One year I planted some canterbury-bells--the blue and the white. They are biennials, and bloom the second year. The blue ones came wonderfully, but the white ones apparently failed. I did not plant them again, for I went in mainly for perennials that, once established, come year after year. I tried myosotis, too, but that also disappeared after the second year. Our garden, such as it was, was a hardy garden, where only the fittest survived.
There was an accompaniment to our garden. It was the brook. Nearly always, as I dug and planted, I could hear its voice. Sometimes it rose strong and insistent--in spring, when rains were plenty; sometimes in August when the sky for weeks had been hard and dry, it sank to a low murmur, but it was seldom silent. All the year through its voice was a lilting undertone, and the seasons ran away to the thread of its silver song.
After all, a garden in any season is whatever it seems to its owner. To one who plans and plants it, tends and loves it, any garden is a world in little, a small realm of sentient personalities, of quaint and lovely a.s.sociations, of anxious strivings and concerns, of battles, of triumphs, and of defeats. To one who makes a garden under compulsion it is merely an inclosure of dirt and persistent weeds, a place of sun and sweat and some more or less perverse and reluctant vegetables that would be much more pleasantly obtained from the market-wagon. There is no personality in it to him, nor any poetry. I know this, because I was once that kind of a gardener myself. It was when I was a boy and had to hoe one every Sat.u.r.day forenoon, when there were a number of other things I wanted to do. It was almost impossible to study lovingly the miracle of the garden when duty was calling me to play short-stop on the baseball nine that I knew was a.s.sembling on the common, with some irresponsible one-gallus subst.i.tute in my place. Yet even in those days I loved the fall garden. The hoeing was all done then, the weeds were no longer my enemies. One could dig around among them and find a belated melon, and in the mellow sunlight, between faded corn-rows, scoop out its golden or ruby heart and reflect on many things.
III
_And how the family did grow up!_
As I look back now, that first year on our abandoned farm seems a good deal like the years that followed it; but it could not have been so, for when I consider to-day"s aspect and circ.u.mstance I realize that each of our twelve years of ownership furnished events that were to us unusual, some of them, at the time, even startling.
We must have enjoyed a kind of prosperity, I suppose, for we seem always to have been planning or doing something to enlarge the house or improve its surroundings, and quite a good deal of money can be spent in that way. I think it was about the second year that for the sake of light and air we let out three dormer windows on the long roof, and I remember that in order not to make a mistake in their architecture we drove thirty miles one morning to see a house like ours which had owned its windows from the beginning. We loved our old house, you see, and did not wish to do it an injury. I think it was about the same time that we pulled off the plaster from the living-room ceiling and left the exposed beams--old hewn timbers which we tinted down with a dull stain. William Deegan and I stained those beams together, and our friendship ripened during that employment. William had been with us about a year at this period--not steadily, because now and then would come a day when with sadness and averted eyes he would say, "I think I"ll be goin" now, for a little while," after which the effacement of William for perhaps a week, followed by his return some morning, pale, delapidated, as on the morning of his first arrival.
In the beginning I had argued, even remonstrated, but without effect.
William only said, humbly: "It comes over me to be goin", and I have to do it. I"ll be dacent ag"in, whin I get back."
During one such period of absence there came a telephone call from the sheriff of the nearest town of size.
"Do you know a man named William Deegan?"
"We do."
"He is in the calaboose here. His fine and costs amount to five dollars.
Do you want to redeem him?"
"We do."
Clearly William"s vacation had been unusual, even for him. We sent up the money and William was home that night, more crushed, more pale, more dilapidated than ever. He had worn a new suit away. He returned with a mere rag. We thought this might cure him, but nothing could do that. We could redeem William, but he could not redeem himself. These occasional lapses were the only drawback of that faithful, industrious soul, and we let them go. We had been unable to forgive them in the light-headed, literary Gibbs.
But William here is a digression; I was speaking of our improvements. We decided one year that we must have more flowers--a real garden. We made it on the side of the house where before had been open field--walled in a s.p.a.ce where there was an apple-tree, a place large enough to a.s.semble all the things we loved most and that grew with an economy of care. In a little while it was a glorious tangle that we admired exceedingly, and that our artist friends tried to paint.
Another year we converted my study behind the chimney into a pantry, opened it into the kitchen, made the "best room" into a dining-room, and left the long living-room with the big fireplace for library use only.
That was a radical change and I had to build me a study over on a cedar slope--a good deal of a house, in fact, where I could gather my traps about me, for with the years my work had somehow invited a paraphernalia of shelves and files, and a variety of other furniture that required room. It was better for a growing-up family, too. With me out of the house, they had more freedom to grow up in, which, after all, was their human right, and the growing-up machinery could revolve as noisily as it pleased without furnishing a procrastinating author an added excuse for not working. No author with a growing-up family should work in his own home. He is impossible enough under even the best conditions.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
And how the family did grow up. Why, once when they were home from school I came from the study one day to find a young man in the house--a strange young man, from somewhere in the school neighborhood. I couldn"t imagine what he was doing there until I was taken aside and it was explained to me that he was there to see our eldest, the Pride. That little girl, imagine! It is true she was eighteen--I counted, up on my fingers to see--but the Pride! why, only yesterday she was bare-footed, wading in the brook. Somehow I couldn"t make it seem right.
