difference. There is a great object concealed in ebony leather, and it
is called the “wap-eradicator.” The term is profoundly masculine, for a
“wap” is some evil-eyed foreigner who might disturb our picnic privacy,
and his eradicator is a pistol. There is also a marvelous jackknife
which I pause in unpacking to examine. It again is no lady’s toy,
seeing that it has not only all the blades a lady might require, but in
addition a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a tack-puller and a can-opener.
There is stout enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we always used
to carry china, feminine and fragile. Food, much of that,--but then
we always did take food, for I have noticed that poets need a deal of
victualing. In fact, roast beef is about the best thing you can do for
anybody’s imagination. One packet I myself put in for old sake’s sake,
despite her laughter, a yellow envelope packed with her typed poetry.
“We’ll never look at it,” she said, and she generally knows. She pulls
forth now some scribbled tablets, skeleton stories of my own, “Your
little deedles,” she designates them in genial contempt, and plants the
cream jar upon them.
Presently she is off to gather fagots for the fire, admonishing my
absent-mindedness, “Don’t let Mac eat the food before we do.” I note how
much handier she has grown in all wood-lore. To-day the fire needs no
coaxing, also it’s a much smaller fire than we used to build. We used
to have a scorching splutter for a wee bit of coffee. This fire goes
briskly and to the point, showering us now and then with cinders, yet
on the whole well-behaved. In other days we toasted our bacon on forked
sticks, but there’s a fine frying-pan now, with rings to thrust a rod
into, tightening it with twigs. Bacon and eggs sizzle merrily, and the
coffee-kettle boils its cover off. We sit smut-cheeked and zestful, and
exhibit a great capacity for sandwiches. There is much complacency in
our manners. Her coffee, she remarks, “has seven kinds of sticks in it,
but is perfectly potable.” The fire, that low, leaping ruddiness against
a gray boulder, is the best fire she “ever personally conducted.” As for
me, there is plenty of chuckle in me, too, but I am thinking, when shall
we begin to talk, for was that not what we always went to the woods
for? Somehow, what with building fires, and brewing and frying, with
eating and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to eat and drink, there
has not been time for talking. That will come later, when we have packed
away the sandwiches we could not eat, and given Mac his drink from our
emptied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps of sugar. Then surely at
last we shall talk, about poems and stories, and all things writable,
and all things livable. Sometimes I think she guesses what I am waiting
for and regards me with a twinkle, while she moves about light-footed,
setting away our clutter.
But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched in flickering shadow on
the brown pine needles; and I, the picnic place has caught me again
into its spell. Nowhere does spring come stepping so delicately as in
New England. In other places there is more riot and revelry in the
carnival of bursting blossoms and leaf. In New England spring has the
face of a girl nun. There are white violets in our woods and white
birch stems. The very light has a quality soft and rare. The sky is the
Quaker ladies’ own color. Across the swirling water that leaps down the
rock path, the face of a hill rises high into the sky. It is all gray
boulder and brown, with a film of pale green over all, touched here and
there by the dreamy white of the shadbush. Nearer by, great boulders at
the waterside below us are moss-covered, and across them the dappled
shade of little leaves goes flickering. The beautiful tree shapes are
unhidden, gray stems twining with brown. There is a satin sheen in
the rod of light that lines each trunk-shaft turned to the sun. Just
now, sailing from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray of the hill
opposite, there fluttered a white butterfly.
After a long time I touch the envelope packed with poetry, and move
it tentatively toward my friend’s hand. She shoves it quietly aside.
Drowsy though she is, she has an eye open to watch Peggy’s glossy brown
head tossing down there in an amber-lit wood space, and to see that Mac
does not wake from his nap, where he lies only half visible against the
russet leaves he has chosen to match his coat. Nowadays any soaring talk
may be interrupted by a hearty “Whoa, Peggy!” or a “Down, Mac!” It is
no poor punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for people whose feet have
often ached from treading the tree-tops.
