So we fell over Buster for the rest of the morning. I never saw a dog before nor since who could so successfully get under your feet as Buster. If I started upstairs with the frame of a pine bureau on my back, Buster was on the third step, between my legs. If I was carrying in a stack of plates from the barrel of crockery, Buster was wedged in the screen door, pushing it open ahead of me, to let it snap back in my face. When I scolded him, he undulated his silly yellow body, sprang upon his hind legs, and licked my hands. If I tried to kick him, he regarded it as a game, and bit my shoe lace. Peter's shoe laces, I noted, were in shreds. But Buster disappeared after a time, and Peter and I got the china and kitchenware all in, and Mrs. Pillig had it washed and in the cupboards before he reappeared. He came down the front stairs with one of my bath slippers in his mouth, and, with a profoundly proud undulation of tail and body, laid it at my feet for me to throw, barking loudly. We all laughed, but I took the slipper and beat him with it, while Peter appeared on the verge of tears.

"No, Buster," I cried. "You keep out of doors. Peter, put him out."

Peter resentfully deposited the pup on the porch, and took my slipper back upstairs. Meanwhile, Buster, after looking wistfully through the screen door a second, pushed it open with his nose and paw and reentered, immediately sitting up on his hind legs and gazing into my eyes with the most human look I ever saw.

"Buster," said I, "you are the limit. Very well, stay in. I give up!"

Buster plopped down on all fours, as if he understood perfectly, and took a bite at my shoe string. I patted his head. I had to. The pup was irresistible.

"And what time will you have your dinner?" asked Mrs. Pillig.

"There's no meat in the house. Guess you forgot to order the butcher to stop; but there's eggs."

"Eggs will do," said I, "and one o'clock. Bert has his at twelve, but I want mine at one. Maybe I shall have a guest."

"A guest!" she cried. "You wouldn't be puttin' a guest on me the first mornin'!"

"Well, it's doubtful, I'm afraid," I answered. "Perhaps I'll wait till to-morrow night, and have three guests for supper--just Bert and his wife and their boarder--sort of a housewarming, you know. I want you to make a pie."

"Well, I reckon I can wait on table stylish enough for Mrs. Temple,"

said she, "and I'll make a lemon pie that'll make Bert Temple sorry he didn't marry _me_."

"I shouldn't want you to wreck Bert's domestic happiness," said I, "but make the pie, just the same!"

I went into the south room, and sat at my desk answering some letters, while I waited for dinner. I could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen--the first of those humble domestic sounds which we a.s.sociate with the word home. Through the house, too, and in to me, floated the aroma of bacon and of coffee, faintly, just detectable, mingled with the smell of earth under June rain, which drifted through an open window.

Presently I heard the front door open very softly. As I guessed that Peter had his instructions in behaviour from his mother, I knew it must be Miss Goodwin. My pen poised suspended over the paper. I waited for her to enter the room, in a pleasant tingle of expectation. But she did not enter. Several minutes pa.s.sed, and I got up to investigate, but there was no sign of her. The front door, however, stood ajar. Then Mrs. Pillig called "Dinner!"

I walked into my dining-room, and sat down at the table, which was covered with a new tablecloth and adorned with my new china. Beside my plate was the familiar, old-fashioned silver I had eaten with when a boy, and the sight of it thrilled me. Then I spied the centrepiece--a gla.s.s vase bearing three fresh iris buds from the brookside. Here was the secret, then, of the open door! Mrs. Pillig came in with the platter of eggs and bacon, and she, too, spied the flowers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Well, well, you've got yourself a bookay," she said]

"Well, well, you've got yourself a bookay," she said.

"Not I," was my answer. "They just came. Mrs. Pillig, there's a fairy lives in this house, a nice, thoughtful fairy, who does things like this. If you ever see her, don't be frightened."

Mrs. Pillig looked at me pityingly. "I'll bring your toast and coffee now," she said.

