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

So it is with the man of whom I have been speaking. Having become a breeder of fancy stock he now appraises a cow not for what she can do on her own intrinsic merits but for the size of her family tree, provided she brings with her the documents to prove it. So far as cows are concerned he has become a confirmed ancestor worshipper. I am sure he would rather own a quarter interest in a collateral descendant of old Prince Bullcon the First of the royal family of the Island of Guernsey, even though the present bearer of the name were but an indifferent milker and of unsettled habits, than to be the sole possessor of some untitled but versatile cow giving malted milk and whipped cream. Such vagaries I cannot fathom. In a democratic country like this, or at least in a country which used to be democratic, it seems to me we should value a cow not for what her grandparents may have been; not for the names emblazoned on her genealogical record, but for what she herself is.

The other Sunday we drove over to his place ostensibly to pay a neighborly call but really to plant distress in his fireside circle by incidentally mentioning that our young grapevines were bearing magnificently.

You see, a member of the Gloat Club is expected to work at his trade Sundays as well as weekdays; and besides we had heard that his arbors, with the coming of the autumn, had seemed a bit puny. So the opportunity was too good to be lost and we went over.

After I had driven the harpoon into his soul and watched it sink into him up to the barbs he took me out to see the latest improvements he had made in his cow bam and to call upon the newest addition to his herd. These times you can bed a hired hand down almost anywhere, but if you go in for blooded stock you must surround them with the luxuries to which they have been accustomed, else they are apt to go into a decline. He invited my inspection of the porcelain-walled stalls and the patent feeding devices and the sanitary fixtures which abounded on every hand, and to his recently installed cream separator. In my youth the only cream separator commonly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache worn by the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, with it, cream separating was merely incidental, the real purposes of the mustache being to be ornamental and impressive and subtly to convey a proper respect for the majesty of the law. Often a town marshal wore one too. But the modern separator is a product of science and not a gift of Nature skillfully elaborated by the art of the barber. It costs a heap of money and it operates by machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is complete without it.

When I had viewed these wonders he led me to a glorified pasture lot and presented me to the occupant – a smallish cow of, a prevalent henna tone. Except that she had rather slender legs and a permanent wave between the horns she seemed to my uninitiated eyes much the same as any other cow of the Jersey persuasion. I realized, however, that she must be very high-church. My friend, I knew, would harbor no nonconformist cows in his place, and besides, she distinctly had the high-church manner, a thing which is indefinable in terms of speech but unmistakably to be recognized wherever found. Otherwise, though, I could observe nothing about her calculated to excite the casual passer-by. But my friend was all enthusiasm.

“Now,” he said proudly, “what do you think of that for a perfect specimen?”

“Well,” I said, “anybody could tell that she’s had a lot of refining influences coming into her life. She’s no doubt cultured and ladylike to a degree; and she has the fashionable complexion of the hour and she’s all marcelled up and everything, but excepting for these adornments has she any special accomplishments that are calculated to give her class?”

“Class!” he repeated. “Class, did you say? Say, listen! That cow has all the class there is. She’s less than two years old and she cost me a cool fifteen hundred cash – and cheap at the figure, at that.”

“Fifteen hundred,” I murmured dazedly. “What does she give?”

“Why, she gives milk, of course,” he explained. “What else would she be giving?”

“Well,” I said, “I should think that at that price she should at least give music lessons. Perhaps she does plain sewing?”

“Say,” he demanded, “what do you expect for fifteen hundred dollars? Fifteen hundred is a perfectly ridiculous price to pay for a cow with a pedigree such as this cow has. She’s registered back I don’t know how far. It’s the regal breeding you pay for when you get an animal like this – not the animal herself.”

But I refused to be swept off my feet. Before this I had associated with royalty. I once met a lineal descendant of William the Conqueror; he told me so himself. Being a descendant was apparently the only profession he had, and I judged this cow was in much the same line of business. “Well,” I replied, “all I can say is that I wouldn’t care if her ancestors came over on the Mayflower – if she belonged to me she’d have to show me something in the line of special endeavor. She’d have to have talents or we’d part company pretty pronto, I’m telling you.”

“It is evident you do not understand anything about blooded stock,” he said. “The grandmother of this cow was insured for fifteen thousand dollars, and her great-grandfather, King Bulbul, was worth a fortune. The owner was offered fifty thousand for him – and refused it.”

In my surprise I could only mutter over and over again the name of William Tell’s brother. A great many people do not know that William Tell ever had a brother. His first name was Wat.

After that my friend gave me up as one hopelessly sunken in ignorance, and by a mutual yet unspoken consent we turned the subject to the actors’ strike, which was then in full blast. But at intervals ever since I have been thinking of what he told me. To my way of thinking there is something wrong with the economic system of a country which saddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an income of more than two thousand dollars a year and if he be married sinks the ax into all he makes above three thousand, leaving him the interest deduction on the extra one thousand, amounting, I believe, to about twelve dollars and a half, for the support of his wife, on the theory that under the present scale of living any reasonably prudent man can suitably maintain a wife on twelve-fifty a year – I repeat, there is something radically wrong with a government which does this to the wage-earner and yet passes right on by a cow that carries fifteen thousand in life insurance and a bull worth fifty thousand in his own right. It amounts to class privilege, I maintain. It’s almost enough to make a man vote the Republican ticket, and I may yet do it, too, sometime when there aren’t any Democrats running, just to show how I feel about it.

Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur-farming group have taken up fruit growing or pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares have been highly recommended to us as being very prolific. You start in with one pair of domestic-minded Belgian hares and presently countless thousands of little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening the landscape. From what I can hear the average Belgian hare has almost as many aunts and uncles and cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too. You can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who hat never tried to eat one. But as we have only about sixty acres and part of that in woodland, we have felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to go in for Belgian hares without sacrificing space which we may require for ourselves.

Mainly our experiments have been confined to hogs and poultry. I will not claim that we have been entirely successful in these directions. The trouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremendously opposed to race suicide and that our hens are so firmly committed to it. Now offhand you might think an adult animal of the swine family that completely gave herself over to the idea of multiplying and replenishing the earth with her species would be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience I have found that such is not always the case. Into the world a brood of little pinky-white squealers are ushered. They grow apace, devouring with avidity the most expensive brands of pig food that the grocer has in stock; and then, just when your mind is filled with delectable visions of hams in the smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellar and tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare-ribs and crackling and home-made country sausage and pork tenderloins on the table – why, your prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera and are shortly no more. They have a perfect mania for it. They’ll travel miles out of their way to catch it; they’ll sit up until all hours of the night in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the Mississippi River – and it full of ice – to get where hog cholera is. Our hogs have been observed in the act of standing in the pen with their snouts in the air, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs of it right out of the air. It is very disheartening to be counting on bacon worth eighty cents a pound only to find that all you have on your hands is a series of hurried interments.

In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicidally minded as hogs are. I speak with authority here because we tried raising turkeys, too. For a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells doom for the turkey, and accordingly it practically devotes its life to getting its feet wet. If it cannot escape from the pen into the damp grass immediately following a rain it will in its desperation take other measures with a view to catching its death of cold. One of the most distressing spectacles to be witnessed in all Nature is a half-grown feebleminded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that it was born a puddle duck, running round and round a coop trying to find a damp spot to stand on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In order to get its feet wet an infant turkey has been known to jump down an artesian well two hundred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it if a scientific fact well authenticated. If somebody would only invent a style of overshoe that might be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkey without making the turkey feel distraught or self-concious, that person would confer a boon upon the entire turkey race and at the same time be in a fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know that a few months back if such an article had been in the market I would gladly have taken fifty pairs, assorted misses’ and children’s sizes.

As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt like altogether abandoning my belief in the good faith and honest intentions of hens. Naturally one thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, but my experience has been that the hen does not follow this line of reasoning. She prefers to go off on a different bent. She figures she was created to adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter of man. Or at any rate I would state that this has been the obsession customarily harbored by the hens which we have owned and which we persistently continue, in the face of disappointment compounded, to go on owning.

We started out by buying, at a perfectly scandalous outlay, a collection of blooded hens of the white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been told that the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth Rock hen; that a white Plymouth Rock hen which had had the right sort of influences in her life and the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in her maturer career would inevitably dedicate her entire being to producing eggs. And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselves offered proof to the absolute contrary.

It was enough almost to break one’s heart to see a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself: “Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the sake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me, sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am I right? I’ll say I am!”

You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. And then when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests you knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind.

We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make them see the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administered to them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted gravel and ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finicky and particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied with the things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; they wished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantities of costly chick feed – compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmed spinster hen to laying her head off.

So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The more confirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpy dropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbid way as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of them as a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she was burdened inside with half-developed yolks – a case, one might say, of mislaid eggs.

In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestion on them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and read aloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?

While I was considering these expedients some one suggested that probably the trouble lay in the fact that our fowls either were too highly bred or were too closely related and perhaps an infusion of new blood was what was needed. So now we went to the other extreme and added to our flock a collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed and homely as to their outward appearance, but declared – by their former owner – to be passionately addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs. Conceding that this was true, the fact remained that immediately they passed into our possession they became slackers and nonproducers. I imagine the mistake we made was in permitting them to associate with the frivolous white débutantes we already owned; undoubtedly those confirmed bachelor maids put queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believe there was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be served up with a comparative stranger’s fried ham. On the theory that they might require exercise to stimulate their creative faculties we let them range through the meadows. Some among them promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravage our garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of the thickets, where the hawks and the weasels and the skunks and the crows might fatten on the fruits of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them up again in their run, whereupon they developed rheumatism and sore eyes and a perverted craving for eating one another’s tail feathers. At present our chicken yard is nothing more nor less than a hen sanitarium. But we do not despair of ultimate success with our hens. We may have to cross them with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere until victory has perched upon our roosts. As Rupert Hughes remarked when, after writing a long list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually produced a riotous hit of hits: “Well, I’m only human – I couldn’t fail every time.”

I should have said that there is one fad to which all our Westchester County colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one agricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception the members of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You meet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience with Polled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they have been highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter him again he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners or Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.

One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopes and disappointments during which he first hired and then for good and sufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commoner varieties – plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls and mavericks – decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employment agencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places. He procured the address of such an establishment and repaired thither – simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he entered the place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, was a shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather than the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. He tried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in so doing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobs offered to him – one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on Long Island and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut. He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants that they’ll hire almost anybody without requiring references.

None of us will ever be rich; we’re all convinced of that, the cost of impractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none of us would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor’s lot – the word landed being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., a landed sucker – for the life of a flat dweller again. It’s a great life if a fellow doesn’t weaken – and we’ll never weaken.

THE END