The Abandoned Farmers. His Humorous Account of a Retreat from the City to the Farm

One morning in the early part of the month of June I counted within sight at one time fourteen varieties of birds, including such brilliantly colored specimens as a scarlet tanager and his mate; a Baltimore oriole; a bluebird; an indigo bunting; a chat; and a flicker – called, where I came from, a yellow hammer. Robins were probing for worms in the rank grass; two brown thrashers and a black-billed cuckoo were investigating the residential possibilities of a cedar tree not far away; and from the woods beyond came the sound of a cock grouse drumming his amorous fanfare on a log.

Think of what that meant to a man who, for the better part of twelve years, had been hived up in a flat, with English sparrows for company, when he craved a bit of wild life!

What had been a gardener’s cottage stood at the roadside a hundred yards away from the site of the main house. On first examination it seemed fit only for the scrap heap; but one of those wise elderly persons who are to be found in nearly every rural community – a genius who was part carpenter, part mason, part painter, part glazier and part plasterer – was called into consultation, and he decided that, given time and material for mending, he might be able to do something with the shell. Modestly he called himself an odd-jobs man; really he was a doctor to decrepit and ailing structures.

From neglect and dry rot the patient was almost gone; but he nursed it back to a new lease on life, trepanning its top with new rafters, splinting its broken sides with new clapboards. He cured the cellar walls of rickets, the roof of baldness, and the inside woodwork of tetter; and he so wrought with hammer and saw and nails, with lime and cement, with paintbrush and putty knife, that presently what had been a most disreputable blot on the landscape became not only a livable little house but an exceedingly picturesque one, what with its wide overhanging gables, its cocky little front veranda, and its new complexion of roughcast stucco.

While this transformation was accomplished in the lower field, we were doing things to the barn up on the hillside. It had good square lines, the barn had; and, though its outer casing was in a woeful state of nonrepair, its frame, having been built sixty or seventy years ago of splendid big timbers, stood straight and unskewed. Thanks to the ability of our architect to dream an artistic dream and then to create it, this structure, without impairment of its general lines and with no change at all in its general dimensions, presently became a combination garage and bungalow.

The garage part was down below, occupying the space formerly given over to horse stalls and cow sheds. Here, also, a furnace room, a laundry and a servant’s room were built in. Above were the housekeeping quarters – three bedrooms; two baths; a big living hall, with a wide-mouthed fireplace in it; a kitchen, and a pantry. This floor had been the haymow; but I’ll warrant that if any of the long-vanished hay which once rested there could have returned it wouldn’t have known the old place.

The roof of the transmogrified mow was sufficiently high to permit the construction of a roomy attic, with accommodations for one sleeper at one end of it, and ample storage space besides.

At the back of the building, where the teams had driven in, a little square courtyard of weathered brick was laid; a roof of rough Vermont slate was laid on in an irregular splotchy pattern of buff and yellow and black squares; and finally, upon the front, at the level of the second floor, the builder hung on a little Italian balcony, from which on clear days, looking south down the Hudson, we have a forty-mile stretch of landscape and waterscape before us.

On the nearer bank, two miles away, the spires of the market town show above the tree tops; on the further bank, six miles away, the rumpled blue outlines of the Ramapo Hills bulk up against the sky line; and back of those hills are sunsets such as ambitious artists try, more or less unsuccessfully, to put on canvas.

All this had not cost so much as it might have, because all the interior trim, all the doors and windows, and all the studs and joists and beams had been reclaimed from the demolished main building. The chief extravagances had been a facing of stonework for the garage front and a stucco dress for the upper walls. We broke camp and moved in.

For a month or so we went along swimmingly. One morning we quit swimming. All of a sudden we woke up to find there was no longer sufficient water for aquatic pastimes.

The absolutely unprecedented dry spell that occurs every second or third year in this part of the North Temperate Zone had descended upon us, taking us, as it were, unawares. The brooks were going dry; the grass on hillsides where the soil was thin turned from a luscious green to a parched brown; and the mother spring of our seven up the valley, which had gushed so plenteously, now diminished overnight, as it were, into a puny runlet. There were no indications that the spring would be absolutely dry; but there was every indication that it would continue to lessen in the volume of its output – which it did. We summoned friends and well-wishers into consultation, and by them were advised to dig an artesian well.

We did not want to bother with artesian wells then. We were living very comfortably upstairs over the garage and we were planning the house we meant to build. We had drawn plans, and yet more plans, torn them up and started all over again; and had found doing this to be one of the deepest pleasures of life. Time without end we had conferred with friends who had built houses of their own, and who gave us their ideas of the things which would be absolutely indispensable to our comfort and happiness in our new house. We had incorporated these ideas with a few of our own, and then we had found that if we meant to construct a house which would please all concerned, ourselves included, there would be needed a bond issue to float the enterprise and the completed structure would be about the size of a cathedral. So then we would trim down, paring off a breakfast porch here and a conservatory there, until we had a design for a compact edifice not much larger than an averagesized railroad terminal.

