A GOOD APPLE
“I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
goods.”
I have just had one of the pleasant experiences of life. From time to
time, these brisk winter days, I like to walk across the fields to
Horace’s farm. I take a new way each time and make nothing of the snow
in the fields or the drifts along the fences....
“Why,” asks Harriet, “do you insist on struggling through the snow when
there’s a good beaten road around?”
“Harriet,” I said, “why should any one take a beaten road when there
are new and adventurous ways to travel?”
When I cross the fields I never know at what moment I may come upon
some strange or surprising experience, what new sights I may see, what
new sounds I may hear, and I have the further great advantage of
appearing unexpectedly at Horace’s farm. Sometimes I enter by the cow
lane, sometimes by way of the old road through the wood-lot, or I
appear casually, like a gust of wind, around the corner of the barn, or
I let Horace discover me leaning with folded arms upon his cattle
fence. I have come to love doing this, for unexpectedness in visitors,
as in religion and politics, is disturbing to Horace and, as sand-grits
in oysters produce pearls, my unexpected appearances have more than
once astonished new thoughts in Horace, or yielded pearly bits of
native humour.
Ever since I have known him, Horace has been rather high-and-mighty
with me; but I know he enjoys my visits, for I give him always, I
think, a pleasantly renewed sense of his own superiority. When he sees
me his eye lights up with the comfortable knowledge that he can plough
so much better than I can, that his corn grows taller than mine, and
his hens lay more eggs. He is a wonderfully practical man, is Horace;
hard-headed, they call it here. And he never feels so superior, I
think, as when he finds me sometimes of a Sunday or an evening walking
across the fields where my land joins his, or sitting on a stone fence,
or lying on my back in the pasture under a certain friendly thorn-apple
tree. This he finds it difficult to understand, and thinks it highly
undisciplined, impractical, no doubt reprehensible.
One incident of the sort I shall never forget. It was on a June day
only a year or so after I came here, and before Horace knew me as well
as he does now. I had climbed the hill to look off across his own
high-field pasture, where the white daisies, the purple fleabane, and
the buttercups made a wild tangle of beauty among the tall herd’s
grass. Light airs moved billowing across the field, bobolinks and
meadow larks were singing, and all about were the old fences, each with
its wild hedgerow of choke cherry, young elms, and black raspberry
bushes, and beyond, across miles and miles of sunny green countryside,
the mysterious blue of the ever-changing hills. It was a spot I loved
then, and have loved more deeply every year since.
Horace found me sitting on the stone fence which there divides our
possessions; I think he had been observing me with amusement for some
time before I saw him, for when I looked around his face wore a
comfortably superior, half-disdainful smile.
“David,” said he, “what ye doin’ here?”
“Harvesting my crops,” I said.
He looked at me sharply to see if I was joking, but I was perfectly
sober.
“Harvestin’ yer crops?”
“Yes,” I said, the fancy growing suddenly upon me, “and just now I’ve
been taking a crop from the field you think you own.”
I waved my hand to indicate his high-field pasture.
“Don’t I own it?”
“No, Horace, I’m sorry to say, not all of it. To be frank with you,
since I came here, I’ve quietly acquired an undivided interest in that
land. I may as well tell you first as last. I’m like you, Horace, I’m
reaching out in all directions.”
I spoke in as serious a voice as I could command: the tone I use when I
sell potatoes. Horace’s smile wholly disappeared. A city feller like me
was capable of anything!
“How’s that?” he exclaimed sharply. “What do you mean? That field came
down to me from my grandfather Jamieson.”
I continued to look at Horace with great calmness and gravity.
“Judging from what I now know of your title, Horace,” said I, “neither
your grandfather Jamieson nor your father ever owned all of that field.
And I’ve now acquired that part of it, in fee simple, that neither they
nor you ever really had.”
At this Horace began to look seriously worried. The idea that any one
could get away from him anything that he possessed, especially without
his knowledge, was terrible to him.
“What do you mean, Mr. Grayson?”
He had been calling me “David,” but he now returned sharply to
“Mister.” In our country when we “Mister” a friend something serious is
about to happen. It’s the signal for general mobilization.
I continued to look Horace rather coldly and severely in the eye.
“Yes,” said I, “I’ve acquired a share in that field which I shall not
soon surrender.”
