Kitabı oku: «That House I Bought», sayfa 5

EIGHTH PERIOD

The real enjoyment of home comes when for the first time you are taking a week off.

"Are you going to Atlantic City?" asks Jones.

You curl your lip in a sneer and tilt your nose and snort, and make yourself superior.

"Atlantic City! Do I look easy? Atlantic City, boardwalk, red hot sun, skinny bathers, flies in the dining-room, at $7 a day? Not on your life! I'm going to stay home and take the rest cure—that's me! I'm going to sleep late, eat four meals a day, spade my garden when I feel like it and enjoy life right. I'm going to take a shower bath every thirty-six minutes and no company—not a blooming visitor—the whole week. What I want is absolute rest."

Jones listens, but with an air of one who is wise.

That was my experience.

I was getting fagged, brain-weary and nervous from a terrific strain of making an appearance at work. The bluff went over and the powers that be told me to go away and cut out the telephone. So out to That House I Bought forthwith hied me—instanter removed. To drop the load, to forget the worries, to submerge the business ego in a week of solid rest! I was getting near to Heaven.

The first morning I awoke with a start, leaped out of bed, shed my pajamas and grabbed for the things on the chair. I was dressed and halfway down stairs before I realized that it was off duty for mine. O joy! I got The Sun from the porch and read the leading locals and saw half a dozen stories sticking out between the lines. The telephone was handy; I'd call up the office and suggest—whoa! The telephone had been cut out.

"Good!" I exclaimed internally. "I'll have late breakfast and sleep a couple of hours."

My wife came down.

"While I'm getting breakfast," she said, "suppose you turn the hose on the porch, and just kind of dust it off with this broom. The girl won't come until next week, and you know I'm a sick woman."

I squirted the hose and dusted. Scrubbery is one of my short talents. When the sun dried it off, the porch was streaked from end to end, and I had to do it over with my wife supervising.

"It is so sweet for us to be together in our nice new home," she said, as I dutifully toted dishes to the kitchen. "You wipe while I wash them, and then you can take a hammer and some tacks and fix these old chairs for the kitchen. When you get that done you can put up some shelves for me in the fruit pantry, and why don't you arrange your books to-day? They're in all sorts of places. There are lots of sticks and stones around the yard. Suppose you pick them up and mow the lawn. Oh, I know what you can do! You can level up all these little gullies where the rain has cut up the loose dirt in the back yard. Isn't it just too dear for anything for us to have a whole week of fun fixing up around the house? I think after you get through with the yard you can–"

And so on and so on, to the end of the chapter!

Some people think cleaning up around a new house is pie for papa, but it isn't. There is none of that glamour you read about in "The Delights of Home" articles, and it isn't a thing on earth but a case of chuck the cuffs and collars and yield your soul to perspiration and persistence.

First, when you start to follow the carpenter into nooks and corners of the cellar and little hiding places in the top floor, you find that he has invented innumerable kinds of leavings, deftly tucked here and there where nobody but a second-sight man would ever figure on locating them. You begin to pick up and after you've stooped about two thousand times you remember the picture in the liver medicine ad., where the man stands with his hands on the small of his back, looking unhappy and pessimistic.

And it isn't only picking up, but it's cleaning out. What to do with the stuff bothers you. It's a cinch to burn the shavings and little pieces of wood and that kind of material, but you've got to deal again with bits of putty and glass and bent nails and tacks and other unburnable debris, and you hate to throw them into the bathtub because of the plumbing. You finally throw them out the window.

Later you realize that you threw them out unwisely. That's when you start to work on your lawn and side yard, and every time you stick in the trowel where you are setting out plants you fetch up a quart of junk. The astonishing lot of garbage they used to make the ground you stand on is bad enough, but with the things you've thrown out added to it the situation is exasperating.

You run your lawn mower over a nail, pick it up, and then wonder why providence ever let you get away from an early death, for sheer imbecility. It was the nail you picked up in the third floor and didn't know how to dispose of it. Pulling up a little bit of ground with your hands, to make a place for some dwarf nasturtium, you cut your finger with the piece of glass you threw out the side window. It's vexing. What to do with this wreckage a second time puzzles you, and you finally throw it over into the next lot. That's the time you find that your neighbor was watching you from his windows, and—it's not easy to be nice to people who throw their refuse over the lot line, is it?

