By the time I had worn my finger nails to a state of complete
dishabille--happy thought!--and had become a hopeless problem for the
most sanguine manicurist, I began to learn things really. For instance,
this is how a lawn ought to be made:
First, grade your ground, then remove all stones and stumps; next roll
it and then put on a couple of inches of top soil; then roll that until
there isn't a bump in it, sow your grass seed and water constantly,
prayerfully. In making our lawn those are the things they didn't do.
I don't dare rake our lawn, because the minute I start, out will come a
lot of bolders, leaving terrific yawns in the sod. I'm sure the Duke
will forgive me for getting peeved about that lawn, when he understands
that there are callouses in my hands and knots in my lawn mower. Also,
why on earth, after throwing on the grass seed, do the men drive wagons
over it and make ruts and jam their heels into it and make holes, where
my vagrant sprinklings with the hose create lakes and puddles and
produce never a single grass?
With a little preliminary exercise, pushing the big road-roller on
Garrison avenue and shoving marble blocks out of the Courthouse, I
tackled our lawn with a new mower, put together by myself in accordance
with instructions. Our lawn mower is painted a beautiful green on the
blades, to keep out the rust. Also, it was never intended to cut. It
would never do, in an emergency, to shave with.
Musically, our lawn mower for the first ten feet sang to my soul a song
of sweet, rural peace and contentment.
Then it struck a snag and changed the tune.
In the course of two dashes I discovered that the spectacle of a
bald-headed front-yard farmer trotting up and down behind a lawn mower
was a thing to make acquaintance with. Two men I'd never seen in my
life stopped and gazed at me, and one of them asked me if I was mowing
my lawn. A little girl came by and stood cross-legged with her finger in
her mouth, and, when I looked her way, snickered and ran home to tell
her mother what a strange sight she had seen. Our grocer lingered to
remark that it was a hot afternoon, and as if in confirmation of his
remarkable perspicuity a lake of sweat fell like a cloudburst from my
brow and drowned a hill of ants.
"Don't work so hard," said my wife, as I made another turn. "Why don't
you take it easy?"
"I am taking it easy," I replied. "All I need now is a leather chair
and a highball to look like the Maryland Club in repose!"
Sarcasm is one of my strong points, and my wife realized that she had
goaded me into sharp retort, so she giggled at me and ran to the
telephone to tell her mother that Henry was perfectly crazy about his
new lawn mower and couldn't leave it alone for a minute.
With all those people looking on and my lawn mower hitting a rock or a
hole every seven revolutions, I felt cheap. I felt as though it might
have been myself whose jawbone was broken by Samson, or who bore Balaam
to Jerusalem. The crowd kept growing, and a stream of honest toil rolled
down my spine. Somehow or other I finished the job. Then I looked at the
crowd. I left the lawn mower and walked over to them with a deadly glare
in my eye.
"Any of you fellows want to fight?" I demanded rudely.
Nobody replied.
"Because if you do," I said, "I can tie both hands behind me and lick
any six of you right now."
The crowd melted away slowly. One man did stay a moment, but he didn't
want to fight. He offered to feel my pulse.
In spite of his sarcasm, and in the face of all criticism, I insist
that I was beginning to learn. For instance, shall I tell you of the
time I astonished Campbell?
Campbell was raised in the country. The smell of sod is strong in his
nostrils, and he is a handy man with a hoe. Campbell is an agent for the
Duke, but time hangs on his hands at moments and he dropped around in a
casual sort of way to look at our back yard.
"I'm thinking of planting a turnip and some onions," said my wife
pleasantly.
Campbell smiled.
"In that soil," he said, "you'll never make them completely happy.
They'll be crying for home all the time."
"What's the matter with the soil?" demanded my wife.
"Well, it wasn't built for farming. You always have to put in richer
soil. I'll show you."
My wife thinks Campbell is just about right. When he began to talk about
how he'd enjoy fixing her garden, and would she please let him have the
hoe, rake, spade, and a bucket to tote sod from a pile in the front
yard, she began to look upon him as a Dispensation of Providence.
Agriculturally, I dwindled in importance as he expanded.
He cut five rows, or furrows, or ditches, or whatever you call them,
with the hoe, and into them he dropped peas, beans, onions, parsley, and
parsnips. Then he brought buckets of top soil and dumped it on the seeds
along the line, and raked the soil over until it was smooth, and stuck
the empty envelopes at the end of the rows for fear my wife would get
the peas identified as corn, the beans as peanuts, the onions as
cauliflower, the parsley as rhubarb, the parsnips as turnips. Campbell
let me bring some more buckets of soil. For that favor I have begun to
question the degree of Campbell's kindness.
Then I spoke.
"Your rows of top soil will start the seeds," I said, "but never
maintain them when they're out. We must get some commercial fertilizer,
and the minute the sprouts show, sprinkle it along the sides of the
furrows. Then we must soak the farm with a hose."
My wife sneered. "He's right," said Campbell. My wife winked at him to
carry on the joke, but he insisted in sign language that I really had
the proper dope. She wilted.
"Now," I said, "we'll have William throw five loads of top soil into
this next patch, over which we will run a plough, mixing it not less
than a foot deep. Then we'll cover it down, roll it and soak it for a
week. We will then be ready to plant our tomato vines and more onions,
along the rows of which we'll sprinkle our fertilizer about two sacks to
ten yards. This temporary work you've done is about as practical as a
school of journalism or poetry. We'll let it stand as a horrible
example, but all this goes under, too, in the fall. Then we'll dig
trenches around the yard, a foot deep, fill in solid with top soil and
after a week of settling plant a double row of hedge, one foot apart in
length and six inches apart in width. Am I right?"
I had her gasping. She stared at me in wonder, and Campbell--well, he
just stood with his mouth open like a catfish, admiring and astounded.
That day when a man becomes a hero in his wife's eyes is a triumph such
as Napoleon never knew in his greatest moments, and the feel of it
outdoes the joy of a Nero in the plaudits of the claque. It isn't
necessary to mention that I got it out of a bulletin from the
agricultural department.