She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to my stories. I am
eager to tell her about all the new people in my brain. She brushes the
cobwebs from their heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing,
in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that I need to write,
while I, I know, too, that she need not. If we did not, each of us,
understand, could there be any more picnics? But the pauses grow longer,
filled with the voices of the water and the wood. The air is warm and
drowsy, and at last she is fast asleep, held close to the brown earth,
and I, the other one, sit straight, my back to a stout pine, while my
thoughts go wandering, gazing in at Eden, at all Edens. Everybody’s path
skirts so many Edens, of the women friends married, and the men friends
married. Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections.
Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine needles, I know,
as every woman must know, that she will never again need me in the old
way, and, as every woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry. The
question for each of us, man or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he,
will she, still come out sometimes into life’s great open and picnic
with me? That all depends, does it not? on the newcomer. If he, if she,
is a petty person, there are no more picnics. If a man, moving in to
possess all sky, all sea, every crack and cranny of the universe, still
holds most sacred there that path of a woman’s past which she walked,
alone, to come to him, he will leave untouched all the little sunny
picnic places, for any man big enough to deserve all a woman’s past
would be far too big to desire it; is not just that the secret of how to
have picnics though married?
And still my thoughts go wandering, passing now from the
“wap-eradicator” to all that lies back of it, of our need for it. How
fundamentally different the way in which we must both regard that great
black pistol lying between us! To her it is a new toy, something she
has recently learned to shoot, and deeper, truer, it is the symbol of a
husband’s protection, while I see beyond it that great fevered army of
the unemployed, those who work and want, whose presence makes a weapon
necessary. In some way I cannot analyze, I know that I am vaguely glad
that I am on their side of the fence; in both my work and play too far
away from them, perhaps, and too forgetful, still on their side of the
ramparts of Eden, in that strange great world where no one ever is
satisfied.
That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to which no new poem has been
added for many a month,--will she ever write again, and shall I be glad
or sorry, I who know myself how a woman’s writing is made? Yet hers
is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark.
Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have
made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too
happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she
remembered,--if she could set to music the purring of her kettle on the
hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,--how the sunny words might twinkle
on harder, stranger paths! But if happy people remembered, could they
then be happy? Oh, dear me, why must I be always asking questions? The
wind is blowing, and against that big frowning boulder a buttercup is
bobbing in the sun: how many times a day one is glad one does not have
to be God, but only has to know Him there, behind this sun-and-shadow
curtain we name Life!
But my friend is awake, measuring the time of the master’s home-going
and ours. She is up, and running down to the waterside. I see her there,
slender and tall, light-poised on a stone. Beyond her the opposite
hillside looms high, green and gray. Above her ruddy head a shadbush
bends itself, russet and white like her own woods-dress. As I look she
tosses the water from her cup, and it falls in a great arc of sun-spray
against the dusk of the woods.
The home-going is as glad as the going forth, but quieter, with long
shadows across the grass. We pass pools where tall trees stand with
their feet in the water in the gold light of late afternoon, and all the
motionless brown water is bordered bright with marsh-marigolds. We stop
at a watering-trough, and I must get out to undo Peggy’s check-rein,
and to keep a hand on Mac’s collar so that he will not tumble head
foremost over the high rail. I hand up a cup to the driver seated, and
we drink thirstily, all four of us.
One farm has been happy with a spring paint-brush since our morning
passing. Every flower-pot, box, tripod, and that curiously frequent
flower-receptacle, the iron boiler, cut in lengthwise section, has been
coated with dashing vermilion. Spring had got into their bones on that
farm.
Mac lags from time to time, and we have to stop to lug and heave him
into the wagon, where he lies across our feet, a panting, restless
lap-robe of warm Airedale. Now a curious social phenomenon occurs. The
very dogs, which in the morning had nosed Mac in friendliest fashion,
come forth and bark and howl at him in his present eminence. It is the
old, old story of the proletariat protesting against the plutocrat.
The green spring country is seamed by old stone walls. I do not know
why an old stone wall has power to touch my pulses strangely, to set
stirring dreams long prisoned. It is some forgotten child association,
I suppose, the feeling that an old stone wall gives me, exactly akin,
by the way, to that of an old covered bridge, with its magic of
mystery-shod hoofs at midnight.
