hand,
and to his recently installed cream separator. In my youth the only
cream separator commonly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache worn
by the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, with it, cream separating
was merely incidental, the real purposes of the mustache being to be
ornamental and impressive and subtly to convey a proper respect for the
majesty of the law. Often a town marshal wore one too. But the modern
separator is a product of science and not a gift of Nature skillfully
elaborated by the art of the barber. It costs a heap of money and it
operates by machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is complete
without it.
When I had viewed these wonders he led me to a glorified pasture lot and
presented me to the occupant--a smallish cow of a prevalent henna tone.
Except that she had rather slender legs and a permanent wave between the
horns she seemed to my uninitiated eyes much the same as any other cow
of the Jersey persuasion. I realized, however, that she must be very
high-church. My friend, I knew, would harbor no nonconformist cows in
his place, and besides, she distinctly had the high-church manner, a
thing which is indefinable in terms of speech but unmistakably to be
recognized wherever found. Otherwise, though, I could observe nothing
about her calculated to excite the casual passer-by. But my friend was
all enthusiasm.
“Now,” he said proudly, “what do you think of that for a perfect
specimen?”
“Well,” I said, “anybody could tell that she's had a lot of refining
influences coming into her life. She's no doubt cultured and ladylike to
a degree; and she has the fashionable complexion of the hour and she's
all marcelled up and everything, but excepting for these adornments has
she any special accomplishments that are calculated to give her class?”
“Class!” he repeated. “Class, did you say? Say, listen! That cow has all
the class there is. She's less than two years old and she cost me a cool
fifteen hundred cash--and cheap at the figure, at that.”
“Fifteen hundred,” I murmured dazedly. “What does she give?”
“Why, she gives milk, of course,” he explained. “What else would she be
giving?”
“Well,” I said, “I should think that at that price she should at least
give music lessons. Perhaps she does plain sewing?”
“Say,” he demanded, “what do you expect for fifteen hundred dollars?
Fifteen hundred is a perfectly ridiculous price to pay for a cow with
a pedigree such as this cow has. She's registered back I don't know how
far. It's the regal breeding you pay for when you get an animal like
this--not the animal herself.”
But I refused to be swept off my feet. Before this I had associated with
royalty. I once met a lineal descendant of William the Conqueror;
he told me so himself. Being a descendant was apparently the only
profession he had, and I judged this cow was in much the same line of
business. “Well,” I replied, “all I can say is that I wouldn't care if
her ancestors came over on the Mayflower--if she belonged to me she'd
have to show me something in the line of special endeavor. She'd have to
have talents or we'd part company pretty pronto, I'm telling you.”
“It is evident you do not understand anything about blooded stock,”
he said. “The grandmother of this cow was insured for fifteen thousand
dollars, and her great-grandfather, King Bulbul, was worth a fortune.
The owner was offered fifty thousand for him--and refused it.”
In my surprise I could only mutter over and over again the name of
William Tell's brother. A great many people do not know that William
Tell ever had a brother. His first name was Wat.
After that my friend gave me up as one hopelessly sunken in ignorance,
and by a mutual yet unspoken consent we turned the subject to the
actors' strike, which was then in full blast. But at intervals ever
since I have been thinking of what he told me. To my way of thinking
there is something wrong with the economic system of a country which
saddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an income of more than
two thousand dollars a year and if he be married sinks the ax into all
he makes above three thousand, leaving him the interest deduction on the
extra one thousand, amounting, I believe, to about twelve dollars and a
half, for the support of his wife, on the theory that under the present
scale of living any reasonably prudent man can suitably maintain a wife
on twelve-fifty a year--I repeat, there is something radically wrong
with a government which does this to the wage-earner and yet passes
right on by a cow that carries fifteen thousand in life insurance and
a bull worth fifty thousand in his own right. It amounts to class
privilege, I maintain. It's almost enough to make a man vote the
Republican ticket, and I may yet do it, too, sometime when there aren't
any Democrats running, just to show how I feel about it.
Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur-farming group have taken
up fruit growing or pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares have
been highly recommended to us as being very prolific. You start in
with one pair of domestic-minded Belgian hares and presently countless
thousands of little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening the
landscape. From what I can hear the average Belgian hare has almost as
many aunts and uncles and cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too.
You can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who has never tried to eat
one. But as we have only about sixty acres and part of that in woodland,
we have felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to go in
for Belgian hares without sacrificing space which we may require for
ourselves.
