I PUMP UP A GHOST
As A matter of fact, I didn't. I went to sleep again at five, and
slept till seven. It's not nearly so easy as it sounds in books to
change all your habits of life. But I resolved to try again the next
morning, and meanwhile to keep awake that night at all costs. Then,
after breakfast, I set out for my farm. Hard Cider would be there with
the estimate. The rest of that row of orchard was waiting for me. Mike
and Joe would finish harrowing the potato field and begin planting. I
almost ran down the road!
What is there about remodelling an old house, renovating an old orchard,
planting a fresh-ploughed field, even building a chicken coop, which
inspires us to such enthusiasm? I have written a few things of which I am
not ashamed, and taken great joy in their creation. But it was not the
same joy as that I take in making even one new garden bed, and not in
the least comparable to the joy of those first glorious days when my
old house was shaping up anew. It has often seemed to me almost
biological, this delight in domestic planning both inside and outside of
the dwelling--as though it were foreordained that man should have each
his own plot of earth, which calls out a primal and instinctive
aestheticism like nothing else, and is coupled with the domestic instinct
to reinforce it. I have known men deaf and blind to every other form of
beauty who clung with a loyal and redeeming love to the flowers in
their dooryard.
As I came into my own dooryard, I found Hard Cider unloading lumber.
He nodded briefly, and handed me a dirty slip of paper--his estimate.
Evidently he, too, had paternally taken me over, for this estimate
included the plumber's bill for a heater, the water connections for
house and barn, a boiler on the kitchen range, and the bathroom. The
bill would come to $3,000. That far exceeded my own estimate, and I
had still the painters to reckon with! However, Hard's bill seemed
fair enough, for Bert had told me the price of lumber, and there was a
lot of digging to connect with the town main. I nodded "Go ahead,"
and opened the door. In three minutes he and his assistant were busily
at work.
In the woodshed I found Mike cutting up the seed potatoes into baskets.
"Good mornin'," he said. "Joe's got the tooth harrer workin', and
we'll be plantin' this afternoon."
I started then toward the orchard, only to meet the boss plumber
arriving. With him I went down cellar to decide on the position for the
heater. "Of course you're going to have hot water?" said the boss.
"Am I?" said I. "I loathe radiators. They spoil the rooms. Wouldn't
you, as a great concession, let me have old-fashioned hot air?"
"You can have anything you want, of course," the plumber replied,
being, like most of his kind, without a sense of humour, "but to get
register pipes upstairs in this old house you'll spoil your rooms more
than with radiators. We have some very ornamental radiators."
"There ain't no such animal," said I.
But I ended with hot water. There were to be four radiators downstairs
and three upstairs, one in the bathroom, one in the hall, and one in a
chamber. The other chambers, having fireplaces, I decided needed no
further heat, though the plumber was mournfully skeptical. That made
seven in all, and did not call for a large heater. After much dickering
and argument, the plumber consented to leave the old copper pump at the
sink, in addition to the faucets. I refused to let that pump go, with
its polished brass knob on the iron handle, even though the sink was to
be replaced by a porcelain one. As the bathroom was almost over the
kitchen, and as the house already had a good cesspool, by some happy
miracle, the work was comparatively simple, and the plumber left to get
his men and supplies.
Again I started for the orchard. Already the buds were swelling on the
old trees, and the haze of nascent foliage hung over them. I had four
and a half rows to trim, and then the whole orchard to go over with
paint pot and gouge and cement. I had never trimmed a tree in my life
till the day before, yet I felt that I was doing a better job than
Bert had done on his trees, for Bert's idea of pruning was to cut off
all the limbs he could reach near the trunk, often leaving a stub four
inches long when it didn't happen to be convenient to saw closer. He
made his living, and a good one, selling milk and cauliflowers--he had
thirty acres down to cauliflowers, and shipped them to New York--but,
like so many New England farmers, he couldn't or wouldn't understand
the simple science of tree culture. Anybody can learn tree culture
with a little application to the right books or models and a little
imagination to see into the future. A good tree pruner has to be a bit
of an architect. I thought so then in my pride, at any rate, and it
turned out I was right. Right or wrong, however, I went at my job that
morning with a mighty zest, and soon had a second barrier of dead wood
heaped upon the ground.