But the worst of all this cleaning-up business is that your wife bosses the job.

Somehow or other, the man who loves his wife still draws the line at matrimonial dictatorship, even in so small a thing as picking up after the carpenter. Neither you nor your wife intended to let it go that far, and she really doesn't intend to go home to her mother, nor do you really intend to drown your domestic griefs in drink. But with some provocations man gets peevish and woman irritable.

The night before it had rained. Our back yard was soaked to the marrow, if a yard has a marrow. We had a wire stretched to mark our lot line and keep people off the grass seed and the garden. On the heels of the rain came one of the company drivers, took down the wire with deliberation and criminal purpose, and drove two goldarned mules and a wagon right through that yard, cutting ruts six inches deep and scattering parsnips, parsley, beans, peas, and lettuce all over the place. In a new development you have to stay at home twenty-four hours a day and yell at such people, or they'll have you rutted out of your possession.

It was pitiful to see those great ruts when we had worked so hard, and the torn-up garden with its sprouts here and there showing what it might have been. But it was more pitiful to see me walking around with a pocketful of manslaughter, looking for the driver who did it. Every driver on the place admitted that he didn't do it; so I came to the conclusion that it couldn't have been done at all. I was having delusions. The ruts and ruined gardens were figments of a disordered imagination.

Oh, well, what's the use?

I got the rake, shovel, spade, hoe, hand cultivator, lawn mower, trowel, and a couple of things you lift young plants with and assembled myself on the lawn to put in a good day's work. With the rake I started to rake off the side yard, and got about halfway through when I discovered that the lawn needed mowing. Halfway through with the mowing job my eye spotted certain thick spots of weeds, and so I started weeding. Halfway through with that I stopped to pick up sticks and stones and throw them, as usual, over my neighbor's lot. Then it was this thing and that thing, never finishing anything, until finally I chucked all things and started something new.

That's the way with enthusiasts. For finishing a job, give me the plodder whose imagination is subordinate to his hoe. You see, he is a one-idea man, and the idea may not be his own; but the fellow with the genius for starting things is very seldom there at the finish. He dreams large and turns the details over to more successful men.

This new thing I started concerns the front plot of garden around the porch. It was a disorganized thing as it stood. I cut out a ditch in front of it, piled all the dirt back against the house and toted baskets of hard stones from a neighboring lot. These I leaned against the sides of the ditch and hammered them in, or cut out the earth and set, making a stone wall that would retain the earth, hold a certain amount of water for irrigation and at the same time be ornamental. It took two hours to make as many yards of this stuff, and several friends called attention to the trouble I was taking for no necessary purpose. Well, that may be so—and probably is—but it is so stupid to be always doing the necessary things, living on the obvious, plugging along on the course of existence that is common to all.

NINTH PERIOD

By the time I had worn my finger nails to a state of complete dishabille—happy thought!—and had become a hopeless problem for the most sanguine manicurist, I began to learn things really. For instance, this is how a lawn ought to be made:

First, grade your ground, then remove all stones and stumps; next roll it and then put on a couple of inches of top soil; then roll that until there isn't a bump in it, sow your grass seed and water constantly, prayerfully. In making our lawn those are the things they didn't do.

I don't dare rake our lawn, because the minute I start, out will come a lot of bolders, leaving terrific yawns in the sod. I'm sure the Duke will forgive me for getting peeved about that lawn, when he understands that there are callouses in my hands and knots in my lawn mower. Also, why on earth, after throwing on the grass seed, do the men drive wagons over it and make ruts and jam their heels into it and make holes, where my vagrant sprinklings with the hose create lakes and puddles and produce never a single grass?

With a little preliminary exercise, pushing the big road-roller on Garrison avenue and shoving marble blocks out of the Courthouse, I tackled our lawn with a new mower, put together by myself in accordance with instructions. Our lawn mower is painted a beautiful green on the blades, to keep out the rust. Also, it was never intended to cut. It would never do, in an emergency, to shave with.

Musically, our lawn mower for the first ten feet sang to my soul a song of sweet, rural peace and contentment.

Then it struck a snag and changed the tune.