An unmistakable dogged look came into Horace’s face, the look inherited
from generations of land-owning, home-defending, fighting ancestors.
Horace is New England of New England.
“Yes,” I said, “I have already had two or three crops from that field.”
“Huh!” said Horace. “I’ve cut the grass and I’ve cut the rowen every
year since you bin here. What’s more, I’ve got the money fer it in the
bank.”
He tapped his fingers on the top of the wall.
“Nevertheless, Horace,” said I, “I’ve got my crops, also, from that
field, and a steady income, too.”
“What crops?”
“Well, Eve just now been gathering in one of them. What do you think of
the value of the fleabane, and the daisies, and the yellow five-finger
in that field?”
“Huh!” said Horace.
“Well, I’ve just been cropping them. And have you observed the wind in
the grass—and those shadows along the southern wall? Aren’t they
valuable?”
“Huh!” said Horace.
“I’ve rarely seen anything more beautiful,” I said, “than this field
and the view across it—I’m taking that crop now, and later I shall
gather in the rowen of goldenrod and aster, and the red and yellow of
the maple trees—and store it all away in _my_ bank—to live on next
winter.”
It was some time before either of us spoke again, but I could see from
the corner of my eye that mighty things were going on inside of Horace;
and suddenly he broke out into a big laugh and clapped his knee with
his hand in a way he has.
“Is that all!” said Horace.
I think it only confirmed him in the light esteem in which he held me.
Though I showed him unmeasured wealth in his own fields, ungathered
crops of new enjoyment, he was unwilling to take them, but was content
with hay. It is a strange thing to me, and a sad one, how many of our
farmers (and be it said in a whisper, other people, too) own their
lands without ever really possessing them: and let the most precious
crops of the good earth go to waste.
After that, for a long time, Horace loved to joke me about my crops and
his. A joke with Horace is a durable possession.
“S’pose you think that’s your field,” he’d say.
“The best part of it,” I’d return, “but you can have all I’ve taken,
and there’ll still be enough for both of us.”
“You’re a queer one!” he’d say, and then add sometimes, dryly, “but
there’s one crop ye don’t git, David,” and he’d tap his pocket where he
carries his fat, worn, leather pocket-book. “And as fer feelin’s, it
can’t be beat.”
So many people have the curious idea that the only thing the world
desires enough to pay its hard money for is that which can be seen or
eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will
haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to
the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange,
intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a
feverish world the unknown great possessions.
So it was that one day, some months afterward, when we had been thus
bantering each other with great good humour, I said to him:
“Horace, how much did you get for your hay this year?”
“Off that one little piece,” he replied, “I figger fifty-two dollars.”
“Well, Horace,” said I, “I have beaten you. I got more out of it this
year than you did.”
“Oh, I know what you mean——”
“No, Horace, you don’t. This time I mean just what you do: money, cash,
dollars.”
“How’s that, now?”
“Well, I wrote a little piece about your field, and the wind in the
grass, and the hedges along the fences, and the weeds among the
timothy, and the fragrance of it all in June and sold it last week——” I
leaned over toward Horace and whispered behind my hand—in just the way
he tells me the price he gets for his pigs.
“What!” he exclaimed.
Horace had long known that I was “a kind of literary feller,” but his
face was now a study in astonishment.
“_What?_”
Horace scratched his head, as he is accustomed to do when puzzled, with
one finger just under the rim of his hat.
“Well, I vum!” said he.
Here I have been wandering all around Horace’s barn—in the snow—getting
at the story I really started to tell, which probably supports Horace’s
conviction that I am an impractical and unsubstantial person. If I had
the true business spirit I should have gone by the beaten road from my
house to Horace’s, borrowed the singletree I went for, and hurried
straight home. Life is so short when one is after dollars! I should not
have wallowed through the snow, nor stopped at the top of the hill to
look for a moment across the beautiful wintry earth—gray sky and bare
wild trees and frosted farmsteads with homely smoke rising from the
chimneys—I should merely have brought home a singletree—and missed the
glory of life! As I reflect upon it now, I believe it took me no longer
to go by the fields than by the road; and I’ve got the singletree as
securely with me as though I had not looked upon the beauty of the
eternal hills, nor reflected, as I tramped, upon the strange ways of
man.
