The Abandoned Farmers. His Humorous Account of a Retreat from the City to the Farm

“Is – is it too late to put up some anti-sliding thingumbobs now?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said comfortingly; “it’s too late now unless you ripped the whole job off and started all over again. I judge you’ll just have to let Nature take its course. I see you’ve got a chimney that don’t come over the ridge of the roof. Are you calculating that it’ll draw?”

“I rather hoped it would – that was the intention, I believe.”

“Well, then, you’re in for another disappointment there. But if I was you I shouldn’t fret myself about that, because it’ll be some months yet before you’ll be building a fire in the fireplace, what with the warm weather just coming on; and you can have the top of the chimney lifted almost any time… I don’t want to alarm you needlessly; but it looks to me like mighty faulty drainpipes the plumber’s been putting in for you. You’ll have to snatch all that out before a great while and have new pipes put in proper. Don’t it beat all what sharpers plumbers are? But then, they’re no worse than other artisans, taking them by and large. F’r instance, what could be a worse job than that plastering in your bedroom, or those tin gutters up yonder at your eaves? The plastering may stay up a while, but the first good hard storm ought to bring the gutters down. I don’t like your masonry work, either, if you’re asking me for my opinion; and I see the carpenters are slipping in some mighty sorry-looking flooring on you.”

I am not exaggerating. I am repeating, as accurately as I can, a conversation that really took place.

For a while the major was in a fair way to spoil the present century for me. If the inhabitants of the countryside were in a conspiracy to strip the pelfry off a fresh arrival and divide it among them as souvenirs, if there was no honesty left anywhere in a corrupted world, what, then, was the use of living? Why not commit suicide according to one of the standard methods and have done with the struggle, trusting that the undertaker would not be too much of a gouge and that the executors of the estate would leave a trifle of it for the widow and the orphan?

But, after a spell, during which from the various firms, corporations and persons who had been traduced by him we uniformly had considerate and fair and scrupulously honorable treatment and service, we began to disregard the major’s danger signals and to steer right past them. He, though, wearied not in well-doing. At every chance he dropped in, a poison viper disguised as a philanthropist, to hang another red light on the switch for us. It was inevitable that his ministrations should get on our nerves. I began to have visions centering about justifiable acts of homicide, always with the major for the chosen victim of my violence.

It was after having such a dream that I figured myself as getting into George Creel’s Despair Association by virtue of having to stand trial over at White Plains for murder. As a matter of fact, I spared the major; and at last accounts he was still going to and fro in the land, planting slanders on all likely sites. I take it that there is one counterpart for him among every so many human beings; but it is in the country where every one has a chance to find out every one’s business, and where the excuses of being neighborly and friendly give him opportunity for plying his trade that he is most in evidence.

CHAPTER V. IN WHICH WE BORE FOE WATER

We joined the Despair Association finally by reason of our water problem. However, that was to come into our lives later. Through the springtime we had more water than we could possibly hope to use, and we focused our attentions and our energies upon hacking a homestead out of the briar patch we had bought.

A painful acre at a time, we cleared lands that once had been cleared. As I may have stated already, forty-odd years of disuse had turned lawn space, garden space and meadow into one conglomerate jungle of towering weeds and tangled thorny underbrush, stretching from the broken fences along the highroad straight back to the dooryard of the moldering tumbledown dwelling. With a gang of men under a competent foreman, and a double team of hired horses, we assaulted that tangle, bringing to the undertaking much of the same ardor and some of the same fortitude which I imagine must have inspired Stanley on the day when he began chopping his way through the trackless wilds of the dark forest to find Doctor Livingstone.

It gave one the feeling of being a pioneer and a pathfinder – no, not a pathfinder; a pathmaker – to stand by, superintending in a large, broad, general, perfectly ignorant fashion the job of opening up those thickets of ours to the sunlight that had not visited them for ever so long. Off of one segment of our property, a slope directly behind the main house, we took over four hundred wagonloads of stumps, roots, trunks, boughs and brush – the fruitage of nearly two months of steady labor on the part of men and horses.

