The Smiling Hill-Top Part 3

[Ill.u.s.tration]

AN ADVENTURE IN SOLITUDE

My windows were all wide open one lovely April day, the loveliest time of all the year in Southern California, filling the house with the sweetness of wistaria and orange blossoms, but also, truth compels me to add, with so many noises of such excruciating kinds that I followed Ulysses' well-known plan and then tried to find quiet for my siesta in the back spare-room. The worst of this house is that it really has no back--it has various fronts, like the war. The spinster next door but one has a parrot--a cynical, tired parrot, but still fond of the sound of his own voice. The lady across the street is raising Pekinese puppies, who apparently bitterly regret being born outside of Pekin. She puts them in baskets on the roof in the sun and lets them cry it out, in that hard-hearted modern method applied to babies.

A sight-seeing car had paused while the gentleman with the megaphone explained to a few late tourists the Arroyo Seco, that great river-bed with only a trickle of water at the bottom, on whose brink our house perches. At home two plumbers were playfully tossing bricks about our courtyard in a half-hearted endeavor to find out why our cellar was flooded. Hence the back bedroom. No amount of cotton wool in one's ears, however, could camouflage a telephone bell.

"The Red Cross Executive Committee will meet at ten on Wednesday."

A short interval followed. "Will Mr. S---- make a 'four-minute' speech on Friday at the Strand Theatre for the Liberty Bond Campaign?"

Another interval during which I began to feel drowsy. "Will Mr. S---- say a few words of appreciation and present a wrist watch to the Chapter Secretary just starting for France?" etc. Just here I made a resolve.

Escape I would, for one week, to my lovely hill-top by the sea, and leave J----, the two boys, the two dogs, the two white mice, the Red Cross, the Red Star, Food Conservation and Liberty Bonds to manage beautifully without me. I even had the reckless idea of trying to forget that there was a war going on! I was furnished with a perfectly good excuse; we had rented "The Smiling Hill-Top" for two months, and it must be put in order. Hence my "Adventure in Solitude."

Everything is called an adventure nowadays, and to me it was a most exciting one, as I had not gone forth independently for many years. One chauffeur, one smiling Helen to clean house for the tenants and cook for me, my worst clothes and my best picnic lunch went into the motor, and I followed. I think my family expected me back next day, when I bade them a loving farewell. Not I! My spirit was craving silence. I wanted not to curl my hair or be neat or polite or a good mother, or any of the things I usually try to be, for just one week. Longer, and I would be lonely and homesick.

It was a lovely day. The coast road to San Diego runs through orange groves for miles, and the perfume of the blossoms hung about us till we came to the sea, where a salt breeze blew away the heavy sweetness. I lunched on the sand and watched the waves for an hour. There, at least, are endless re-enforcements! As fast as the front ranks break more come always to fill their places.

I felt no hurry, as the Smiling Hill-Top is some fifteen miles nearer Pasadena than San Diego--an easy day's run--and I had no engagements, but at last my impatience to see how much our garden had grown started me once more on my way, and we arrived at our wicket gate in the late afternoon. There were twenty-seven keys on the ring the real-estate agent gave me--twenty more than caused so much trouble at Baldpate--but none fitted, so I had the chauffeur lift the gate bodily from its hinges and I was at home!

In California things grow riotously. Grandparents who haven't seen their grandsons for years, and find that they have shot up from toddling babies to tall youths, must feel as I did when I saw the vines and shrubs, especially the banana trees planted only six months before! The lawn over which I had positively wept lay innocent and green--almost English in its freshness. The patio was entrancing with blooming vines.

The streptasolen, which has no "little name," as the French say, was like a cascade of flame over one end of the wall. The place was ablaze with it. The three goldfish in the fountain seemed as calm as ever, and apparently have solved the present problem of the high cost of living, for they don't have to be fed at all. The three had picked up what they needed without human aid. I really felt like patting them on the head, but that being out of the question, I was moved to rhyme:

"I wish I were a goldfish, All in a little bowl; I wouldn't worry whether I really had a soul.

I'd glide about through sun and shade And s.n.a.t.c.h up little gnats, My heaven would be summer My h.e.l.l--well, call it cats!"

All this time the chauffeur had been wrestling with the key ring, and finally had our bare necessities in the way of doors open. I had telegraphed our agent that I was coming only long enough before for the house to have what is vulgarly known as "a lick and a promise,"

but it looked just as comfortable and pleasant as I knew that it would, and the terrace--no need to bother about that. The south wind does the housework there.

That night I went to sleep between sheets fragrant with lavender from my own garden, while the ocean boomed gently on the beach below the hill.