As I worked, I thought how this orchard must be trimmed and cleaned
up first, but how the fine planting weather was upon us, too, and I ought
to be getting my garden seeds in, if I was to have any flowers. I
thought, also, of all my manuscripts to be read. A nervous fit seized
me, and I worked frantically. "How on earth shall I ever find time for
all I've got to do?" I said to myself, sending the saw into a dead
limb with a vicious jab. But I soon discovered that nervous haste
wasn't helping any. In my excitement, I cleaned off all the suckers on
a limb, and suddenly realized that I should have left two or three of
the strongest to make new wood, as the limb itself was past bearing.
I thought of Mike's reflection, that he kept his thoughts on his
gardening. So I calmed down, and gave my whole attention to my work,
making a little study of each limb, deciding what I wished to leave for
future development, and what would give the best decorative effect to my
slope as well. You can really trim an old apple tree into a thing of
gnarled power and quaint charm by a little care.
Tap, tap, tap, came the sound of hammers from my house. The plumbers
had returned, and I could hear them rattling pipes. The water company
was digging for the connections. Now and then a shout from Joe to the
horses was wafted down from the plateau. A pair of persistent song
sparrows, building in an evergreen by the brook, kept up a steady song. A
robin sang in the next tree to me. The sun beat warmly on my neck. And I
sawed and pruned, keeping steadily to my job, treating each tree and
limb as a separate and important problem, till I heard the hammers
cease at noon.
I had almost completed my first row!
As I returned from dinner, Joe was walking the drills in the potato
field, dropping the fertilizer, and the bent form of Mike followed
immediately behind him, dropping the seed from a basket. Joe walked
with a fine, free stride, and dropped the fertilizer from his hand
with a perfectly rhythmic gesture. The father's bent back behind him
was an added touch from Millet. But the lone pine and the blue mountains
gave a bright, sharp quality to the landscape which was quite unlike
Millet. The picture held me, however, as do the Frenchman's canvases.
Even my knowledge of Mike's comfortable home and happy disposition did
not rob it of that subtle pathos of agricultural toil. Why the pathos, I
asked myself? Mike is healthy and happy. No toil is more healthful.
I'm working as hard as Mike, and having a glorious time! To be sure,
I'm working my own land, but Mike, too, has a garden of his own, yet
doubtless looks as pathetic in it. I could find no solution, unless it
be that instinctive belief of a city-bred civilization that all joys
are urban. Just then, however, Mike straightened up with a laugh, and
the pathos vanished.
"So the pathos," thought I, as I caught myself instinctively
straightening, too, "is a matter of spinal sympathy!"
This was a most comforting reflection, and I hastened to investigate Hard
Cider's morning work. The kitchen floor was ready to relay. Over the
old planking he had spread tar paper, then carefully adjusted a light,
half-inch framework, and on top of this was laying the new floor.
"Thet'll keep out the cold," he said briefly, carefully lifting the
lid of the stove and spitting into the fire pot.
I examined the framework on which he was laying the new floor. It was
as carefully jointed as if it were the floor itself.
"Why so much pains with this?" I asked, pointing with my toe.
"Why not?" Hard Cider replied, as the March Hare replied to Alice.
I was braver than Alice. "But it doesn't show," I said.
"Somebody might take the floor up," he retorted, with some scorn.
"Hard Cider, after all, is an artist," I thought. "He has the artistic
conscience--and, being a Yankee, he won't admit it."