Peggy’s hoofs are swift, going home, and the road, although the same,
seems twice as short as before. At one point we vary it, cutting across
country through a wood of pines. Beneath the pines the earth is all
brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is clear amber, except that
at the far edge of the grove there are bright gold gleams through the
distant tree stems. Above our heads the color is not brown; it is
that strange deep gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart of a pine
tree where the branches meet the trunk. We have not talked very much
to-day, she and I, but here no one could speak any words. These seem
the stillest woods in all the world. We draw rein. Suddenly from out
uttermost silence there rings the chime of a thrush.
But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is panting. Were the animals urgent
just like this, I wonder, when Adam and Eve longed to listen to some
archangel’s voice?
It is Peggy’s will that we get home. The master is there before us,
and at the barn. That is another thing I have noticed about husbands,
when they are not at “The Works,” they are likely to be at the barn, if
there is one. Jennie is flying about, singing to her feet to keep them
lively while she makes us a dinner. Even when that meal comes I find I
am still dreaming, for I was not ready to come home. Afterward in the
clear May twilight we move forth to doorstep and lawn. It is Peggy’s
hour for evening cropping. The master leads her about. Every turn of her
head, every lift of her foot, is a movement of grace. In the gathering
twilight, soft and misty, Peggy seems some beautiful horse stepping
delicately out of elfland. Mac is tugging at the other end of her tether
rope, and the master is somehow strung between them.
The level meadows flow away before us. The deepening blue of the sky
softly puts out the sunset. Suddenly, as at some signal, the frogs begin
to pipe from the meadow pool. My friend crosses the dusky lawn to join
those others. She moves at Peggy’s head in her dim white dress. One star
comes out.
Across their heads I see, hardly discernible, the spires of the city,
and its red earth-lights, and somehow, although I know all its fever,
all its pain, I hear the far crying of its spirit to my spirit, cry of
innermost comradeship, the call of Home. I rise now from my seat on the
doorstep, signal of good-night. She comes flying to my side; of all the
words she might say, she chooses that best one, “It was our very nicest
picnic.”
XV
_The Farm Feminine_
There are in my summer neighborhood three gentlemen farmers who are
women. There is an implied distinction in the implied definition. The
three I have under observation are quite different from those women
farmers who have shouldered their husbands’ acres when forced to do so
by widowhood or other marital disability. This difference, among others
that readily occur, is primarily the same as that between all actual and
amateur farming, the difference between those who grow up out of the
soil and know its tricks, and those who come to the soil from another
plane, and don’t suspect it of having any tricks. At any rate, the lady
farmers of our neighborhood farm because they want to, not because they
have to; otherwise, perhaps, they would not be in our neighborhood at
all, although it is one of the loveliest in all the land.
Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of the South and the beautiful
austerity of New England lies Pennsylvania. This countryside is rich
in mellow old farms, far retired from railways. There are low, rolling
hills and woodsy back roads. Houses are set far up grassy lanes, lined
with trees. Doorways back and front are deep in shade. Barns are big
and white, and spread broad wings over plentiful harvesting. Houses are
white, too, of stucco or of stone, old, kindly, solidly built. To these
shady bricked porches, where the roses clamber against gray-white walls,
Washington’s colonials might have come clattering up. Small wonder that
women desiring farms should desire just this deep-verdured beauty, and
no less wonder that the farms, many good miles from market, should be so
abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to surround herself with fields
and fowls, may readily choose her own particular frame and setting.
The three have chosen, each according to her heart’s requirements.
Lady One is the lady of the flowers, and she is the youngest. Her
throat is round and white, nor beneath the droop of her great garden
hat is it too much exposed to the sun. She wears gloves, white ones
and unique among garden gloves because they fit. Her shoes, her
kerchief, are always freshly white, and her muslin dress of soft shade,
lavender or blue, or sprigged and flounced. She might have stepped
forth from fancy’s gallery where we all keep pictures hanging of
gardens and of grandmothers. She herself may be dreaming of just such
a portrait-picture. But don’t think that she is a drone because she
is perhaps a dreamer. There are no such flowers in thirty miles, and
flowers mean tireless toil; they take more good soil-sweat than a whole
field of potatoes.