Between times, when not engaged in the pleasing occupation of building our house on paper, we chose the site where it should stand. This, also, consumed a good many days, because each time we decided on a different location. One of our favorite recreations was shifting the house we meant to build about from place to place. We put imaginary wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us was we had too much latitude. With half an acre of land at our disposal, we should have been circumscribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you have to be reasonably definite about where you are going to build; slide too far one way or the other, and you are committing trespass, and litigation ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick and to choose – sixty acres, with desirable sites scattered all over the tract.

No sooner had we absolutely and positively settled on one spot as the spot where the house must stand than we would find half a dozen others equally desirable, or even more so; and then, figuratively speaking, we would pick up the establishment and transport it to one of the newly discovered spots, and wheel it round to face in a different direction from the direction in which it had just been facing. If a thing that does not yet physically exist may have sensations, the poor dizzy thing must have felt as if it were a merry-go-round.

Likewise we were very busy putting in our road. Up until a short time ago Miss Anna Peck, who makes a specialty of scaling supposedly inaccessible crags, was probably the only living person who could have derived any pleasure from penetrating to our mountain fastness, either afoot or otherwise. When we heard an engine in difficulties coughing down under the hill, followed by the sound of a tire blowing out, or by the smell of rubber scorching as the brakes clamped into the fabric, we knew some of our friends had been reckless enough to undertake to climb up by motor. So, unless we wanted to become hermits, we felt it incumbent upon us to put in a road.

When we got the estimates on the job we decided that the contractor must have figured on building our road of chalcedony or onyx or moss agate or some other of the semi-precious stones. It didn’t seem possible that he meant to use any native material – at that price. It turned out, though, that his bid was fairly moderate – as processed blue-stone roads go in this climate; and ours has cost us only about eight times as much as I had previously supposed a replica of the Appian Way would cost. However, it has been pronounced a very good road by critics who should know; not a fancy road, but a fair average one.

It would look smarter, of course, with wide brick gutters down either side of it for its entire length; and I should add brick gutters, too, if I were as comfortably fixed, say, as Mr. Charles Schwab, and felt sure that I could get some of the Vanderbilt boys to help me out in case I ran short of funds before the job was completed. Still, for persons who live simply it does very well.

With all these absorbing employments to engage us, we naturally were loath to turn our attentions to water. We had lived too long in a flat where, when you wanted water, you merely turned a faucet. To us water had always been a matter of course. But now the situation was different. With each succeeding day the flow from our spring was slackening. In its present puniness it was no more than a reminder of the brave stream of the springtime.

There was a water witch, so called, in the neighborhood – a gentleman water witch. We were recommended to avail ourselves of his services. It was his custom, we were told, to arm himself with a forked peach-tree switch and walk about over the land, holding the wand in front of him by its two prongs, meantime muttering strange incantations. When he came to a spot where water lay close to the surface the other end of his divining rod would dip magically toward the earth. You dug there, and if you struck water the magician took the credit for it; and if you didn’t strike water it was a sign the peach-tree switch had wilfully deceived its proprietor, and he cut a fresh twig off another and more dependable tree and gave you a second demonstration at half rates. However, before opening negotiations with this person, I bethought me to interview the man who had contracted to do the boring.

The latter gentleman proved to be the most noncommittal man I ever met in my life. He was as chary about making predictions as to the result of operations in his line as the ticket agent of a jerkwater railroad down South is about estimating the probable time of arrival of the next passenger train – always conceding that there is to be any next train; and that is as chary as any human being can possibly be. Only upon one thing was he positive, which was that no peach-tree switch in the world could be educated up to the point where it could find water that was hidden underground.

Man and boy, he had been boring wells for thirty years, he said; and it was all guess. One shaft would be put down – at three dollars a foot – until it pierced the roof of Tophet, and the only resultant moisture would be night sweats for the unhappy party who was footing the bills. Or the same prospector might dig his estate so full of circular holes that it would resemble honeycomb tripe, and never get anything except monthly statements for the work to date. On the other hand, a luckier man, living right across the way, had been known to start sinking a shaft, and before the drill had gone twenty feet it became necessary to remove the women and children to a place of safety until the geyser had been throttled down.

This particular well digger’s business, as he himself explained, was digging wells, not filling them after they were dug. He guaranteed to make a hole in the ground of suitable caliber for an artesian well, but Nature and Providence must do the rest. With this understanding, he fetched up his outfit and greased himself and the machinery all over, and announced that he was ready to start.