The brambles were shorn down and piled in heaps to be burned. The locusts, thousands of them, varying in size from half-grown trees to switchy saplings, were by main force snatched out of the ground bodily. A number of long-dead chestnuts and hickories, great unsightly snags that reared above the uptom harried earth like monuments to past neglect, were felled and sawed into cordwood lengths and carted away.

What emerged after these things had been done more than repaid us for all our pains. When the rumpled soil had been smoothed back and plowed and harrowed, and sown to grass, and when the grass had sprouted as promptly as it did, there stood forth a dimpling green expanse where before had been a damp, moldy and almost impenetrable tangle, hiding treasure-troves of old tin cans, heaps of rusted and broken farming implements and here and there the bleached-out bones of a dead cow or a deceased horse.

To our abounding astonishment, we found ourselves the owners of a considerable number of old but healthy apple trees and a whole grove of cherry trees that we hadn’t known were there at all, so thoroughly had they been buried in the locusts and the sumacs. It was just like finding them. Indeed, it was finding them.

The old house came down next, with some slight assistance from a crew of wreckers. Being almost ready to come down of its own accord it met them halfway. They had merely to pry into the foundations, hit her a hard wallop in the ribs, and then run for their lives. From the wreckage we reclaimed, out of the cellar, which was pre-Revolutionary, some hand-hewn oak beams in a perfect state of preservation; and out of the upper floors, which were pre-James K. Polk, a quantity of interior trim, along with door frames and window sashes.

Incidentally we dispossessed a large colony of rats and a whole synod of bats, a parish of yellow wasps and a small but active congregation of dissenting cats – half-wild, glary-eyed, roach-backed, mangy cats that resided under the broken flooring. In all there were fourteen of these cats – swift and rangy performers, all of them. One and all, they objected to being driven from home. They hung about the razed wreckage, and by night they convened in due form upon a bare knoll hard by, and held indignation meetings.

Parliamentary disputes arose frequently, with the result that the proceedings might be heard for a considerable distance. I took steps to break up these deliberations, and after several of the principal debaters had met a sudden end – I am a very good wing shot on cats – the survivors saw their way clear to departing entirely from the vicinity. Within a week thereafter the song birds, which until then had been strangely scarce upon the premises, heard the news, and began coming in swarms. We put up nesting boxes and feeding shelves, and long before June arrived we had hundreds of feathered boarders and a good many pairs of feathered tenants.

One morning in the early part of the month of June I counted within sight at one time fourteen varieties of birds, including such brilliantly colored specimens as a scarlet tanager and his mate; a Baltimore oriole; a bluebird; an indigo bunting; a chat; and a flicker – called, where I came from, a yellow hammer. Robins were probing for worms in the rank grass; two brown thrashers and a black-billed cuckoo were investigating the residential possibilities of a cedar tree not far away; and from the woods beyond came the sound of a cock grouse drumming his amorous fanfare on a log.

Think of what that meant to a man who, for the better part of twelve years, had been hived up in a flat, with English sparrows for company, when he craved a bit of wild life!

What had been a gardener’s cottage stood at the roadside a hundred yards away from the site of the main house. On first examination it seemed fit only for the scrap heap; but one of those wise elderly persons who are to be found in nearly every rural community – a genius who was part carpenter, part mason, part painter, part glazier and part plasterer – was called into consultation, and he decided that, given time and material for mending, he might be able to do something with the shell. Modestly he called himself an odd-jobs man; really he was a doctor to decrepit and ailing structures.

From neglect and dry rot the patient was almost gone; but he nursed it back to a new lease on life, trepanning its top with new rafters, splinting its broken sides with new clapboards. He cured the cellar walls of rickets, the roof of baldness, and the inside woodwork of tetter; and he so wrought with hammer and saw and nails, with lime and cement, with paintbrush and putty knife, that presently what had been a most disreputable blot on the landscape became not only a livable little house but an exceedingly picturesque one, what with its wide overhanging gables, its cocky little front veranda, and its new complexion of roughcast stucco.