I went back to my orchard, working with a greater confidence and
speed now, born of practice; and I had begun on the second row by five
o'clock. Then I walked up to the plateau. Joe was working overtime,
covering the drills, while his father was doing the stable work. I staked
the three sections of the field containing Early Rose, Dibble's
Russet, and Irish Cobbler respectively, and entered in my notebook the
date of planting. It occurred to me then and there to keep a diary of
all seeds, soils, fertilizers, and plantings, noting weather conditions
and pests during the growing season, and the time, quality, and
quantity of harvest. That diary I began the same evening; I have kept
it religiously ever since, and I have learned more about agriculture
from its pages than from any other book--something I don't say
vainly at all, because it is but the careful tabulation of practical
experience, and that is any man's best teacher.
I picked up a hoe and helped Joe cover drills for half an hour. Thanks
to golf and rowing, my hands were already calloused, or I don't know
what would have happened to them in those first days!
Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I
walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned
out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the
dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm
was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be
easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a grass terrace,
with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in
the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the
orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the
farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered
south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks
running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog
some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my
pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the
other into the grassy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of
the glass door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench
against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and
thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled,
also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at
the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a
long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs.
Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.
That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done.
I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked
another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily
stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all
day. I must give up my mornings to my manuscript reading.
"Well," thought I, "I'll do it--as soon as the orchard is finished."
As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made
on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary trimming
of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a
half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they
were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to
be painted, and cement work to be done.
"Good gracious!" thought I, "if I do all that, when will I plant, when
will I make my lawn?"
Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire
to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid
sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That
is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn't afford to employ
more labour. Besides, I didn't want to. I wanted to do the work myself.
But there was so much to do!
I stood stock still and pulled myself together. "Rome was not built in
a day," I told myself. "You just take out the worst of the dead wood
in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else
at odd times during the summer."
Then one of those things called a still, small voice whispered in my ear:
"But you should never begin a new job till you have finished the old.
Hoe out your row, my son!"
I recognized the latter words as the catch phrase of a moral story in
an ancient reader used in my boyhood school days. Oh, these blighting
dogmas taught us in our youth! I resisted the still, small voice, but
I felt secretly ashamed. That day I finished the orchard by merely taking
out unsightly dead wood and a few of the worst suckers; so that one
half of it looked naked and one half bearded, even as the half-shaved
hunchback in the "Arabian Nights." I knew I was doing right, yet I
felt I was doing wrong, and in my heart of hearts I was never quite happy
for a year, till I had that orchard finished.
Meanwhile, Hard Cider had finished the kitchen floor and cut out the new
door frame into the dining-room, while the plumbers had mounted the
boiler by the range and begun on the piping. Mike and Joe had been
busy on the slope to the south, ploughing the most distant portion
for the fodder crops and harrowing in load after load of old stable
manure from the barn. The next day would bring them into the garden
area, so I staked out my contemplated sundial lawn, allowing a liberal
250 feet, and ran the line westward till it came a trifle beyond the
last woodshed, whence I ran it north to the shed for the grape arbour.
West of the arbour, on the half acre of slope remaining before the
plateau was reached, I planned to set out a new orchard--some day. That
same night I filled out an order for fifty rambler roses! "I'll grow
'em on poles, till I can build the trellises," said I. Then I sat
down to my manuscripts.
The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and
found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in
the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification
of a hoary superstition. Personally, I like best to work at night, and
some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But
you cannot drive your brain at night when you've been driving your
body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming.
Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden
and Mike sowing peas.
"Can I have the horse to-morrow?" said I.
"Yez cannot," said Mike. "Sure, we'll be another day at the least
gettin' the garden ready."
"But I want to grade my lawn," I said. "The day after, then?"
"Maybe," said Mike. "Yez must make lawns when there's nothin' else
at all to do."
"Yes, sir," I replied, and he grinned.
That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers
fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope
as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at
each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room
for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider
to order the trellis lumber for me.
Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of
cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of
carbolic solution, I gouged out a few--only a few--of the worst cavities
in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a
slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none
too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I
will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my
experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily
interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of
the work to a dentist's filling teeth. If every tree died, I told
myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job
myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs
had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean
up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So
for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed,
carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed,
and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden.
Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled grass (for the
orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the
barrow back for it.
When six o'clock came I was still carting from the top of the orchard,
and for an hour past I had been working with that grim automatism
which characterizes the last lap of a two-mile race. There is no joy
of creation in clearing up! It is just a grind. And yet it is a part
of creation, too, the final stage in the achievement of garden beauty.
I wonder if any gardener exists, though, with the imagination so to
regard it while he cleans? Certainly I am not the man. I then and there
resolved to finish the job by installments, from day to day. Perhaps,
taken a little at a time, it would not seem so boresome!
The next morning the smoke of my burning brush pile was coming over the
hill as I drew near my farm. The harrow was at work in the garden.
Hard's hammer was ringing from the chamber over the dining-room, which
he was converting into a bathroom so that the plumbers could get to work
in it. The old orchard trees held up their cropped and denuded tops
with a brave show of buds, and I debated with myself what I should
do. "Spray!" I decided. So I got a hoe, and started to scrape the
trees mildly on the trunks and large lower limbs, while my lime-sulphur
mixture was boiling on the stove. I soon found that here, again, I
had tackled a job which would require a day, not an hour, so I gave
it up, and put the solution in my spraying barrel, summoned Joe to the
pump, and sprayed for scale on the unscraped bark. I was by this time
getting used to half measures. You have to, when you try to bring up a
farm with limited labour!
The wiseacre has now, of course, foreseen that I killed all the young
buds. Alas! I am again compelled to spoil a good story, and confess
that I didn't kill any of them. I mixed the lime-sulphur one part to
sixty, for I carefully read the warning in my spraying bulletin. I have
my doubts whether it was strong enough to kill the scale, certainly
not with the bark left on, but at least it was weak enough not to kill
the buds, and it was fun applying it.
"There," I cried, as noon came, "the orchard may rest for the present!
Now for the next thing!"
Have you ever watched a small boy picking berries? He never picks a
bush clean, but rushes after this or that big cluster of fruit which
strikes his eye, covering half an acre of ground while you, perhaps,
are stripping a single clump of bushes. And he is usually amazed when
your pail fills quicker than his. Alas! I fear I was much like that small
boy during my first season on the farm, or at any rate during the first
month or two. There was little "efficiency" in my methods--but, oh,
much delight!
I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me.
Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden
coldframes along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my
temporary seed beds there. Mike assented to the plan as a good one,
and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the
nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden
earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and
finally with my hands.
Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for
planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves.
Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves.
Surely, thought I, they miss something--the cool, moist feel of the
loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o'clock
I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin
tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with
scrupulous care always said, "press the earth down firmly with a
board." I was working with a flat mason's trowel, so I got up and
found a board. It wasn't half so easy to work with, but I was taking
no chances!
"There must," I grinned, "be some magic efficacy in that board."
The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by
Professor Grey's assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure.
Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving
those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues--like a second
marriage, alas! too often "the triumph of hope over experience"--or
else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.
But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun,
beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy
fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put
the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to;
very often I didn't know whether they could be transplanted. (As it
turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait.
As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a
marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors' buttons,
love-in-a-mist, Drummond's phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual
larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well
as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the
soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense
enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put
in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I
got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently
watered the hopeful earth.
Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The
great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house
toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was
my farm, thence would come my profits--if profits there should be. But
just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was
more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to
paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my
dwelling a dream of gardens.
"After all," I thought, "a country place is but half realized without
its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of
country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with
shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps
I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in
colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that.
I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a
gardener--an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within;
I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!"
I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old
wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands
and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.
"What are yez doin' that for?" he asked.
I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. "Just to be a kid,
I guess," I laughed.
There are some things Mike couldn't understand. Perhaps I did not
clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and
the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy
memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had
waked the echo of their mood.
But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those
memories came back with haunting clearness--a summer day, a long tramp,
the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden passion,
the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken
words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!
The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far
blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit,
too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the
face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was
dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a manuscript by a
rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was
the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.