So we picked out a spot where it would be convenient to build a pump house afterward, and he fixed up the engine and began grinding away. And he ground and ground and ground. Every morning, whistling a cheerful air, he would set his drills in circular motion, and all day he would keep it turning and turning. At eventide I would call on him and he would report progress – he had advanced so many feet or so many yards in a southerly direction and had encountered such and such a formation.

“Any water?” At first I would put up the question hopefully, then nervously, and finally for the sake of regularity merely.

“No water,” he would reply blithely; “but this afternoon about three o’clock I hit a stratum of the prettiest white quartz you ever saw in your life.” And, with the passion of the born geologist gleaming in his eye, he would pick up a handful of shining specimens and hold them out for me to admire; but I am afraid that toward the last any enthusiasm displayed by me was more or less forced.

And the next night it would be red sandstone, or gray mica, or sky-blue schist, or mottled granite, or pink iron ore – or something! This abandoned farm of ours certainly proved herself to be a mighty variegated mineral prospect. In the course of four weeks that six-inch hole brought forth silver and solder, soda and sulphur, borax and soapstone, crystal and gravel, amalgam fillings and a very fair grade of moth balls.

It brought forth nearly everything that may be found beneath the surface of the earth, I think, except radium – and water. On second thought, I am not so sure about the radium. It occurs to me that we did strike a trace of something resembling radium at the two-hundred-foot level – I won’t be positive. But I am absolutely sure about the water. There wasn’t any.

At the end of a long and expensive month we abandoned that hole, fruitful though it was in mineral wealth, moved the machinery a hundred yards west, and began all over again. We didn’t get any water here, either; but before we quit we ran into a layer of wonderful white marble. If anybody ever discovers a way of getting marble for monuments and statuary out of a hole six inches in diameter and a hundred and seventy-five feet deep our fortunes are made. We have the hole and the marble at the bottom of it; all he will have to provide is the machinery.

By now we were desperate, but determined. We sent word to George Creel to rush us application blanks for membership in his Despair Association. We transferred the digging apparatus to a point away down in the valley, and the contractor retuned his engine and inserted a new steel drill – his other one had been worn completely out – and we began boring a third time. And three weeks later – oh, frabjous joy! – we struck water – plenteous oodles of it; cold, clear and pure. And then we broke ground for our new house.

That isn’t all – by no means is it all. Free from blight, our potatoes are in the bin; our apples have been picked; and our corn has been gathered, and in a rich golden store, it fills our new corncrib. We are eating our own chickens and our own eggs; we are drinking milk from our own cow; and we are living on vegetables of our own raising.

Until now I never cared deeply for turnips. Turnips, whether yellow or white, meant little in my life. But now I know that was because they were strange turnips, not turnips which had grown in our own soil and for which I could have almost a paternal affection. Last night for dinner I ate a derby hatful of mashed turnips, size seven and an eighth.

Let the servants quit now if they will – and do. Only the day before yesterday the laundress walked out on us. It was our new laundress, who had succeeded the old laundress, the one who stayed with us for nearly two consecutive weeks before the country life palled upon her sensitive spirit. And the day before that we lost a perfect treasure of a housemaid. She disliked something that was said by some one occupying the comparatively unimportant position of a member of the family, and she took umbrage and some silverware and departed from our fireside. We’ve had our troubles with cooks, too.

When the latest one showed signs of a gnawing discontent I offered to take lessons on the ukulele and play for her in the long winter evenings that are now upon us. I suggested that we think up charades and acrostics – I am very fertile at acrostics – and have anagram parties now and then to while away the laggard hours. But no; she felt the call of the city and she must go. We are expecting a fresh candidate to-morrow. We shall try to make her stay with us, however brief, a pleasant one.

But these domestic upsets are to us as nothing at all; for we have struck water, and we are living, in part at least, on our own home-grown provender, and shortly we shall start the home of our dreams. And to-day something else happened that filled our cup of joy to overflowing. In the middle of the day a dainty little doe came mincing down through our garden just as confidently as though she owned the place.

We are less than an hour by rail from the Grand Central Station; and yet, as I write this line, a lordly cock grouse is strutting proud and unafraid through the undergrowth not fifty yards from my workroom! Last night, when I opened my bedroom window – in the garage – to watch the distant reflection of the New York lights, flickering against the sky to the southward, I heard a dog fox yelping in the woods!

Let Old Major Gloom, the human Dismal Swamp, come over now as often as pleases him. Our chalice is proof against his poison.

CHAPTER VI. TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE

As the reader will have no trouble in recalling, we broke ground for our house. That, however, was after we had altered the design so often that the first lot of plans and specifications got vertigo and had to be retired in favor of a new set. For one thing, we snatched one entire floor out of the original design – just naturally jerked it out from under and cast it away and never missed it either. And likewise this was after we had shifted the site of the house from one spot to another spot and thence to a third likely spot, and finally back again to the first spot. This, however, had one thing in its favor at least. It enabled us to do our moving without taking our household goods from storage, and yet during the same period to enjoy all the pleasurable thrill of shifting about from place to place. I find moving in your mind is a much less expensive way than the other way is and gives almost as much pleasure to a woman, who – being a woman – is naturally a mover at heart.