While this transformation was accomplished in the lower field, we were doing things to the barn up on the hillside. It had good square lines, the barn had; and, though its outer casing was in a woeful state of nonrepair, its frame, having been built sixty or seventy years ago of splendid big timbers, stood straight and unskewed. Thanks to the ability of our architect to dream an artistic dream and then to create it, this structure, without impairment of its general lines and with no change at all in its general dimensions, presently became a combination garage and bungalow.

The garage part was down below, occupying the space formerly given over to horse stalls and cow sheds. Here, also, a furnace room, a laundry and a servant’s room were built in. Above were the housekeeping quarters – three bedrooms; two baths; a big living hall, with a wide-mouthed fireplace in it; a kitchen, and a pantry. This floor had been the haymow; but I’ll warrant that if any of the long-vanished hay which once rested there could have returned it wouldn’t have known the old place.

The roof of the transmogrified mow was sufficiently high to permit the construction of a roomy attic, with accommodations for one sleeper at one end of it, and ample storage space besides.

At the back of the building, where the teams had driven in, a little square courtyard of weathered brick was laid; a roof of rough Vermont slate was laid on in an irregular splotchy pattern of buff and yellow and black squares; and finally, upon the front, at the level of the second floor, the builder hung on a little Italian balcony, from which on clear days, looking south down the Hudson, we have a forty-mile stretch of landscape and waterscape before us.

On the nearer bank, two miles away, the spires of the market town show above the tree tops; on the further bank, six miles away, the rumpled blue outlines of the Ramapo Hills bulk up against the sky line; and back of those hills are sunsets such as ambitious artists try, more or less unsuccessfully, to put on canvas.

All this had not cost so much as it might have, because all the interior trim, all the doors and windows, and all the studs and joists and beams had been reclaimed from the demolished main building. The chief extravagances had been a facing of stonework for the garage front and a stucco dress for the upper walls. We broke camp and moved in.

For a month or so we went along swimmingly. One morning we quit swimming. All of a sudden we woke up to find there was no longer sufficient water for aquatic pastimes.

The absolutely unprecedented dry spell that occurs every second or third year in this part of the North Temperate Zone had descended upon us, taking us, as it were, unawares. The brooks were going dry; the grass on hillsides where the soil was thin turned from a luscious green to a parched brown; and the mother spring of our seven up the valley, which had gushed so plenteously, now diminished overnight, as it were, into a puny runlet. There were no indications that the spring would be absolutely dry; but there was every indication that it would continue to lessen in the volume of its output – which it did. We summoned friends and well-wishers into consultation, and by them were advised to dig an artesian well.

We did not want to bother with artesian wells then. We were living very comfortably upstairs over the garage and we were planning the house we meant to build. We had drawn plans, and yet more plans, torn them up and started all over again; and had found doing this to be one of the deepest pleasures of life. Time without end we had conferred with friends who had built houses of their own, and who gave us their ideas of the things which would be absolutely indispensable to our comfort and happiness in our new house. We had incorporated these ideas with a few of our own, and then we had found that if we meant to construct a house which would please all concerned, ourselves included, there would be needed a bond issue to float the enterprise and the completed structure would be about the size of a cathedral. So then we would trim down, paring off a breakfast porch here and a conservatory there, until we had a design for a compact edifice not much larger than an averagesized railroad terminal.

Between times, when not engaged in the pleasing occupation of building our house on paper, we chose the site where it should stand. This, also, consumed a good many days, because each time we decided on a different location. One of our favorite recreations was shifting the house we meant to build about from place to place. We put imaginary wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us was we had too much latitude. With half an acre of land at our disposal, we should have been circumscribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you have to be reasonably definite about where you are going to build; slide too far one way or the other, and you are committing trespass, and litigation ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick and to choose – sixty acres, with desirable sites scattered all over the tract.

No sooner had we absolutely and positively settled on one spot as the spot where the house must stand than we would find half a dozen others equally desirable, or even more so; and then, figuratively speaking, we would pick up the establishment and transport it to one of the newly discovered spots, and wheel it round to face in a different direction from the direction in which it had just been facing. If a thing that does not yet physically exist may have sensations, the poor dizzy thing must have felt as if it were a merry-go-round.