The coffee came in steaming, and it was good coffee, much better than Mrs. Bert's. The eggs were good, too. But best of all was the centrepiece. She had come in so softly, and gone so quickly, and n.o.body had seen her! She had been present at my first meal in Twin Fires, after all, and so delicately present, just in the subtle fragrance of flowers and the warm token of thoughtfulness! My meal was a very happy one, happier even, perhaps, than it would have been had she sat opposite me in person. We are curious creatures, who can on occasion extract a sweeter pleasure from our dreams of others in loneliness than from their bodily presence. Mrs. Pillig fluttered in and out, to see if I was faring well, and though her service was not that of a trained waitress it sufficed to bring me dessert of some canned peaches, buried under my own rich cream, and to remind me that my wants were solicitously cared for. Out on the porch I could see Peter playing with Buster and hear that ingratiating pup's yelps of canine delight. Before me stood the purple iris blooms, with golden hearts just opening, their slender stems rising from the clear water in the vase, and spoke of her whose thought of me was so gracious, so delicately expressed, so warming to my heart. The spoon I held bore my mother's initials, reminding me of my childhood, of that other home which death had broken up ten years before, since when I had called no place home save my study and bedroom high above the college Yard. I thought of the Yard--pleasantly, but without regrets. I looked through the window as my last spoonful of dessert was eaten, and saw the sky breaking into blue. I folded my new napkin, put it into the old silver ring which bore the word "John" on the side, failed utterly to note the absence of a finger-bowl, and rose from my first meal in Twin Fires.

"I have a home again," said I, aloud; "I have a home again after ten years!"

Then I went up the road toward Bert's.

Chapter XIV

THE FIRST LEMON PIE

Miss Goodwin was not there. She had gone for a walk. Disappointed, I went back to my farm, and resolved to clean up the path through the pines, to surprise her. The grove was dripping wet, the brook high, and when I had stacked up the slash from as far as the tamarack swamp, I brought down some old planks from the house and made a walk with them over the wet corner. There was scarcely any slash in the open border of pines along the south wall, so that I had time to smooth with a rake the path on between the vegetables and the hayfield well back toward the house, mow it out with a scythe across the little slope of neglected gra.s.s just west of the house, where I was going some day to plant more orchard and place my chicken houses, and finally bring it down sharp through the group of pines by the road just northwest of the woodshed (evidently planted there for a windbreak), ending it up at the driveway which led in to the vegetable garden, around the end of the shed. Then I put up my tools, and walked back proudly around the circle. The path practically encompa.s.sed ten acres, so that it made quite a respectable stroll. First, it led west through the small group of pines, then south along the wall by the potato field, where I glimpsed the rows of sprouting plants, and beyond them the lone pine and the acres of Bert's farm and the far hills up the valley. Then it led by the hayfield wall, on the right a tangle of wild roses and other wallside flowers and weeds, on the left the neat rows of my vegetables, with the peas already brushed. At the end of the farm it turned east, between two rows of pine trunks like a natural cloister, and finally entered the tamarack swamp, and then the hush and silence of the pine grove, where the brook ran along in its mossy bed and you might have been miles from any house. It emerged into the maples where Twin Fires was visible, spick and span with new white paint and green shutters, above its orchard. I was very proud of that path, of its length, its charm, its variety, its spontaneous character. It seemed to me then, and it has never ceased to seem, better than any extended acres of formal garden planting, more truly representative of the natural landscape of our country, and so in a truer sense a real garden.

There are spots along that brook now where I have sown ferns and wild flowers from the deep woods, brought home, like the trilliums, in a grapevine basket, spots which for sheer exquisiteness of shadowed water and shy bloom and delicate green beat any formal bed you ever dreamed. I have even cleared out three trees to let the morning sun fall on a little pool by the brook, and into that place I have succeeded in transplanting a cardinal flower, which looks at its own reflection in the still water below, across the pool from a blue vervain. Just one cardinal flower--that is all--under a shaft of sunlight in the woods. But it is, I like to think, what Hiroshige would most enjoy.

