The Fat of the Land Part 21

"I've been over the ridge into the Dunkard settlement, and they have the cholera there to beat the band. Joe Siegel lost sixty hogs in three days, and there are not ten well hogs in two miles. What do you think of that?"

"That means a hard 'fight mit Siegel,'" said Kyrle.

"It ought to mean a closer quarantine on this side of the ridge," said I, "and you must fumigate your clothes before you appear before your swine, Jackson. It's more likely to be swine plague than cholera at this time of the year, but it's just as bad; one can hardly tell the difference, and we must look sharp."

"How does the contagion travel, Doctor?"

"On horseback, when such chumps as you can be found. You probably have some millions of germs up your sleeve now, or, more likely, on your back, and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm going to whistle for rain."

"I say, Williams, when you came out here I thought you a tenderfoot, sure enough, who was likely to pay money for experience; but, by the jumping Jews! you've given us natives cards and spades."

"I _was_ a tenderfoot so far as practical experience goes, but I tried to use the everyday sense which G.o.d gave me, and I find that's about all a man needs to run a business like this."

"You run it all right, for returns, and that's what we are after; and I'm beginning to catch on. I want you to tell me, before Kyrle here, why you gave me that bull two years ago."

"What's the matter with the bull, Jackson? Isn't he all right?"

"Sure he's all right, and as fine as silk; but why did you give him to me? Why didn't you keep him for yourself?"

"Well, Bill, I thought you would like him, and we were neighbors, and--"

"You thought I would save you the trouble of keeping him, didn't you?"

"Well, perhaps that did have some influence. You see, this is a factory farm from fence to fence, except this forty which Polly bosses, and the utilitarian idea is on top. Keeping the bull didn't exactly run with my notion of economy, especially when I could conveniently have him kept so near, and at the same time be generous to a neighbor."

"That's it, and it's taken me two years to find it out. You're trying to follow that idea all along the line. You're dead right, and I'm going to tag on, if you don't mind. I was glad enough for your present at the time, and I'm glad yet; but I've learned my lesson, and you may bet your dear life that no man will ever again give me a bull."

"That's right, Jackson. Now you have struck the key-note; stick to it, and you will make money twice as fast as you have done. Have a mark, and keep your eye on it, and your plough will turn a straight furrow."

Jackson sent for his horse, and just before he mounted, I said, "Are you thinking of selling your farm?"

"I used to think of it, but I've been to school lately and can 'do my sums' better. No, I guess I won't sell the paternal acres; but who wants to buy?"

"Kyrle, here, is looking for a farm about the size of yours, and to tell you the truth I should like him for a neighbor. It's dollars to doughnuts that I could give him a whole herd of bulls."

"Indeed, you can't do anything of the kind! I wouldn't take a gold dollar from you until I had it tested. I'm on to your curves."

"But seriously, Jackson, I must have more land; my stock will eat me out of house and home by the time the factory is running full steam. What would you say to a proposition of $10,000 for one hundred acres along my north line?"

"A year ago I would have jumped at it. Now I say 'nit.' I need it all, Doctor; I told you I was going to tag on. But what's the matter with the old lady's quarter across your south road?"

"Nothing's the matter with the land, only she won't sell it at any price."

"I know; but that drunken brute of a son will sell as soon as she's under the sod, and they say the poor old girl is on her last legs,--down with distemper or some other beastly disease. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sound the renegade son and see how he measures. Some one will get it before long, and it might as well be you."

Jackson galloped off, and Kyrle and I sat on the porch and divided the widow's 160-acre mite. It was a good strip of land, lying a fair mile on the south road and a quarter of a mile deep. The buildings were of no value, the fences were ragged to a degree, but I coveted the land. It was the vineyard of Naboth to me, and I planned its future with my friend and accessory sitting by. I destroyed the estimable old lady's house and barns, ran my ploughshares through her garden and flower beds, and turned the home site into one great field of l.u.s.ty corn, without so much as saying by your leave. Thus does the greed of land grow upon one.

But in truth, I saw that I must have more land. My factory would require more than ten thousand bushels of grain, with forage and green foods in proportion, to meet its full capacity, and I could not hope to get so much from the land then under cultivation. Again, in a few years--a very few--the fifty acres of orchard would be no longer available for crops, and this would still further reduce my tillable land. With the orchards out of use, I should have but 124 acres for all crops other than hay. If I could add this coveted 160, it would give me 250 acres of excellent land for intensive farming.

"I should like it on this side of the road," said I, "but I suppose that will have to do."

"What will have to do?" asked Kyrle.

"The 160 acres over there."