Likewise we were very busy putting in our road. Up until a short time ago Miss Anna Peck, who makes a specialty of scaling supposedly inaccessible crags, was probably the only living person who could have derived any pleasure from penetrating to our mountain fastness, either afoot or otherwise. When we heard an engine in difficulties coughing down under the hill, followed by the sound of a tire blowing out, or by the smell of rubber scorching as the brakes clamped into the fabric, we knew some of our friends had been reckless enough to undertake to climb up by motor. So, unless we wanted to become hermits, we felt it incumbent upon us to put in a road.

When we got the estimates on the job we decided that the contractor must have figured on building our road of chalcedony or onyx or moss agate or some other of the semi-precious stones. It didn’t seem possible that he meant to use any native material – at that price. It turned out, though, that his bid was fairly moderate – as processed blue-stone roads go in this climate; and ours has cost us only about eight times as much as I had previously supposed a replica of the Appian Way would cost. However, it has been pronounced a very good road by critics who should know; not a fancy road, but a fair average one.

It would look smarter, of course, with wide brick gutters down either side of it for its entire length; and I should add brick gutters, too, if I were as comfortably fixed, say, as Mr. Charles Schwab, and felt sure that I could get some of the Vanderbilt boys to help me out in case I ran short of funds before the job was completed. Still, for persons who live simply it does very well.

With all these absorbing employments to engage us, we naturally were loath to turn our attentions to water. We had lived too long in a flat where, when you wanted water, you merely turned a faucet. To us water had always been a matter of course. But now the situation was different. With each succeeding day the flow from our spring was slackening. In its present puniness it was no more than a reminder of the brave stream of the springtime.

There was a water witch, so called, in the neighborhood – a gentleman water witch. We were recommended to avail ourselves of his services. It was his custom, we were told, to arm himself with a forked peach-tree switch and walk about over the land, holding the wand in front of him by its two prongs, meantime muttering strange incantations. When he came to a spot where water lay close to the surface the other end of his divining rod would dip magically toward the earth. You dug there, and if you struck water the magician took the credit for it; and if you didn’t strike water it was a sign the peach-tree switch had wilfully deceived its proprietor, and he cut a fresh twig off another and more dependable tree and gave you a second demonstration at half rates. However, before opening negotiations with this person, I bethought me to interview the man who had contracted to do the boring.

The latter gentleman proved to be the most noncommittal man I ever met in my life. He was as chary about making predictions as to the result of operations in his line as the ticket agent of a jerkwater railroad down South is about estimating the probable time of arrival of the next passenger train – always conceding that there is to be any next train; and that is as chary as any human being can possibly be. Only upon one thing was he positive, which was that no peach-tree switch in the world could be educated up to the point where it could find water that was hidden underground.

Man and boy, he had been boring wells for thirty years, he said; and it was all guess. One shaft would be put down – at three dollars a foot – until it pierced the roof of Tophet, and the only resultant moisture would be night sweats for the unhappy party who was footing the bills. Or the same prospector might dig his estate so full of circular holes that it would resemble honeycomb tripe, and never get anything except monthly statements for the work to date. On the other hand, a luckier man, living right across the way, had been known to start sinking a shaft, and before the drill had gone twenty feet it became necessary to remove the women and children to a place of safety until the geyser had been throttled down.

This particular well digger’s business, as he himself explained, was digging wells, not filling them after they were dug. He guaranteed to make a hole in the ground of suitable caliber for an artesian well, but Nature and Providence must do the rest. With this understanding, he fetched up his outfit and greased himself and the machinery all over, and announced that he was ready to start.

So we picked out a spot where it would be convenient to build a pump house afterward, and he fixed up the engine and began grinding away. And he ground and ground and ground. Every morning, whistling a cheerful air, he would set his drills in circular motion, and all day he would keep it turning and turning. At eventide I would call on him and he would report progress – he had advanced so many feet or so many yards in a southerly direction and had encountered such and such a formation.

“Any water?” At first I would put up the question hopefully, then nervously, and finally for the sake of regularity merely.