Oh, my friend, is it the settled rule of life that we are to accept
nothing not expensive? It is not so settled for me; that which is
freest, cheapest, seems somehow more valuable than anything I pay for;
that which is given better than that which is bought; that which passes
between you and me in the glance of an eye, a touch of the hand, is
better than minted money!
I found Horace upon the March day I speak of just coming out of his new
fruit cellar. Horace is a progressive and energetic man, a leader in
this community, and the first to have a modern fruit cellar. By this
means he ministers profitably to that appetite of men which craves most
sharply that which is hardest to obtain: he supplies the world with
apples in March.
It being a mild and sunny day, the door of the fruit cellar was open,
and as I came around the corner I had such of whiff of fragrance as I
cannot describe. It seemed as though the vials of the earth’s most
precious odours had been broken there in Horace’s yard! The smell of
ripe apples!
In the dusky depths of the cellar, down three steps, I could see
Horace’s ruddy face.
“How are ye, David,” said he. “Will ye have a Good Apple?”
So he gave me a good apple. It was a yellow Bellflower without a
blemish, and very large and smooth. The body of it was waxy yellow, but
on the side where the sun had touched it, it blushed a delicious deep
red. Since October it had been in the dark, cool storage-room, and
Horace, like some old monkish connoisseur of wines who knows just when
to bring up the bottles of a certain vintage, had chosen the exact
moment in all the year when the vintage of the Bellflower was at its
best. As he passed it to me I caught, a scent as of old crushed apple
blossoms, or fancied I did or it may have been the still finer aroma of
friendship which passed at the touching of our fingers.
It was a hand-filling apple and likewise good for tired eyes, an
antidote for winter, a remedy for sick souls.
“A wonderful apple!” I said to Horace, holding it off at arm’s length.
“No better grown anywhere,” said he, with scarcely restrained pride.
I took my delight of it more nearly; and the odour was like new-cut
clover in an old orchard, or strawberry leaves freshly trod upon, or
the smell of peach wood at the summer pruning—how shall one describe
it? at least a compound or essence of all the good odours of summer.
“Shall I eat it?” I asked myself, for I thought such a perfection of
nature should be preserved for the blessing of mankind. As I hesitated,
Horace remarked:
“It was grown to be eaten.”
So I bit into it, a big liberal mouthful, which came away with a
rending sound such as one hears sometimes in a winter’s ice-pond. The
flesh within, all dewy with moisture, was like new cream, except a rim
near the surface where the skin had been broken; here it was of a
clear, deep yellow.
New odours came forth and I knew for the first time how perfect in
deliciousness such an apple could be. A mild, serene, ripe, rich
bouquet, compounded essence of the sunshine from these old
Massachusetts hills, of moisture drawn from our grudging soil, of all
the peculiar virtues of a land where the summers make up in the passion
of growth for the long violence of winter; the compensatory aroma of a
life triumphant, though hedged about by severity, was in the bouquet of
this perfect Bellflower.
Like some of the finest of wines and the warmest of friends it was of
two flavours, and was not to be eaten for mere nourishment, but was to
be tasted and enjoyed. The first of the flavours came readily in a
sweetness, richness, a slight acidity, that it might not cloy; but the
deeper, more delicate flavour came later—if one were not crudely
impatient—and was, indeed, the very soul of the fruit. One does not
quickly arrive at souls either in apples or in friends. And I said to
Horace with solemnity, for this was an occasion not to be lightly
treated:
“I have never in my life tasted a fine apple.”
“There is no finer apple,” said Horace with conviction.
With that we fell to discussing the kinds and qualities of all the
apples grown this side China, and gave our more or less slighting
opinions of Ben Davises and Greenings and Russets, and especially of
trivial summer apples of all sorts, and came to the conclusion at last
that it must have been just after God created this particular “tree
yielding fruit” that he desisted from his day’s work and remarked that
what he saw was good. The record is silent upon the point, and Moses is
not given to adjectives, but I have often wondered what He would have
said if He had not only seen the product of His creation, but _tasted_
it.
I forgot to say that when I would have slurred the excellence of the
Baldwin in comparison with the Bellflower, Horace began at once to
interpose objections, and defended the excellence and perfection of
that variety.
...He has fifty barrels of Baldwins in his cellar.
While we talked with much enjoyment of the lore of apples and
apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to
Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds:
“Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life.”
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