Mainly our experiments have been confined to hogs and poultry. I will
not claim that we have been entirely successful in these directions. The
trouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremendously opposed to race
suicide and that our hens are so firmly committed to it. Now offhand
you might think an adult animal of the swine family that completely gave
herself over to the idea of multiplying and replenishing the earth with
her species would be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience I
have found that such is not always the case. Into the world a brood of
little pinky-white squealers are ushered. They grow apace, devouring
with avidity the most expensive brands of pig food that the grocer
has in stock; and then, just when your mind is filled with delectable
visions of hams in the smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellar
and tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare-ribs and
crackling and home-made country sausage and pork tenderloins on the
table--why, your prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera and
are shortly no more. They have a perfect mania for it. They'll travel
miles out of their way to catch it; they'll sit up until all hours of
the night in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the Mississippi
River--and it full of ice--to get where hog cholera is. Our hogs have
been observed in the act of standing in the pen with their snouts in the
air, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs of it right
out of the air. It is very disheartening to be counting on bacon worth
eighty cents a pound only to find that all you have on your hands is a
series of hurried interments.
In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicidally minded as hogs
are. I speak with authority here because we tried raising turkeys, too.
For a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells doom for the
turkey, and accordingly it practically devotes its life to getting
its feet wet. If it cannot escape from the pen into the damp grass
immediately following a rain it will in its desperation take other
measures with a view to catching its death of cold. One of the most
distressing spectacles to be witnessed in all Nature is a half-grown
feebleminded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that it was born a
puddle duck, running round and round a coop trying to find a damp spot
to stand on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In order to get
its feet wet an infant turkey has been known to jump down an artesian
well two hundred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it if a
scientific fact well authenticated. If somebody would only invent a
style of overshoe that might be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkey
without making the turkey feel distraught or self-concious, that
person would confer a boon upon the entire turkey race and at the same
time be in a fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know that a few
months back if such an article had been in the market I would gladly
have taken fifty pairs, assorted misses' and children's sizes.
As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt like altogether
abandoning my belief in the good faith and honest intentions of hens.
Naturally one thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, but my
experience has been that the hen does not follow this line of reasoning.
She prefers to go off on a different bent. She figures she was created
to adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter of man. Or at any
rate I would state that this has been the obsession customarily harbored
by the hens which we have owned and which we persistently continue, in
the face of disappointment compounded, to go on owning.
We started out by buying, at a perfectly scandalous outlay, a collection
of blooded hens of the white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been told
that the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth Rock hen; that a
white Plymouth Rock hen which had had the right sort of influences in
her life and the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in her
maturer career would inevitably dedicate her entire being to producing
eggs. And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselves
offered proof to the absolute contrary.
It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed,
full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head
off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours
of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself:
“Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my
nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the
sake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me,
sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am I
right? I'll say I am!”
You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. And
then when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests
you knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind.
We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make them
see the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administered
to them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted gravel
and ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finicky
and particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied with
the things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; they
wished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantities
of costly chick feed--compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmed
spinster hen to laying her head off.
So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The more
confirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpy
dropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbid
way as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of them
as a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she
was burdened inside with half-developed yolks--a case, one might say, of
mislaid eggs.
In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestion
on them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon
in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and read
aloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?
While I was considering these expedients some one suggested that
probably the trouble lay in the fact that our fowls either were too
highly bred or were too closely related and perhaps an infusion of new
blood was what was needed. So now we went to the other extreme and added
to our flock a collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed and
homely as to their outward appearance, but declared--by their former
owner--to be passionately addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs.
Conceding that this was true, the fact remained that immediately they
passed into our possession they became slackers and nonproducers. I
imagine the mistake we made was in permitting them to associate with the
frivolous white débutantes we already owned; undoubtedly those confirmed
bachelor maids put queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believe
there was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be served up with a
comparative stranger's fried ham. On the theory that they might require
exercise to stimulate their creative faculties we let them range through
the meadows. Some among them promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravage
our garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of the thickets, where
the hawks and the weasels and the skunks and the crows might fatten on
the fruits of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them up again
in their run, whereupon they developed rheumatism and sore eyes and a
perverted craving for eating one another's tail feathers. At present our
chicken yard is nothing more nor less than a hen sanitarium. But we do
not despair of ultimate success with our hens. We may have to cross
them with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere until victory has
perched upon our roosts. As Rupert Hughes remarked when, after writing
a long list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually produced a
riotous hit of hits: “Well, I'm only human--I couldn't fail every time.”
I should have said that there is one fad to which all our Westchester
County colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one
agricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception the
members of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You
meet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience with
Polled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they have
been highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter him
again he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners
or Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.
One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopes
and disappointments during which he first hired and then for good and
sufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commoner
varieties--plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls and
mavericks--decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employment
agencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places.
He procured the address of such an establishment and repaired
thither--simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he entered
the place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, was
a shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather
than the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. He
tried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in so
doing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobs
offered to him--one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on Long
Island and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut.
He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants that
they'll hire almost anybody without requiring references.
None of us will ever be rich; we're all convinced of that, the cost of
impractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none of
us would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor's lot--the word
landed being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., a
landed sucker--for the life of a flat dweller again. It's a great life
if a fellow doesn't weaken--and we'll never weaken.
THE END