New lives for old

The first thing I did when I was fairly on my feet was to buy a farm.

It was a matter of sentiment with me. All my family with the exception of my father had been farmers and even he, in his latter years, had talked wistfully of the independence of country life. His father had owned a fairly prosperous farm in New Hampshire and on his few acres had lived and died. He had raised there wheat for his flour, wool for his clothing, hides for his shoes, cream for his butter, and meat and vegetables for his table. He even made a fairly good imitation tea and coffee and sweetened the drink with maple sugar from his own trees. Grandfather Carleton, according to father, could have built a Chinese wall about his fields and lived within its boundaries, asking favor of no man. I suppose it was the feeling of independence coming of this that made such men as he good Americans; the first to shoulder muskets for their country, the first to shoulder axes and blaze a trail through the wilderness.

Ruth’s folks, too, had all been farmers. She herself was born and bred on a farm and I think it was that which gave her such good health and good courage. Though in the years of our struggle in the city I never heard her complain, I knew that always in her heart she had a great yearning for the fields and open sky. She never spoke of this, but sometimes Ruth says a great deal when she doesn’t speak. I know when I first told her of my plan she had to swallow hard to keep from crying.

One thing alone disturbed Ruth and that was the thought that with success we were running away from our new-found friends.

“Somehow it seems as though we ought to stay right on here where we’ve made good and share our success with the others,” she said.

“You talk as though we’d made our fortune and were going back to the fatherland,” I said.

“I feel that way,” she admitted.

“Well,” I said, “the gang is part of me now and I wouldn’t quit if I were worth a million. But we’re in a position where we can afford more elbow room now. Of course we can move back into the suburbs again, if we want to.”

She shuddered a little at that.

“Not back there,” she answered.

“Then the only other thing is a farm,” I said. “And if you want, you can think of it as a farm for the whole gang. What a place it will be for the kiddies; your own and the others!”

That was all the cue Ruth needed. On the spot she hatched plans enough to keep her busy all her life. It looked to me as though we’d need a Carnegie endowment to carry out all her schemes, but I didn’t say anything. I’d felt that way before about her projects and seen her end by putting them through on a few dollars. If Ruth had put into business the same amount of thought and brains and energy that she put into her philanthropies she would have made a fortune.

I went to a real estate dealer and there I received my first surprise. It wasn’t my last, however. Before I was through with this business I discovered that I had as much to learn as I had during those first years as an emigrant. And I may as well say right here that my experience wasn’t the kind I’ve read about in the “Simple Life” and “Back to the Farm” stories. And because it was different is the reason I’m writing this. There’s been just as much nonsense written about the farm as about the slums. One man makes it out a hell on earth and another man makes it out a paradise on earth, and both of them are wrong and both of them are right, but neither of them seems to me to have got at the heart of the matter.

In “One Way Out” I learned to my own satisfaction that if an emigrant succeeds where an American fails it proves there’s something wrong with the American. And there is. True as you’re living, there is. Something is lacking in him that his ancestors had; something lacking that the emigrant has to-day. I thought that I had learned this once for all but when I got back into the country I had to learn it over again. The conditions were different, but the same facts held good.

I received a surprise, I said, at the very beginning. It came when the real estate man handed me a list of almost a hundred places for rent and for sale--all within easy reach of the city. I had my choice of anything from one acre to a hundred acres. Not only this but they were offered me almost at my own figure and my own terms. I found I could buy a farm as easily as a set of books. I don’t think the agents would have refused a dollar down and a dollar a week.

I didn’t know anything about real estate values then, but judging from the prices suburban property was bringing I had an idea that a fairly decent place with buildings would cost me around ten thousand dollars. I found that for this sum I could get a fourteen room Colonial house with land enough for a park. After living where the same amount of land would almost make a ward, I was staggered. I thought there must be something crooked in the proposition. But I went to the other agencies and found the same bargains open to me. It seemed that farms were a drug on the market.

And this was in a section of the country which had been settled for over two hundred and fifty years! There’s something to think about in that. It was within a ten cent car fare of a region which was absorbing emigrants by the hundred thousand. It was on the very outskirts of a city which was howling about congestion and moaning over the high cost of living. Land was actually lying idle almost within sight of a market pleading for more produce. It certainly looked queer.