"You unconscionable wretch! Have you evicted the poor widow, and she on her deathbed? For stiffening the neck and hardening the heart, commend me to the close-to-nature life of the farmer. I wouldn't own a farm for worlds. It risks one's immortality. Give me the wicked city for pasturage--and a friend who will run a farm, at his own risk, and give me the benefit of it."

CHAPTER XLVIII

MAIDS AND MALLARDS

We have so rarely entered our house with the reader that he knows little of its domestic machinery. So much depends upon this machinery that one must always take it into consideration when reckoning the pleasures and even the comforts of life anywhere, and this is especially true in the country. We have such a lot of people about that our servants cannot sing the song of lonesomeness that makes dolor for most suburbanites.

They are "churched" as often as they wish, and we pay city wages; but still it is not all clear sailing in this quarter of Polly's realm. I fancy that we get on better than some of our neighbors; but we do not brag, and I usually feel that I am smoking my pipe in a powder magazine.

There is something essentially wrong in the working-girl world, and I am glad that I was not born to set it right. We cannot down the spirit of unrest and improvidence that holds possession of cooks and waitresses, and we needs must suffer it with such patience as we can.

Two of our house servants were more or less permanent; that is, they had been with us since we opened the house, and were as content as restless spirits can be. These were the housekeeper and the cook,--the hub of the house. The former is a Norwegian, tall, angular, and capable, with a knot of yellow hair at the back of her head,--ostensibly for sticking lead pencils into,--and a disposition to keep things snug and clean. Her duties include the general supervision of both houses and the special charge of store-rooms, food cellars, and table supplies of all sorts. She is efficient, she whistles while she works, and I see but little of her. I suspect that Polly knows her well.

The cook, Mary, is small, Irish, gray, with the temper of a pepper-pod and the voice of a guinea-hen suffering from bronchitis, but she can cook like an angel. She is an artist, and I feel as if the seven-dollar-a-week stipend were but a "tip" to her, and that sometime she will present me with a bill for her services. My safeguard, and one that I cherish, is an angry word from her to the housekeeper. She jeeringly a.s.serted that she, the cook, got $2 a week more than she, the housekeeper, did. As every one knows that the housekeeper has $5 a week, I am holding this evidence against the time when Mary asks for a lump sum adequate to her deserts. The number of things which Mary can make out of everything and out of nothing is wonderful; and I am fully persuaded that all the moneys paid to a really good cook are moneys put into the bank. I often make trips to the kitchen to tell Mary that "the dinner was great," or that "Mrs. Kyrle wants the receipt for that pudding," or that "my friend Kyrle asks if he may see you make a salad dressing;" but "don't do it, Mary; let the secret die with you." The cook cackles, like the guinea-hen that she is, but the dishes are none the worse for the commendation.

The laundress is just a washerwoman, so far as I know. She undoubtedly changes with the seasons, but I do not see her, though the clothes are always bleaching on the gra.s.s at the back of the house.

The maids are as changeable as old-fas.h.i.+oned silk. There are always two of them; but which two, is beyond me. I tell Polly that Four Oaks is a sprocket-wheel for maids, with two links of an endless chain always on top. It makes but little difference which links are up, so the work goes smoothly. Polly thinks the maids come to Four Oaks just as less independent folk go to the mountains or the sh.o.r.e, for a vacation, or to be able to say to the policeman, "I've been to the country." Their system is past finding out; but no matter what it is, we get our dishes washed and our beds made without serious inconvenience. The wage account in the house amounts to just $25 a week. My pet system of an increasing wage for protracted service doesn't appeal to these birds of pa.s.sage, who alight long enough to fill their crops with our wild rice and celery, and then take wing for other feeding-grounds. This kind of life seems fitted for mallards and maids, and I have no quarrel with either.

From my view, there are happier instincts than those which impel migration; but remembering that personal views are best applied to personal use, I wish both maids and mallards _bon voyage_.

CHAPTER XLIX

THE SUNKEN GARDEN

Extending directly west from the porch for 150 feet is an open pergola, of simple construction, but fast gaining beauty from the rapid growth of climbers which Polly and Johnson have planted. It is floored with brick for the protection of dainty feet, and near the western end cl.u.s.ter rustic benches, chairs, tables, and such things as women and gardeners love. Facing the west 50 feet of this pergola is Polly's sunken flower garden, which is her special pride. It extends south 100 feet, and is built in the side of the hill so that its eastern wall just shows a coping above the close-cropped lawn. Of course the western wall is much higher, as the lawn slopes sharply; but it was filled in so as to make this wall-enclosed garden quite level. The walls which rise above the flower beds 4 feet, are beginning to look decorated, thanks to creeping vines and other things which a cunning gardener and Polly know. Flowers of all sorts--annuals, biennials (triennials, perhaps), and perennials--cover the beds, which are laid out in strange, irregular fas.h.i.+on, far indeed from my rectangular style. These beds please the eye of the mistress, and of her friends, too, if they are candid in their remarks, which I doubt.