Finally, though, all this preliminary skirmishing came to an end and we actually started work on our house. I should say, we started work on what formerly we had thought was going to be our house. It turned out we were wrong. As it stands to-day, two years after the beginning, in a state approaching completion, it is a very satisfactory sort of house we think, artistically as well as from the standpoint of being practical and comfortable; but it is no longer entirely our house. The architect is responsible for the general scheme of things, for the layout and the assembling of the wood and the brick and the cement and the stonework and all that sort of thing, and to him largely will attach the credit if the effect within and without should prove pleasing to the eye. Likewise, here and there are to be found the traces of ideas which we ourselves had, but I must confess the structure is also a symposium of the modified ideas of our friends and well-wishers mated to our ideas.

To me human nature presents a subject for constant study. For a thing so widely distributed as it is, I regard it as one of the most interesting things there are anywhere. It seems to me one of the chief peculiarities of human nature is that it divides all civilized mankind into two special groups – those who think they could run any newspaper better than the man who is trying to run it, and those who think they could run any hotel better than the man who is hanging on as manager or proprietor of it. There are subdivisional classifications of course – for example, women who think they can tell any other woman how to bring up her children without spoiling them to death, and women who are absolutely sure no woman on earth can tell them anything about the right way to bring up their own children; which two groupings include practically all women. And I have yet to meet the man who did not believe that he was a good judge of either horses, diamonds, wines, women, salad dressings, antique furniture, Oriental rugs or the value of real estate. And finally all of these, regardless of sex and regardless, too, of previous experience in the line, know better how a house intended for living purposes should be designed and arranged than the individuals who are paying the bills and who expect to tenant the house as a home when it is done. By the same token – or by the inverse ratio of the same token – the persons who are building the house invariably begin to have doubts and misgivings regarding the worth of their own pet notions in regard to the said house the moment some outsider offers a counter argument. I do not know why this last should be so, but it is. It merely is one of the inexplicable phases of the common phenomenon called human nature.

In our own case the force of this fact applied with a pronounced emphasis. When the tentative draft of the house of our dreams was offered for our inspection it seemed to us a gem – perfect, precious and rare. Filled with pride as we were, we showed the drawings to every one who came to see us. Getting out the drawings when somebody called became a regular habit with us. Being ourselves so deeply interested in them, we couldn’t understand why our friends shouldn’t be interested too. And they were – I’ll say that much for them; they were all interested. And why not? For one thing, it gave them a chance to show how right they were regarding the designing of a house; not our house particularly, but anything under a roof, ranging from St. Peter’s at Rome to the façade of the government fish hatchery in Tupelo, Mississippi. For another thing, it gave them a chance to show us how completely wrong we were on this subject. Not a single soul among them but pounced at the opportunity. Until then I never realized how many born pouncers – not amateur pouncers but professional expert master pouncers – I numbered in my acquaintance. Right from the beginning the procedure followed a certain ritual. A caller or pouncer would drop in and have off his things and get comfortably settled. We would produce the sketches, fondling them lovingly, and spread them out and invite the attention of our guest to probably the only perfect design of a house fashioned by the mind of man since the days of the mound builders on this hemisphere. In our language we may not have gone quite so far as to say all this, but our manner indicated that such was the case.

He – for convenience in the illustration I shall make him a man, though in the case of a woman the outcome remained the same – he would consider the matchless work of inventive art presented for his consideration and then he would say; “An awfully nice notion – splendid, perfectly splendid! And still, you know, if I were – ”

And so on.

Or perhaps it would be: “Oh, I like the general idea immensely! But – you’ll pardon my making a little suggestion, won’t you? – but if I were tackling this proposition – ” And so on.

It has been my observation that all complimentary remarks uttered by a member of the human race in connection with a house which somebody else contemplates building end in “but.”

You just simply can’t get away from it.

From the treasure-troves of my memory I continue to quote:

“But if I were tackling this proposition I would certainly not put the dining room here were you’ve got it. I’d switch it over there right next to the living room and give a vista through. See, like this!”

And out would come his lead pencil.

“But that would mean eliminating the main hall,” one of us would venture.

“Of course it would,” Brother Pounce would say. “Next to giving a vista through, cutting out the hall is the principal idea I had in mind. What do you want with a hall here? For that matter, what do you want with a hall any place that you can get along without it? Why, my dear people, don’t you know that hallways are no earthly good except to catch dust and be drafty and make extra work for servants? And besides, in modern houses people are cutting the hallways down to a minimum – to an absolute minimum.”