However, I am running ahead of my story. Returning to the house, I went up to my new chamber, where my striped Navajo blanket (a gift from a New Mexican undergraduate who had been in one of my courses and entertained an inexplicable regard for me, possibly because I persuaded him that he was not destined for a literary career) was spread on the floor, my old college bed was clean with fresh linen, and my college shingles hung on the walls, a pleasant reminder of those strange social ambitions which mean so much to youth. Through my west window streamed in the sunset. I peeled off my clothes and dove into my brand new and quite too expensive porcelain bath tub--a luxury Bert's house did not possess.

Then I got into my good clothes and a starched collar, more for the now novel sensation than anything else, ate my supper, and in the warm June evening walked up the road.

Bert and his wife were in the front sitting-room. I could see them beneath the hanging lamp. The girl was walking idly up and down before the house. Out of range of the open window I took her hand and gave it a little pressure. "For the centrepiece," said I. "You sat opposite me at my first meal, bless you!"

"Did I?" she answered. "What are you talking about?" She smiled it off, but I knew that she was pleased at my pleasure.

Then I led the way into the parlour. "Hear, ye; hear, ye; hear, ye!"

I cried. "To-morrow night at seven a housewarming dinner-party will be given at Twin Fires. The guests will be Mrs. Bert Temple, her lesser fraction, and Miss Stella Goodwin."

"Land o' Goshen!" said Mrs. Bert. "I ain't got no fit clothes."

Bert and I roared. "They're all alike," cried Bert to me. "You ain't got no fit clothes, neither, hev you, Miss Goodwin?"

"Of course not," she laughed. "But I expect to go."

"Well, I ain't got no swaller tail myself," said Bert. "But I expect to go. We'll jest leave the old lady ter home."

"Will you, now?" said she. "Do you s'pose I'd lose a chance to see how Mrs. Pillig's feedin' our friend? Not much!"

"Seven o'clock, then!" I called, as I went back down the road, to light my old student's lamp again at last, and labour in my own house in the quiet evening, the time of day the Lord appointed for mental toil. As I drew near, the form of Buster emerged from the shed, barking savagely, his bark changing to whimpers of joy as I spoke his name.

He pleaded to come into the house with me, so I let him come, and all the evening he lay on the rug beside my chair, while I worked. Now and then I leaned to stroke his head, whereupon he would roll over on his back, raise his four paws into the air, and present his white belly to be scratched. When I stopped, he would roll back with a grunt of profound satisfaction, bat one eye at me affectionately, and go to sleep again.

"Buster," said I, "hanged if I don't like you."

His great tail spanked the rug.

The house seemed oddly more companionable for his presence. Yes, I did like him--I who had thought I hated dogs! I put him to bed at eleven, in the woodshed, and bade him good-night aloud.

The next day Mrs. Pillig was nervously busy with preparations for the feast. The ice man came, and the butcher. I worked half the day at my ma.n.u.scripts, and half cleaning up the last of my orchard slash, mowing the neglected gra.s.s with a scythe, and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the gra.s.s between the house and the road with a lawn mower. I also edged the path to the kitchen door. Every few moments I looked up the road toward Bert's, but no figure drew near with saucily tilted nose. There was only Buster, trotting hither and yon in every part of the landscape, and, at half-past three, the chunky form of Peter coming home from the Slab City school. I set Peter to work for an hour sawing wood.

"But I gotter study," he said.

"What?" said I.

"Spellin'," said Peter.

"All right," said I, "I'll ask you words while you saw."

He gave me his book which I held open on the lawnmower handle, and every time the machine came to his end of the strip of lawn I asked him a new word. Then I'd mow back again, and he'd make another cut of apple bough, and then we'd have a fresh word.

"This lends an extremely educational aspect to agricultural toil, Peter," said I.

"Yes, sir," said he.