While excavating the garden we found a granite boulder shaped somewhat like an egg and nearly five feet long. It was a big thing, and not very shapely; but it came from the soil, and Polly wanted it for the base of her sun-dial. We placed it, big end down, in the mathematical centre of the garden (I insisted on that), and sunk it into the ground to make it solid; then a stone mason fas.h.i.+oned a flat s.p.a.ce on the top to accommodate an old bra.s.s dial that Polly had found in Boston. The dial is not half bad. From the heavy, octagonal bra.s.s base rises a slender quill to cast its shadow on the figured circle, while around this circle old English characters ask, "Am I not wise, who note only bright hours?"

A plat of sod surrounds the dial, and Polly goes to it at least once a day to set her watch by the shadow of the quill, though I have told her a hundred times that it is seventeen minutes off standard time. I am convinced that this estimable lady wilfully ignores conventional time and marks her cycles by such divisions as "catalogue time," "seed-buying time," "planting time," "sprouting time," "spraying time," "flowering time," "seed-gathering time," "mulching time," and "dreary time," until the catalogues come again. I know it seemed no time at all until she had let me in to the tune of $687 for the pergola, walls, and garden. She bought the sun-dial with her own money, I am thankful to say, and it doesn't enter into this account. I think it must have cost a pretty penny, for she had a hat "made over" that spring.

Polly has planted the lawn with a lot of shade trees and shrubs, and has added some clumps of fruit trees. Few trees have been planted near the house; the four fine oaks, from which we take our name, stand without rivals and give ample shade. The great black oak near the east end of the porch is a tower of strength and beauty, which is "seen and known of all men," while the three white oaks farther to the west form a clump which casts a grateful shade when the sun begins to decline. The seven acres of forest to the east is left severely alone, save where the carriage drive winds through it, and Polly watches so closely that the foot of the Philistine rarely crushes her wild flowers. Its sacredness recalls the schoolgirl's definition of a virgin forest: "One in which the hand of man has never dared to put his foot into it." Polly wanders in this grove for hours; but then she knows where and how things grow, and her footsteps are followed by flowers. If by chance she brushes one down, it rises at once, shakes off the dust, and says, "I ought to have known better than to wander so far from home."

She keeps a wise eye on the vegetable garden, too, and has stores of knowledge as to seed-time and harvest and the correct succession of garden crops. She and Johnson planned a greenhouse, which Nelson built, for flowers and green stuff through the winter, she said; but I think it is chiefly a place where she can play in the dirt when the weather is bad. Anyhow, that gla.s.s house cost the farm $442, and the interest and taxes are going on yet. I as well as Polly had to do some building that autumn. Three more chicken-houses were built, making five in all. Each consists in ten compartments twenty feet wide, of which each is intended to house forty hens. When these houses were completed, I had room for forty pens of forty each, which was my limit for laying hens. In addition was one house of ten pens for half-grown chickens and fattening fowls. It would take the hatch of another year to fill my pens, but one must provide for the future. These three houses cost, in round numbers, $2100,--five times as much as Polly's gla.s.s house,--but I was not going to play in them.

I also built a cow-house on the same plan as the first one, but about half the size. This was for the dry cows and the heifers. It cost $2230, and gave me stable room enough for the waiting stock, so that I could count on forty milch cows all the time, when my herd was once balanced.

Forty cows giving milk, six hundred swine of all ages, putting on fat or doing whatever other duty came to hand, fifteen or sixteen hundred hens laying eggs when not otherwise engaged, three thousand apple trees striving with all their might to get large enough to bear fruit,--these made up my ideal of a factory farm; and it looked as if one year more would see it complete.

No rain fell in October, and my brook became such a little brook that I dared to correct its ways. We spent a week with teams, ploughs, and sc.r.a.pers, cutting the fringe and frills away from it, and reducing it to severe simplicity. It is strange, but true, that this reversion to simplicity robbed it of its shy ways and rustic beauty, and left it boldly staring with open eyes and gaping with wide-stretched mouth at the men who turned from it. We put in about two thousand feet of tile drainage on both sides of what Polly called "that ditch," and this completed the improvements on the low lands. The land, indeed, was not too low to bear good crops, but it was lightened by under drainage and yielded more each after year.