She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly seedy, but she retouched
all its fading picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame, low,
and white. Small grilled windows wink with garret mysteries above the
high porch roof, and all is deep in shade and set far back beyond low
terraces with mossy flower urns and steps of cracked flags. There are
trim green globes of box trees before the front door, and to the left is
her garden of flowers set within a labyrinthine box hedge. Everywhere
are roses, roses,--starry little yellow blossoms, red, pink, white,
roses whose very names are fragrant: Flower of Fairfield, Perle de
Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d’Or, Crimson Globe, Killarney.
This lady’s eyes are brown and too deep to fathom because she is still
too young to be fearless. Her voice, her words, are sweet and friendly,
but her eyes do not see you, they see only roses, and in roses,
perhaps, those deeper mysteries all women see in all growing things; her
gloved hand can touch a rose as if it were a little live face.
Quite different, Lady Two and her farm. Here all is bustle and clack.
Chickens, pigs, turkeys, kittens, ducks, puppies, calves occur so
frequently that every day is a birthday. You could not associate Lady
One with the farmyard; you could not associate Lady Two with anything
else. True, her house has a front doorway every whit as picturesque
as Lady One’s,--a square porch where the lilies-of-the-valley push
up through ancient bricks, and a great pine bears fruit of stars
every evening,--but Lady Two is not there to see, for she is putting
her chickens to bed. It is out on the great back porch with its pump
and its grapevine lattice, on this porch and on the slope to the big
barns below, that things happen. There is no rose garden. Lady Two has
flowers, it is true, in hearty democratic confusion and profusion; she
loves them, too, but without subtlety, watering them and her tomato
plants alike with the same splashing hand. Her vegetable-garden is the
garden of her heart. She is a woman radiant with a hoe.
Lady Two is tall and spare, tanned and cheery. Somewhere she has a
family, comfortable and conventional, but somehow she has managed to
slip off to a farm, away from them and all social claims, and thus at
forty she remains a hearty, rosy boy, with quick hands, quick feet,
and brown eyes full of zest. The farm keeps her a little breathless;
she is on the jump all day, from the first imperative call of hungry
chicks to the small-hour barkings of Gyp. It is nothing to hurry forth
from slumber with lantern and comforting words to still her dog. If she
should find that Gyp had been barking at some prowling evil-doer, she
would not think first of her own nerves, but of Gyp’s.
Lady Two cares not for costume, choosing merely the nearest and the
handiest before she hurries forth to her farm. Her hands are marked by
sun and serviceability; could you succor a sick horse in gloves! In
mud-streaked denim, hatted and booted like a man, she stalks the boggy
pasture to recapture the black turkey-hen, an errant lady, who, in
some atavistic dream, prefers to brood on an empty nest in the swamp,
exhibiting a truly feminine propensity to combine a pleasing wildness
with a perilous wetness.
To Lady Two her farm means primarily fowls. Down the slope below the
kitchen porch they are housed with all modern improvements, in brooders
and colony house, and all manner of coops. Ducks waddle, geese strut,
guinea fowl go trip-trip on feet too tiny. At feeding-time Lady Two is
the center of a feathered mass, cackling, peeping, gobbling, quacking,
creaking like rusty hinges as guinea fowl do. She might be a mother with
a great group of happy, boisterous youngsters. Sometimes she stoops to
pick up and inspect some tiny hurt chick. She croons to it with brooding
tenderness. Babies, she calls the tiny things, and babies they are to
her, all the little newly-borns of her farm, whether a pinky piglet, a
calf that gambols awkwardly, a little turkey that must not get its feet
wet, a colt unsteady on stilt-legs, a beady-eyed yellow duckling, a
plunging puppy lost among its own four legs,--babies all.
Not for roses, not for chicks, that grow, both, beneath a fostering
hand, did Lady Three choose her farm. Roses and chicks she has both in
plenty, and tends them with her own hands, adequately and happily, but
without absorption. She has outlived the need for absorption, so that
the twinkle in her gray eyes is imperishable. She has also outlived
the need for varied costume. Hers has the detachment and independence
of uniform, always straight-cut, gray serge with a straight-cut linen
collar, and small crimson tie. Her dress has all a man’s superiority to
his exterior, but her choice of a farm reveals nothing masculine in her
spirit. Her great farmhouse is built of brown stones set irregularly
in clear-seamed white. There are big twin chimneys at right and left.