These facts, however, didn’t concern me at the time. As soon as I made sure the facts were actually as represented, I set about making a selection. To Ruth and me this was like living our honeymoon all over again. Perhaps it was more like living our youth again, for we hadn’t ever passed our honeymoon. I’d go over the lists with her in the evening and we’d check off the places that sounded good to us, and then on the first fair morning we’d start to hunt them up. She’d leave the baby at home with some of our good neighbors and we’d go as far as we could on the electric cars and then walk. I wanted to have a carriage but she wouldn’t hear of it because she wanted to feel free. Some days she pretended we were gypsies and other days that we were two Indians hunting a spot to camp. I didn’t mind, because Dick was looking after most of the business now so I could take my time without worrying about that. In this way we squandered whole days along the country roads going through one old house after another and eating our lunch by the side of a brook or in a bit of woods.

I think there must have been something in our blood inherited from our ancestors, for we took to the open road as though we’d been born by its side. Oh, but those were good days--those days when we wandered about at our will in search of a home. It was June and the fields were full of flowers and the air full of birds. Ruth knew them every one and greeted them like old friends, pointing them out to me. I could tell a crow from a robin and a daisy from a buttercup, but that was about all, and yet to me also these wild things were like old friends. I had never missed them, but after the first day I knew I could never do without them again. It was just as I had felt about Ruth from the first time I saw her.

I suppose too that the contrast with our narrow quarters of the last few years had something to do with our joy in the broader prospect. Not that we had ever felt crowded. We had in our tenement all the room we needed and our lives had been so full that we didn’t notice our quarters anyway. Our lives were still full but with more leisure and less strain we wanted more than we needed. We were like pioneers--content at the start with a log cabin or even a tent, but with prosperity desiring larger and better quarters more as a matter of comfort than necessity. We were now ready for a few of the luxuries of life but we recognized frankly the fact that our new inclinations were luxuries. If success had been longer in coming than it was, we would have remained where we were in perfect contentment.

It was hard for us to decide on any of the many old houses we explored because to us they all looked attractive. The thing we both liked about them in spite of signs of decay was that they all seemed so firmly established. There was nothing flimsy about them. They looked as though they had become rooted in the soil like the big elms which grew before so many of them. It was as though the winds and the sun and the rain had tested them and found them honest. As Ruth said, in going into them you wouldn’t feel as though you were beginning life again as you might in a brand new house, but were only starting where the last owner left off.

After our experiences during the last few years we appreciated such details as those. There had been times in the emigrant days when way down deep in our hearts we had felt a little bit like people without a country. We were pioneers and we gloried in that, but we were pioneers without a fatherland. We had no sunny Italy, no emerald isle, no gay France, not even a grim Russia to talk about over a pipe at the end of the day as our neighbors had. We had to go back a century or more to get home, and vivid as that past seemed at times it was distinctly a past in which we had played no part. Now out here in the country where we saw stone walls built by our forefathers, where the land had been tilled by them, where trees planted by them were still growing, where if not direct descendants of our own, descendants of the old stock still lived, we felt closer to that history. So we thought that if we went into one of the old houses built by our forefathers, it would bring us still nearer home.

We spent almost a month this way, anxious to draw out the pleasure as long as possible.

“I’ll know our home as soon as I see it,” said Ruth; “I’ll recognize it like an old friend.”

And so she did. One day toward nightfall--when in the country all the world seems to get mellow--we came upon a little story and a half house connected by a shed with a ramshackly looking barn. It was half hidden behind trees and lilac bushes on the top of a knoll which sloped to a small lake some fifty rods distant. There wasn’t another house within sight of it--just woodland and pasture and fields. Standing there on the old granite doorstep, you wouldn’t have believed there was a city within a long day’s journey.

We had the key and went inside. The rooms were low studded and the windows came down to within two feet of the floor. The ceilings were discolored and the paper was off in great patches where the roof had leaked. But in spite of this the place somehow was like home. Ruth took my arm with a tight squeeze and looked up at me.

“This is it, Billy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure as she was until all excited she began to tell me what she was going to do. With the birds singing outside and the lazy sun streaming through the windows slantwise, she led me through every room, selecting her papers, making her changes, and placing her furniture.