Chapter XXV
HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS
But this story is, after all, an idyl, and the idyl is drawing to itsclose. Even as the Old Three Decker carried tired people to the Islandsof the Blest, my little tale can only end with "and they lived happyever after." Into the sweet monotony of such happy years what readerwants to follow? The reader sees his fellow passengers, the characters,disembark, waves them good-bye--and turns to sail for other isles! Soplease consider that the hawsers are being loosed, the farewells beingspoken.
That second summer at Twin Fires, of course, showed us many things yetto be done. Neither Rome nor the humblest garden was ever built in a day.Our ramblers did their duty well, but the grape arbour and the pergolawould not be covered properly in a season. There were holes in theflower beds to be filled by annuals, and mistakes made in succession, sothat July found us with many patches destitute of any bloom. Out inthe vegetable area there were first cutworms and then drought andpotato blight to be contended with. In our ignorance we neglected towatch the hollyhocks for red rust till suddenly whole plants began todie, and we had to spray madly with Bordeaux and pull off a great heap ofinfected leaves, to save any blooms at all. There were clearings tobe made in the pines for ferny spots, and constant work to be doneabout the pool to keep the wild bushes from coming back. There werechickens to be looked after now, also, and new responsibilities inthe village for both of us. We had neither attempted nor desired toavoid our full share of civic work. We lived a busy life, with not anhour in the day idle, and few hours in the evening. We lived so full alife, indeed, that it was only by preserving an absolute routine for myown bread-winning labours, from nine A.M. till one, that I was able toresist the siren call of farm and garden, and get my daily stintaccomplished.
The preceding summer I had made about $200 out of my produce, whichin my first naive enthusiasm pleased me greatly. But it was surely a poorreturn on my investment, reckoned merely in dollars and cents, andthe second season showed a different result. Having two cows and a smallfamily, I managed to dispose of my surplus milk and cream to a farmerwho ran a milk route. This brought me in $73 a year. As I further savedat least $100 by not having to buy milk, and $60 by Peter's efforts atthe churn, and could reckon a further profit from manure and calves,my cows were worth between $300 and $400 a year to me. Now that we hadhens and chickens, we could reckon on another $100 saved in egg andpoultry bills. To this total I was able to add at the end of thesummer more than $500 received from the sale of fruit and vegetables,not only to the market but to the hotels. I was the only person inBentford who had cultivated raspberries for sale, for instance, and thefact that I could deliver them absolutely fresh to the hotels wasappreciated in so delicate a fruit. Stella and Peter were the pickers.I also supplied the inns with peas, cauliflowers, and tomatoes. Thusthe farm was actually paying me in cash or saving at least $1,000 ayear--indeed, much more, since we had no fruit nor vegetable bills theyear through, Mrs. Pillig being an artist in preserving what would notkeep in the cellar. But we will call it $1,000, and let the rest goas interest on the investment represented by seeds and implements. Tooffset this, I paid Mike $600 a year, and employed his son Joe at$1.75 a day, for twenty weeks. This left me a profit of about $200 onmy first full season at Twin Fires, which paid my taxes and bought mycoal. Out of my salary, then, came no rent, no bills for butter, eggs,milk, poultry, nor vegetables. I had to pay Mrs. Pillig her $20 a monththerefrom, I had to pay the upkeep of the place, and grocery and meatbills (the latter being comparatively small in summer). But with thegreat item of rent eliminated, and my farm help paying for itself,it was astonishing to me to contemplate what a beautiful, comfortablehome we were able to afford on an income which in New York would coop usin an Upper West Side apartment. We had thirty acres of beautiful land,we had a brook, a pine grove, an orchard, a not too formal garden, alovely house in which we were slowly assembling mahogany furniturewhich fitted it. We had summer society as sophisticated as we cared tomix with, and winter society to which we could give gladly of our ownstores of knowledge or enthusiasm and find joy in the giving. We hadhealth as never before, and air and sunshine and a world of beautyall about us to the far blue wall of hills.
Above all, we had the perpetual incentive of gardening to keep our eyestoward the future. A true garden, like a life well lived, is foreverbecoming, forever in process, forever leading on toward new goals. Life,indeed, goes hand in hand with your garden, and never a fair thoughtbut you write it in flowers, never a beautiful picture but you paintit if you can, and with the striving learn patience, and with the halfaccomplishment, the "divine unrest."
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
reads the ancient motto on our dial plate, and as I look back on theyears of Twin Fires' genesis, or forward into the future, the hoursthat are not sunny are indeed not marked for me. I am writing now ata table beneath the pergola. The floor is of brick, laid (somewhatirregularly) by Stella and me, for we still are poor, as the Eckstromswould reckon poverty, and none of what Mrs. Deland has called "thegrim inhibitions of wealth" prevents us from doing whatever we canwith our own hands, and finding therein a double satisfaction. Overmy head rustle the thick vines--a wistaria among them, which may or maynot survive another winter.