In the week that followed I abolished a number of things. First of all, meal hours. I had my meals when I felt like it; in fact, I didn't wind the clock till I was leaving. I only did it then on account of the tenants, as some people find the ticking of a clock and the chirping of a cricket pleasant and cosy sounds. I don't. Then I cut out the usual items from my bill of fare, and lived on young peas, asparagus, eggs, milk, and fruit, with just a little bread and b.u.t.ter--not enough to agitate Mr. Hoover. I never had had as much asparagus as I really wanted before. I wore an old smock and a disreputable hat, and I pruned and dug in my garden till I was tired, and then I lay on the terrace and watched the waves endlessly gather and glide and spread. Counting sheep jumping over a wall is nothing to compare with waves for soothing rasped nerves.

My first solitary day was so clear that the Pasadena Mountains, as we call that part of the Sierra Madre, rose soft over the water on the far horizon, so that I couldn't feel lonely with home in sight. Long unused muscles expostulated with me, but smoothed-out nerves more than balanced their twinges. Of course I couldn't forget the war. Who could, especially with flocks of aeroplanes flying over me as I lay on a chaise longue on the terrace, listening to the big guns of Camp Kearny roaring behind the hills; but it no longer gave me the sensation of sand-paper in my feelings. I thought about it all more calmly and realized a little of what it is doing to us Americans--to our souls!--that is worth the price; and in addition, how much it is teaching us of economy, conservation, and efficiency, as well as more spiritual things.

It has also brought home to me the beauty of throwing away. In a fever of enthusiasm to make every outgrown union suit and superfluous berry spoon tell, I have ransacked my house from garret to cellar, and I bless the Belgians, Servians, and Armenians, the Poles and the French orphans for ridding me of a suffocating ma.s.s of things that I didn't use, and yet felt obliged to keep.

My wardrobe is now the irreducible minimum, the French Relief has the rest, and at last I have more than enough hangers in my closet to support my frocks. The shoes that pinched but looked so smart that they kept tempting me into one more trial have gone to the Red Cross Shop. No more concerts will be ruined by them. The hat that made me look ten years older than I like to think I do, accompanied them. It was a good hat, almost new, and it cost--more than I pay for hats nowadays. I do not need to wear it out. My large silver tea-pot given me by my maid of honor did good work for the Belgians--I hope if she ever finds out about its fate that she will be glad that it is now warm stockings for many thin little Belgian legs. Nora, from Ireland, viewed its departure with satisfaction--it made one less thing to polish. Many odds and ends of silver followed, and were put into the melting-pot, being too homely to survive--I'm saving enough for heirlooms for my grandchildren, of course. One must not allow sentiment to go by the board; we need it especially now that we have lost such quant.i.ties of it out of the world.

So much was "made in Germany," that old Germany of the fairy tales and Christmas trees which seems to be gone forever.

I need not go on enumerating my activities. Every one has been doing the same thing, and in all probability is now enjoying the same sense of orderliness and freedom that I feel. Even the children have caught the spirit. I was just leaving my house the other day when a palatial automobile stopped at the gate and a very perfect chauffeur alighted and touched his cap. "Madam," he said, "I have come for a case of empty bottles that Master John says your little boy promised him for the Red Cross." There was a trace of embarra.s.sment in his manner, but there was none in mine as I led him to the cellar and watched with satisfaction while he clasped a cobwebby box of--dare I whisper it?--empty beer bottles to his immaculate chest and eventually stowed it in the exquisite interior of the limousine. How wonderful of the Red Cross to want my bottles, and how intelligent of my "little boy" to arrange the matter so pleasantly!

To do away with the needless acc.u.mulations of life, or better still, not to let them acc.u.mulate, what a comfort that would be! Letters? The fire as rapidly as possible! No one ought to have a good time reading over old letters--there's always a tinge of sadness about them, and it's morbid to conserve sadness, added to which, in the remote contingency of one's becoming famous, some vandalish relative always publishes the ones that are most sacred.

J---- has the pigeon-hole habit. He hates to see anything sink into the abyss of the waste-basket, but I am training him to throw away something every morning before breakfast. After a while he'll get so that he can dispose of several things at once, and the time may come when I'll have to look over the rubbish to be sure that nothing valuable has gone, because throwing away is just as insidious a habit as any other.

If only one could pile old bills on top of the old letters, what a glorious bonfire that would make! But that will have to wait until the millennium; as things are now, it would mean paying twice for the motor fender of last year, and never feeling sure of your relations with the butcher.