There is a white tablet beneath the eaves bearing a date of Penn’s
time, but only the shell of the house is old, within all is remade to
a mistress’s liking. If in all women the root of all impulse is to be
always making something that shall tangibly shape to the impress of
each woman’s separate self, then Lady Three chose neither flowers nor
fowls, she chose to create for herself a home. Much-traveled herself,
she found her farm far from beaten paths, lost down a grassy lane
where a brown brook clatters and chuckles from out a hushed woodland.
A business woman, so-called, executive, successful, as any man, she
chose, ten years ago, at fifty, her far-off farm. Her lawns are clear
of litter as was her desk in her counting-room. Her house is heated,
watered, furnished in neatest and completest comfort. Many electrical
devices, and her own ruddy health make her quite independent of kitchen
itinerants not like the mistress inured to loneliness. Having read
much, seen much, done much, known much, in her fifty years, she chose
to spend the rest with herself, in her home, a home where every chair,
book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some quick quaint taste,
some humorous little philosophy. It is a house warm with welcome, but
genially self-sufficient. Of the three, this lady, wise and gray, is the
only one who really sees you, and listens; the other two see only farm.
Lady Three is not afraid to live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or
alone indoors with her hearth fire. You can’t be afraid of the lonely
wind when you have long ago ceased to be afraid of yourself.
Thus my three lady farmers; and now that question, Does their farming
pay? All lady farming depends entirely on the quality of its male
assistance. You cannot farm without a man; it has been tried. Help is an
ever-present trouble, but the Lady of the Roses has not found this out,
because she is still too young and too pretty. Whenever she steps far
from her roses, it is to look at her sky rather than her soil. Unwitting
she has power to turn that brute species, Hired Man, into a very knight
of chivalry, jealous to guard every blade of wheat that springs for
her. Busily binding, cutting, watering her roses, she never even sees
her servitors; but they see her, in all those frail fripperies of hers,
while in the summer evening they linger, blue-overalled and bounden,
just beyond her low hedge, to hear the sound of her voice in its sweet,
absent responses. Her men know she does not see them, but perhaps they
think some day she will perceive what tall corn she has, what sleek
cattle. Does her farming, therefore, pay? Yes, a little, which is as
much as can be said for most farming.
Quite different is the case with Lady Two. She has her hired men and
her hired boys, big and little, and they all keep very busy, watching
her, and they keep still busier demanding that she watch them. She is a
cheery, desirable comrade for any toil, their “Miss Katie,” diminutive,
both affectionate and superior, showing small awe for their tall boy
mistress, in whose brisk capability they have, however, pride. They
constantly call her to see them do it, whatever it is she desires. “Miss
Katie,” “Miss Katie,” resounds from garden and furrow and hencoop. They
cannot detach a setting hen, or churn the butter without her oversight,
loudly bellowed for. They are children demanding that their mother shall
watch their prowess at play. She wonders why her farm does not pay; it
is because of that expensive little name of hers, because of her “Miss
Katie.”
Lady Three,--does her farm give her dollar for dollar? Precisely that,
and that is all she asks of it. Her oversight is brief, adequate. Men
have always worked well for her, they always will. She has the quiet
mistress-mastery that every man recognizes; moreover, she has a bank
account that every man respects.
No, on the whole, lady farming does not pay, if you reckon success
not by desires, but by dollars. From that point of view, only those
women farm successfully who have at least once or twice in their lives
possessed a husband and assimilated his manner of dealing with crops and
with animals. Farming _qua_ farming, that is essentially man’s work,
but farming _qua_ joy, that’s a woman’s discovery. A man farmer is
never fused with his farm, because a man is not built to share earth’s
parturition. In some way or other a woman must be always creating,
always bringing forth. If she is not a house-mother, then she must be
slipping, sliding, something of herself into her roses, her baby chicks,
her home. To be joyous, she must be putting forth shoots, blossoms,
must be pushing down her roots. To be glad, she must feel herself part
of this great springing, growing universe. That woman who has chosen
herself a farm has done so that she may feel her head warmed by the
life-giving sun and her feet firm in the fertile earth.