More Jonathan Papers Part 10

Oh, everything.

Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?

Whyhair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then b.u.t.ton-hookyou neednt smile. b.u.t.ton-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out Jonathan was laughing by this timeWell, I have to use what I have, dont I?

Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?

After thatoh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod.

The devil you did!

Not at all. It wasnt hurt a bit. It just wouldnt go down, thats all.

So then I thought Id wait for you.

And now what do you expect?

I expect you to fix it.

Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it.

Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a whole evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst throughand not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a sight, and there wasundoubtedly there wasa strong smell of coffee.

Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its position, while the rest of us cleared up the kitchen,its astonis.h.i.+ng what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,and as our friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in Hamlet, shouted, Hold em! Theres half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can finish. Sure enough there was! And then he wouldnt have to pack it down.

We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot, in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering, through his sleep, Whos sick now? How could they know it was only a plumbing party?

As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the year. It isnt so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction in the world, that we meant, on that particular evening, to have a plumbing party, with the drain as the _piece de resistance_. Toward this our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!

Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs broke out of the pen, about nine oclock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs.

Hiram needed our help to get them inthere was no use in pretending that we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game, but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the only way to keep ones temper at all is to regard it, for the time being, as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng and mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own rewards. But the att.i.tude is difficult to maintain, especially late at night.

On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the house, I could not refrain from saying, with some edge, I never wanted to keep pigs anyway.

Who says were keeping them? remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and laughed.

You neednt think Im laughing because you said anything specially funny, I said. Its only because Im tired enough to laugh at anything.

The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I finally broke out, Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!

Ill have the thing together now in a jiffy, said Jonathan.

Jiffy! Theres no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night, I snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked. Why cant we find a really simple way of living? This isnt simple. Its highly complex and very difficult.

You cut those washers very well, suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I was not prepared to be soothed.

It was hateful work, though. Now, look what weve done this evening!

Weve shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dogs chain, and now weve fixed the pumpand it wont stay fixed at that!

Fair evenings work, murmured Jonathan as he rapidly a.s.sembled the pump.

Yes, as work. But all I mean isit isnt _simple_. Farm life has a reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesnt seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of aI dont know what!

I like your climaxes, said Jonathan, and we both laughed. There! Im done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and chicken-houses.

And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and quiet thingsbooks and firelight and moonlight and talk; many in retrospect full of things quite differentdrains and latches and fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the critters were at rest. Evenings when we sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and searched for a philosophy to cover them.

Im beginning to see that it will never be any better, I said.

Probably not, said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.

You seem contented enough about it.

I am.

I dont know that Im contented, but perhaps Im resigned. I believe its necessary.

Of course its necessary.

Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on, You see, were right down close to the earth that is the ultimate basis of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we have to make immediate adjustments to them.

And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings.

Now if were in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those adjustments for us. Were like the princess with seventeen mattresses between her and the pea.

She felt it, though, said Jonathan. It kept her awake.

I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadnt been there.

True, said Jonathan.

Farm life is the pea without the mattresses I went on.

Sounds a little cheerless, said Jonathan.

Wellof course, it isnt really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy.

Its full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment.

That was the way the princess felt about her pea.

The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldnt call her soul her own a minute, I suppose.

Perhaps that was why she ran away, suggested Jonathan.

Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didnt find it.

No. She found the peaeven with all those mattresses.

And weve run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses, said Jonathan.