It isn't only things that I am disposing of. I've rid myself of a lot of useless ideas. We don't have to live in any special way. It isn't necessary to have meat twice a day, and there is no law about chicken for Sunday dinner. b.u.t.ter does not come like the air we breathe.

Numerous courses aren't necessary even for guests. New clothes aren't essential unless your old ones are worn out--and so on.

And so I'm stepping forth on a road leading, even the graybeards can't say where, with surprises behind every hedge and round every corner.

There hasn't been so thrillingly interesting an age to be alive since that remote time when the Creation was going on. Except for moments of tired nerves, like this, it is very stimulating, and I find myself stepping out much more briskly since I threw my extra wraps and bundles beside the road. Here on my hill-top I have even enjoyed a little of that charm of unenc.u.mberedness that all vagabonds know--and later if I come to some steep stretches I shall be more likely to make the top, for I'm resolved to "travel light."

There is usually one serpent in Eden, if it is only a garter snake. Ours was a frog in the fountain. He had a volume of sound equal to Edouard de Reske in his prime. I set the chauffeur the task of catching him, but after emptying out all the water one little half-inch frog skipped off, and John a.s.sured me that he could never be the offender. But he was "Edouard" in spite of appearances, for he returned at dusk and took up the refrain just where he had left off. I decided to hunt him myself. It was like the game of "magic music" that we used to play as children: loud and you are "warm"; soft and you are far away. I never caught him.

He was ready to greet the tenants instead of the cosy cricket, and may have been the reason why they suddenly departed after only a three weeks' stay, but as it was a foggy May, as it sometimes is on this coast, that is an open question. J---- tersely put it, "Frog or fog?"

The smiling Helen smiled more beamingly every day, but the chauffeur hated it. He was a city product and looked as much at home on that hill-top as a dancing-master in a hay-field. He smoked cigarettes and read the sporting page of the paper in the garage, where gasoline rather deadened the country smells of flowers and hay, and tried to forget his degrading surroundings, but he was overjoyed when the day to start for home arrived. I did not share his feelings, and yet I was ready to go.

It had been a great success, and the only time I had felt lonely was in a crowded restaurant in San Diego, where J---- and I had had many jolly times in past summers. On the Smiling Hill-Top who could be lonely with the ever-changing sea and sky and sunsets. I dare not describe the picture, as I don't wish to be put down as mad or a cubist. Scent of the honeysuckle, the flutter of the breeze, the song of pink-breasted linnets and their tiny splas.h.i.+ngs in the birds' pool outside my sleeping-porch, the velvet of the sky at night, with its stars and the motor lights on the highway like more stars below--how I love it all! I was taking enough of it home with me, I hoped, to last through some strenuous weeks in Pasadena, until I could come back for the summer, bringing my family.

Much bustling about on the part of the smiling Helen and me, much locking of gates and doors by the bored chauffeur, and we were off for home! After all is said and done, "home is where the heart is,"

irrespective of the view.

The first part of the way we made good time, but just out of one of the small seaside towns something vital snapped in the motor's insides. It happened on a bridge at the foot of a hill, and we were very lucky to escape an accident. I will say for the chauffeur that while, as a farmer, he would never get far, as a driver he knew his business. One slight skid and we stopped short, "never to go again," like grandfather's clock. It resulted in our having to be towed backwards to the nearest garage, while the chauffeur jumped on a pa.s.sing motor bound for Pasadena, and was s.n.a.t.c.hed from my sight like Elijah in the chariot--he was off to get a new driving shaft. The smiling Helen followed in a Ford full of old ladies. I elected to travel by train and sat for hours in a small station waiting for the so-called "express." In a hasty division of the lunch I got all the hard-boiled eggs, and of course one can eat only a limited number of them, though I will say that a few quite deaden one's appet.i.te.

I had an amazing collection of bags, coats, and packages, and was dreading embarking on the train. However, I have a private motto, "There is a way." There was. The only occupant of the waiting-room besides myself was a very dapper gentleman of what I should call lively middle age, with very upstanding gray mustaches. I took him to be a marooned motorist, also. He was well-dressed, with the added touch of an orange blossom in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and he had a slightly roving eye. His hand-baggage was most "refined." I had noticed him looking my way at intervals, and wondered if he craved a hard-boiled egg; I could easily have spared him one! While I am certainly not in the habit of seeking conversation with strange gentlemen, there are always exceptions to everything, and I concluded that this was one. I smiled! We chatted on the subject of the flora and fauna of California in a perfectly blameless way till my train whistled, when he said, "I am going to carry those bags for you, if you will allow me!" I thanked him aloud and inwardly remarked, "I have known that for a long time!"