It is June again. The ghost of Rome in roses is marching across thelawn beyond the white sundial, and there are arches in perspectivenow beneath the level superstructure. The little brick bird bath iscovered with ivy, and last year's self-sown double Emperor Williamsare already blue about it. The lawn is a thick, rich green. To thewest the grape arbour rises above a white bench of real marble, and Ican see dappled shadows beneath the whitish young leaves. I know thataround the pool stately Japanese iris are budding now, great clumps ofthem revelling in the moisture they so dearly love, soon to break intoblooms as large as plates, and beyond them is a little lawn, with thebench our own hands made against a clump of cedars, and on each side asmall statue of marble on a slender chestnut pedestal, carved and paintedto balance the bench.
I know also that a path now wanders up the brook almost to the road,amid the wild tangle, and ends suddenly in the most unexpected nookbeneath a willow tree, where irises fringe a second tiny pool. I knowthat the path still wanders the other way into the pines--pines largernow and more murmurous of the sea--past beds of ferns and a lone cardinalflower that will bloom in a shaft of sunlight. Somewhere down that pathmy wife is wandering, and she is not alone. A little form (at leastshe says it has form!) sleeps beside her, while she sits, perhaps,with a book or more likely with sewing in her busy fingers, or morelikely still with hands that stray toward the sleeping child and earsthat listen to the sea-shell murmur of the pines whispering secretsof the future. Is he to be a Napoleon or a Pasteur? No less a genius,surely, the prophetic pines whisper to the listening mother!
My own pen halts in its progress and the ink dries on the point.
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
--that indeed we desire for our children, for our loved ones! Dim,forgotten perils of adolescence come to my mind, as a cloud obscuresthe summer sun. Then the cloud sweeps by. I see the white dial postfocussing the sunlight once again on the green lawn, amid its ring ofstately queens, and the thought comes over me not that I possess thesethirty acres of Twin Fires, but that they possess me, that they aremine only in trust to do their bidding, to hand them on still fairer thanI found them to the new generation of my stock. They are the Uptonhome--forever.
Already we have bought a tall grandfather's clock, with little Nat'sname and birth date on a plate inside the door. I can hear it tickingsomnolently now, out in the hall. Already the quaint rubbish isaccumulating in our attic which in twenty years will be a dusty,historical record of many things, from sartorial styles to literaryfashions. Some day little Nat will rummage them for forgotten books ofhis childhood, and come upon my derby, now in the latest fashion, towonder that men ever wore such outlandish headgear.
But the garden will never be out of fash
ion! Looking forth again fromthe window, I can see our best discovery of last season beginning toscatter its bits of sky on the ground, as it does every day before noon.It is flax, which blooms every day at sunrise the season through, shedsall its petals when the sun is high, and renews them all with the nextday's dew. It is perfectly hardy and reproduces itself in greatquantity. No blue is quite like it save the sky, and at seven o'clock ofa fresh June morning you will go many a mile before you find anythingso lovely as our garden borders. A little later, too, the first sowingof our schyzanthus will begin to flower, against a backing of whiteplatycodons, and that will be an old-fashioned feature of delicate bloomperpetually new, for the little butterfly flower, as it used to becalled, covering the entire graceful plant with orchidlike blossoms, isone of those shyer effects that the professional gardeners neverstrive for, but which we amateurs who are poor enough to be our owngardeners achieve, to put the great expensive formal gardens to shame.Another bed we are proud of is filled with love-in-a-mist rising outof sweet alyssum--all feathery blue and white, like our own skies.But we, too, have the showier effects. Already the best of them iscoming--about a hundred feet of larkspur along the west wall of thegarden, and at its base pink Canterbury bells. Unfortunately, the bellswill be passing as the larkspur comes to its fullest flower, but forabout four or five days in ordinary seasons that particular border ofpink and blue is a rare delight.
I wonder, by the way, if Stella has watered the schyzanthus plantsthis morning. They are down in the borders by the pool. Perhaps I hadbetter go and see. A moment's respite from my toil will do me good. Iwill listen to the tinkle of the brook, as I will follow the path thatwanders beside it through the maples to the pines, where our garden isbut the reproduction in little of our fair New England woods. At thespot where first we heard the hermit sing I shall find my wife andchild, I shall find them for whom all my strivings are, who give meaningto my life, who, when all is said, are the sunshine of its serene hours.What a blue sky overhead where the cloud ships ride! What a burst ofsong from the oriole! What a pleasant sound from the field beyond theroses--the soft chip of Mike's hoe between the onions! And hark, fromthe pines a tiny cry! Can he want his father?
THE END