“No water,” he would reply blithely; “but this afternoon about three o’clock I hit a stratum of the prettiest white quartz you ever saw in your life.” And, with the passion of the born geologist gleaming in his eye, he would pick up a handful of shining specimens and hold them out for me to admire; but I am afraid that toward the last any enthusiasm displayed by me was more or less forced.

And the next night it would be red sandstone, or gray mica, or sky-blue schist, or mottled granite, or pink iron ore – or something! This abandoned farm of ours certainly proved herself to be a mighty variegated mineral prospect. In the course of four weeks that six-inch hole brought forth silver and solder, soda and sulphur, borax and soapstone, crystal and gravel, amalgam fillings and a very fair grade of moth balls.

It brought forth nearly everything that may be found beneath the surface of the earth, I think, except radium – and water. On second thought, I am not so sure about the radium. It occurs to me that we did strike a trace of something resembling radium at the two-hundred-foot level – I won’t be positive. But I am absolutely sure about the water. There wasn’t any.

At the end of a long and expensive month we abandoned that hole, fruitful though it was in mineral wealth, moved the machinery a hundred yards west, and began all over again. We didn’t get any water here, either; but before we quit we ran into a layer of wonderful white marble. If anybody ever discovers a way of getting marble for monuments and statuary out of a hole six inches in diameter and a hundred and seventy-five feet deep our fortunes are made. We have the hole and the marble at the bottom of it; all he will have to provide is the machinery.

By now we were desperate, but determined. We sent word to George Creel to rush us application blanks for membership in his Despair Association. We transferred the digging apparatus to a point away down in the valley, and the contractor retuned his engine and inserted a new steel drill – his other one had been worn completely out – and we began boring a third time. And three weeks later – oh, frabjous joy! – we struck water – plenteous oodles of it; cold, clear and pure. And then we broke ground for our new house.

That isn’t all – by no means is it all. Free from blight, our potatoes are in the bin; our apples have been picked; and our corn has been gathered, and in a rich golden store, it fills our new corncrib. We are eating our own chickens and our own eggs; we are drinking milk from our own cow; and we are living on vegetables of our own raising.

Until now I never cared deeply for turnips. Turnips, whether yellow or white, meant little in my life. But now I know that was because they were strange turnips, not turnips which had grown in our own soil and for which I could have almost a paternal affection. Last night for dinner I ate a derby hatful of mashed turnips, size seven and an eighth.

Let the servants quit now if they will – and do. Only the day before yesterday the laundress walked out on us. It was our new laundress, who had succeeded the old laundress, the one who stayed with us for nearly two consecutive weeks before the country life palled upon her sensitive spirit. And the day before that we lost a perfect treasure of a housemaid. She disliked something that was said by some one occupying the comparatively unimportant position of a member of the family, and she took umbrage and some silverware and departed from our fireside. We’ve had our troubles with cooks, too.

When the latest one showed signs of a gnawing discontent I offered to take lessons on the ukulele and play for her in the long winter evenings that are now upon us. I suggested that we think up charades and acrostics – I am very fertile at acrostics – and have anagram parties now and then to while away the laggard hours. But no; she felt the call of the city and she must go. We are expecting a fresh candidate to-morrow. We shall try to make her stay with us, however brief, a pleasant one.

But these domestic upsets are to us as nothing at all; for we have struck water, and we are living, in part at least, on our own home-grown provender, and shortly we shall start the home of our dreams. And to-day something else happened that filled our cup of joy to overflowing. In the middle of the day a dainty little doe came mincing down through our garden just as confidently as though she owned the place.

We are less than an hour by rail from the Grand Central Station; and yet, as I write this line, a lordly cock grouse is strutting proud and unafraid through the undergrowth not fifty yards from my workroom! Last night, when I opened my bedroom window – in the garage – to watch the distant reflection of the New York lights, flickering against the sky to the southward, I heard a dog fox yelping in the woods!

Let Old Major Gloom, the human Dismal Swamp, come over now as often as pleases him. Our chalice is proof against his poison.