What made it especially pleasant was that I was going north and he was going south. So ended my Adventure--not all Solitude, if you like, but as near it as one can achieve with comfort. The amazing thing about it was how well I got on with myself, for I don't think I'm particularly easy to live with. I must ask J----. Probably it was the novelty.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A SABINE FARM

I once remarked that I thought New York City a most friendly and neighborly place, and was greeted with howls of derision. I suppose I said it because that morning a dear old lady in an oculist's office had patted me, saying, "My dear, it would be a pity to put gla.s.ses on you,"

and an imposing blonde in a smart Fifth Avenue shop had sold me a hat that I couldn't afford either to miss or to buy, for half price, because she said I'd talked to her like a human being, the year before--all of which had warmed my heart. I think perhaps my statement was too sweeping. Since we have changed oceans I notice that the atmosphere of the West has altered my old standards somewhat. There is an easy-going fellows.h.i.+p all through every part of life on this side of the Rocky Mountains.

Take banks, for instance. Can you picture a dignified New York Trust Company with bowls of wild flowers placed about the desks and a general air of hospitality? In one bank I have often had a pleasant half-hour very like an afternoon tea, where all the officers, from the president down, came to shake hands and ask after the children. Of course, that is a rather unusually pleasant and friendly bank, even for California.

Always I am carefully, tenderly almost, escorted to my motor. At first this flattered me greatly, till I discovered that there is a law in California that if you slip and hurt yourself on any one's premises, they pay the doctor's bill. Hence the solicitude. I was not to be allowed to strain my ankle, even if I wanted to.

Probably the same geniality existed in the East fifty years ago. I have been told that it did. It is a very delightful stage of civilization where people's sh.e.l.ls are still soft, if they have sh.e.l.ls at all. There is an accessibility, a breeziness and camaraderie about even the prominent men--the bulwarks of business and public life. We are accused of bragging and "boosting" in the West. I am afraid it is true. They are the least pleasant attributes of adolescence.

Banking isn't the only genial profession. There is real estate. Of course about half the men in California are in real estate for reasons too obvious to mention. Providence was kind in putting us into the hands of an honest man, better still, one with imagination, when we came to look for a winter bungalow. He saw that we had to have something with charm, even if the furniture was scarce, and took as much pains over realizing our dream as if we had been hunting for a palace. It was he who found our "Sabine Farm," which brought us three of the best gifts of the G.o.ds--health, happiness, and a friend. We had almost decided to take a picturesque cot that I named "The Jungle," from its tangle of trees and flowers, even though the cook could reach her abode only by an outside staircase. The boys had volunteered to hold an umbrella over her during the rainy season, but I wasn't quite satisfied with this arrangement. Just then we saw an enchanting bungalow set in a garden of bamboos, roses and bananas, and looked no further! It belonged to an English woman who raised Toggenburg goats, which made it all the more desirable for us as the goats were to stay at the back of the garden, and provide not only milk but interest for the boys.

J---- dubbed it "El rancho goato" at once. Our friends in the East were delighted with the idea, and many were their gibes. One in particular always added something to the address of his letters for the guide or diversion of the R. F. D. postman: "Route 2, Box so-and-so, you can tell the place by the goats"; or during the spring floods this appeared in one corner of the envelope: "Were the goats above high water?"

It wasn't just an ordinary farm. There was a certain something--I think the names of the goats had a lot to do with it--Corella, Coila, Babette, Elfa, Viva, Lorine, and so on, or perhaps it was the devotion of their mistress, who expended the love and care of a very large heart on a family that I think appreciated it as far as goats are capable of appreciation. If she was a little late coming home (she had a tiny shack on one corner of the place) they would be waiting at the gate calling plaintively. There is a plaintive tone about everything a goat has to say. In his cot on the porch J---- composed some verses one morning early--I forget them except for two lines:

"The plaintive note of a querulous goat Over my senses seems to float."

Of course that was the difficulty--creatures of one kind or another do not lie abed late. Our Sabine Farm was surrounded by others and there was a neighborhood hymn to the dawn that it took us some time to really enjoy--if we ever did. Sopranos--roosters; altos--pigeons, and ducks; tenors--goats; ba.s.sos--cows, and one donkey. There was nothing missing to make a full, rich volume of sound. Of course there is no place where it is so difficult to get a long, refres.h.i.+ng night's sleep as the country.

One rarely comes through any new experience with all one's preconceived ideas intact. Our first season on the Sabine Farm shattered a number of mine. I had always supposed that a mocking-bird, like a garden, was "a lovesome thing, G.o.d wot." Romantic--just one step below a nightingale!