In the course of two dashes I discovered that the spectacle of a bald-headed front-yard farmer trotting up and down behind a lawn mower was a thing to make acquaintance with. Two men I'd never seen in my life stopped and gazed at me, and one of them asked me if I was mowing my lawn. A little girl came by and stood cross-legged with her finger in her mouth, and, when I looked her way, snickered and ran home to tell her mother what a strange sight she had seen. Our grocer lingered to remark that it was a hot afternoon, and as if in confirmation of his remarkable perspicuity a lake of sweat fell like a cloudburst from my brow and drowned a hill of ants.

"Don't work so hard," said my wife, as I made another turn. "Why don't you take it easy?"

"I am taking it easy," I replied. "All I need now is a leather chair and a highball to look like the Maryland Club in repose!"

Sarcasm is one of my strong points, and my wife realized that she had goaded me into sharp retort, so she giggled at me and ran to the telephone to tell her mother that Henry was perfectly crazy about his new lawn mower and couldn't leave it alone for a minute.

With all those people looking on and my lawn mower hitting a rock or a hole every seven revolutions, I felt cheap. I felt as though it might have been myself whose jawbone was broken by Samson, or who bore Balaam to Jerusalem. The crowd kept growing, and a stream of honest toil rolled down my spine. Somehow or other I finished the job. Then I looked at the crowd. I left the lawn mower and walked over to them with a deadly glare in my eye.

"Any of you fellows want to fight?" I demanded rudely.

Nobody replied.

"Because if you do," I said, "I can tie both hands behind me and lick any six of you right now."

The crowd melted away slowly. One man did stay a moment, but he didn't want to fight. He offered to feel my pulse.

In spite of his sarcasm, and in the face of all criticism, I insist that I was beginning to learn. For instance, shall I tell you of the time I astonished Campbell?

Campbell was raised in the country. The smell of sod is strong in his nostrils, and he is a handy man with a hoe. Campbell is an agent for the Duke, but time hangs on his hands at moments and he dropped around in a casual sort of way to look at our back yard.

"I'm thinking of planting a turnip and some onions," said my wife pleasantly.

Campbell smiled.

"In that soil," he said, "you'll never make them completely happy. They'll be crying for home all the time."

"What's the matter with the soil?" demanded my wife.

"Well, it wasn't built for farming. You always have to put in richer soil. I'll show you."

My wife thinks Campbell is just about right. When he began to talk about how he'd enjoy fixing her garden, and would she please let him have the hoe, rake, spade, and a bucket to tote sod from a pile in the front yard, she began to look upon him as a Dispensation of Providence. Agriculturally, I dwindled in importance as he expanded.

He cut five rows, or furrows, or ditches, or whatever you call them, with the hoe, and into them he dropped peas, beans, onions, parsley, and parsnips. Then he brought buckets of top soil and dumped it on the seeds along the line, and raked the soil over until it was smooth, and stuck the empty envelopes at the end of the rows for fear my wife would get the peas identified as corn, the beans as peanuts, the onions as cauliflower, the parsley as rhubarb, the parsnips as turnips. Campbell let me bring some more buckets of soil. For that favor I have begun to question the degree of Campbell's kindness.

Then I spoke.

"Your rows of top soil will start the seeds," I said, "but never maintain them when they're out. We must get some commercial fertilizer, and the minute the sprouts show, sprinkle it along the sides of the furrows. Then we must soak the farm with a hose."

My wife sneered. "He's right," said Campbell. My wife winked at him to carry on the joke, but he insisted in sign language that I really had the proper dope. She wilted.

"Now," I said, "we'll have William throw five loads of top soil into this next patch, over which we will run a plough, mixing it not less than a foot deep. Then we'll cover it down, roll it and soak it for a week. We will then be ready to plant our tomato vines and more onions, along the rows of which we'll sprinkle our fertilizer about two sacks to ten yards. This temporary work you've done is about as practical as a school of journalism or poetry. We'll let it stand as a horrible example, but all this goes under, too, in the fall. Then we'll dig trenches around the yard, a foot deep, fill in solid with top soil and after a week of settling plant a double row of hedge, one foot apart in length and six inches apart in width. Am I right?"

I had her gasping. She stared at me in wonder, and Campbell—well, he just stood with his mouth open like a catfish, admiring and astounded.

That day when a man becomes a hero in his wife's eyes is a triumph such as Napoleon never knew in his greatest moments, and the feel of it outdoes the joy of a Nero in the plaudits of the claque. It isn't necessary to mention that I got it out of a bulletin from the agricultural department.