IV
_And then one eventful day_
I suppose it was about that time that we acquired a car--it would be likely to be about that time. "Most everybody was getting cars, and Lord Beaconsfield, good Old Beek, was getting slower each year and could no longer keep up even with our deliberate progress. Furthermore, I learned to drive the car, in time. It is true I knocked some splinters from the barn, put a crimp in a mud-guard, and smashed another man"s tail-light in the process, but nothing fatal occurred, though I found it a pretty good plan to stick fairly close to my new study on the cedar slope if I wanted to keep up with the garage and damage bills. Those bills startled me, at first, and then, like everybody else, I became callous and reckless, and we did without a good many other things in order that the car might not go unshod or climb limpingly the stiff New England hills.
And then at last, one eventful day--a day far back in that happy, halcyon age when ships sailed as freely across the ocean as ferry-boats across the North River and men roved at will among the nations of the earth--one sunny August morning, eight years after the day of our coming, we locked the old house behind us and drove away in the car to a New York pier and sailed with it (the car, I mean, not the pier) to the Mediterranean, and the sh.o.r.es of France. In that fair land, while the world was still at peace, we wandered for more than a year, resting where we chose, as long as we chose, all the more unhurried and happy for not knowing that we were seeing the end of the Golden Age. Oh, those lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day"s shock of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied fields; I can drift once more with Elizabeth and our girls through the wonderland of France.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _It was on a winter evening that I drove our car back to its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by land and sea_]
War came and brought the ruin of the world. It was late in the year when we returned to America, and it was on a winter evening that I drove our car back to its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by land and sea. Our old house had remained faithful. A fire roaring up the chimney made it home.
We went to Westbury"s, however, for the holidays. Westbury with the years had become a prosperous contractor, for Brook Ridge was no longer an abandoned land, but a place of new and beautiful homes. Westbury"s prosperity, however, had not made him proud--not too proud to offer us old-time Christmas hospitality at his glowing fireside.
V
_Was it the spirit of our garden?_
Summer found us back in the old house, almost as if we had not left it.
Almost, but not quite. Somehow the world had changed. Perhaps it was just the war--perhaps it was because we were all older--our girls beginning to have lives of their own--because the family unit was getting ready to dissolve.
The dissolving began at last one sunny June day when the Pride left us.
It was the young man whom I had noticed around the house a year or two before who took her away. She seemed to prefer to go with him than to stay with us, I could not exactly make out why, but I did not think it best, or safe, to argue the question, and I drove them to the train afterward.
Then the Hope and the Joy got the notion of spending their summers in one of those camps that are so much the fashion now, and at last there came a day that the Hope, who such a little while ago was running care-free and happy-hearted in the sun, bade us good-by and sailed away--sailed back across the ocean to France, an enlisted soldier, to do her part where the world"s bravest were battling for the world"s freedom.
For us, indeed, the world had changed; we had little need any more for the old house that on a July day twelve years before we had found and made our home. It had seen our brief generation pa.s.s; it was ready for the next. And when, one day, there came a young man and his bride, just starting on the way we had come, and seeing the beauty of the spot, just as we had seen it, wanted to own and enjoy it, just as we had owned and enjoyed it, we yielded it to them gladly, even if sorrowfully, for one must give up everything, some time or other, and it is an economy of regret to give to the right person, at the right time.
And now just here I want to record a curious thing. Earlier in these pages I have spoken of planting one year some white canterbury-bells that did not grow, or at least, so far as we could discover, did not bloom. In six seasons we never saw any sign of them, yet on the day we were leaving our house, closing it for the last time, I found on the spot where they had been planted, in full bloom, a stalk of white canterbury-bells! Had the seed germinated after all those years? Was it the spirit of our garden, sprung up there to tell us good-by? Who can answer?
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Our abandoned farm is no longer ours. We, too, have abandoned it. Only the years that we spent there remain to us--a tender and beautiful memory. Whatever there was of shadow or misfortune has long since pa.s.sed, by. I see now all our summers there bathed in mellow sunlight, all the autumns aglow with red and gold, all the winters clean with sparkling snow, all the springs green with breaking buds and white with bloom. If those seasons were not flawless at the time, they have become so, now when they are added to the past.
And I know that they were indeed happy, for they make my heart ache remembering, and it is happiness, and not misery, that makes the heart ache--when it is gone.
_Books by_
ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
_For Young Readers_
THE BOYS" LIFE OF MARK TWAIN HOLLOW TREE NIGHTS AND DAYS THE HOLLOW TREE AND DEEP-WOODS BOOK THE HOLLOW TREE SNOWED-IN BOOK
_Small books of several stories each, selected from the above Hollow Tree books:_
HOW MR. DOG GOT EVEN HOW MR. RABBIT LOST HIS TAIL MR. RABBIT"S BIG DINNER MAKING UP WITH MR. DOG MR. "POSSUM"S GREAT BALLOON TRIP WHEN JACK RABBIT WAS A LITTLE BOY MR. RABBIT"S WEDDING MR. CROW AND THE WHITEWASH MR. TURTLE"S FLYING ADVENTURE
_For Grown-ups_
DWELLERS IN ARCADY MARK TWAIN"S LETTERS MARK TWAIN: A BIOGRAPHY TH. NAST: HIS PERIOD AND HIS PICTURES THE SHIP-DWELLERS (Humorous travel) THE TENT-DWELLERS (Humorous camping) FROM VAN-DWELLER TO COMMUTER (Humorous, home life) PEANUT (Story of a boy)
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK