IN PRAISE OF COUNTRY WINTER

Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all.

From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into "a tumultuous privacy of storm."

Our first winter began one bleak November day when the lone pine in the potato field was outlined black against a gray sky, and over the long mountain wall to the northwest came suddenly a puff of white vapour, like the beginning of artillery fire, and then the shrapnel of the snow descended upon us. Wrapped against it, we ran about the farm, marvelling at the transformations it wrought. First it filled up the furrows on the ploughed land, making our field like a zebra's back.

Then it whitened the sundial lawn, reminding us to take the wooden dial post in for the winter. Then it whitened the brown earth around the pool, where our July-sown gra.s.s had failed to make a catch, and presently the pool was a black mirror on a field of white.

Then, as a crowning touch, it powdered the pines, and we ran among them.

Under their thick shelter the wind was not felt. We could hear the flakes hissing against the needles overhead. All about us the white powder was sifting down. A peep into the outside world showed all distances blotted out by the storm. By evening the grove was a powdered Christmas card, the naked farm fields mantles of white laid upon the earth, the lamps in our house beacons of warmth gleaming behind us.

That snow melted, but others followed it, and by Christmas we were, as Mike put it, snowed in for the winter. In the barn was the warm smell of cattle. The motors had disappeared from our roads, and we went to the village in a pung, meeting other pungs on the way. It was as if we had slipped back a whole generation in time. Curiously enough, too, life became more leisurely, more familiar. The great summer estates were boarded up, the hotels closed. Only the real village people sat in church or waited at the post-office. We who in summer had known but few of our townsfolk now became acquainted with them all. We, too, left our pung in the horse sheds every Sabbath morning, listened to the nasal drone of the village choir, and joined in the social quarter-hour which followed the service. It was an altogether different world we live in from the summer world, and we liked it even better.

What walks we had! Either with stout boots along the roads or with snowshoes into the deep woods, we took our exercise almost daily by tramping, and to us the countryside was a perpetual revelation. Almost the first thing which impressed us was the colourful quality of the winter landscape. Even on our own thirty acres that was apparent. At sunset of a still, peaceful day we could look forth from our south windows across the white lawn to the dark green pines and beyond them the exquisite iron-rust tamaracks, soft and feathery. The eastern sky would be mother of pearl at that hour, the southern sky blue, the western sky warm salmon, green, and gold, and the encircling hills a soft gray. Then, as the sun sank lower, a veil of amethyst would steal mysteriously into the feathery tamaracks and over the gray hills, all the upper air would blush to rose, and for a brief ecstatic ten minutes nature would sound a colour chord like a Mozartian andante.

Out on the roads we were charmed by the tawny tiger colour of the willow shoots and the delicate lavender of the blackberry vines rising from the snow beside a gray roadside wall. On the edge of the woods a white birch trunk, naked of leaves, would tell like a lightning stab against the wall of pines, while in the woods themselves, where the sunlight flickered through, the brook would wander black as jet beneath beautifully curved banks of snow, and a laurel bush or fern would stand out a vivid green in a shaft of sunlight; or even a spot of brown leaves, where a pheasant or partridge had scratched, would disclose in its centre the vivid red of a partridge berry, a tiny woodland colour note that we loved.

And how close our wild neighbours came in the winter! We kept out a constant supply of suet and sunflower seeds on two or three downstair window ledges, and while we were dining, or reading in the south room, we could look up at any time and see chickadees or juncos or nuthatches just beyond the pane. The pheasants, too, came to our very doors in winter, leaving their unmistakable tracks, for they are walking birds and set their feet in a single line.

It was not long before we began to find tracks of four-footed wild things, a mink by the brook, a deer in the pasture, and finally a fox which, unlike Buster, tracked with one footprint in the other, leaving apparently but two marks. We followed him a long way on our snowshoes--up through our pasture and across Bert's to Bert's chicken house, and then out across the fields and into the woods. Stella had never tracked before, and she was as keen on the scent as a Boy Scout, reconstructing the animal's actions in her imagination as she went along. We lost the trail finally where it crossed a road, but we picked up deer tracks instead, and found a spot where they had eaten from the sumach bushes, and another where they had pawed up the snow for frozen apples in an old abandoned orchard.

"Oh, if they'd only come into _our_ orchard!" cried Stella.

It was not long afterward, one moonlight night, that I chanced to be sitting up late, and before retiring I glanced from the window. There was something--there were two somethings--moving about amid the apple trees. I looked closer and ran to awake Stella. Wrapped in a dressing-gown, she came with me to the window and peered out. There, in the full moonlight which flooded the white world with a misty silver radiance, were two deer pawing for apples in our orchard. Buster, by some sixth sense, suddenly scented them, and we heard him set up an alarm in the kitchen. The buck shot up his head and listened, a beautiful sight which made Stella gasp for breath. We heard the horse stamp in the stable, and Buster continued his yelps. But the buck was evidently satisfied of his safety, for he lowered his muzzle into the snow again.

However, as we watched, there came a different sound to his ears, though not to ours, for suddenly he gave a leap, and with the doe after him took the stone wall at a bound, the wall across the road at another, and vanished up our pasture. A moment later we, too, heard the sound; it was the jingle of approaching sleigh-bells.

Stella sighed happily as she went back to bed. "All my dreams are coming true!" she whispered.

I wonder if any pleasure in this world is quite comparable with that of coming back to your own snug dwelling after a long tramp through the snowy woods, returning when the green sunset is fading in the west and the amethyst shadows are creeping up the hills and the cold night stillness is abroad, and seeing from afar the red window-squares of home gleaming over the snow? Our favourite method of return was to climb the stone wall by the frozen tamarack swamp and enter the pines, where the ice-covered brook crept like a flowing black ribbon through the white, with the snow on the banks curled over it in the most exquisite and fantastic of tiny cornices. We could see our south windows through the branches, just before the path emerged, and Mrs. Pillig had orders to light the lamps before our return so that they might glow a welcome.

We always stood a moment, hand in hand, regarding them, before we climbed the slope and entered the door.

Ah, the warmth that greeted us when we stepped inside! The good smell of burning apple wood on the twin hearths! The cheerful bark of Buster, if he had not gone to walk with us! The prophetic rattle of dishes and the kettle song from the kitchen! We had a kettle of our own, too, now, in the long room. It hung on a crane in the west fireplace, and was delightfully black, and often made the tea taste smoky, like camp tea.

Quickly we left our wraps in the hall, quickly Stella brought out cups and tea caddy to a little tabouret before the western fireplace, and sitting on our settle in the chimney nook, with the last wan light of sunset competing with the evening lamps, we warmed our hands before the blaze, and drank our tea, and felt that delicious drowse steal over us which comes only after brisk exercise in the mountain air of winter.

And then the evenings, the long winter evenings by the twin fires, when we were supposed by our friends in town to be pining for the opera or the theatre, and were in reality blissfully unaware of either!

Stella's first duty after supper was to hear Peter's lessons, while Buster lay on the hearth and I sprawled in a Morris chair with my cigar, and read the morning paper. That is another delightful feature of country life. You never have time to read the morning paper till evening, and then you read it comfortably all through, if you like.

Peter was going far ahead of his cla.s.s as a result of this individual instruction, and had actually begun to develop a real interest in the acquisition of knowledge--a thing that did not exist as a rule in the pupils of Bentford, which, perhaps, was not the pupils' fault. So far as I have observed, it is not characteristic of most of our public schools in America. Perhaps that is a penalty of democracy; certainly it is a penalty of too large cla.s.ses and too low salaries paid for teaching. We make the profession of teacher a stop-gap for girls between the normal school and matrimony.

When Peter's lesson was over, and we were left alone, we had the best books in the world, the best music in the world, to choose from. We could have a play if we liked, the kind too seldom seen on Broadway. We could have Mozart, or so much of him as Stella could render. We had letters to write, also, a task always left till evening. Sometimes I had tag ends of my morning labours to finish up. Any writing of my own I brought forth in the evening for Stella to read, and to criticise as mercilessly as she chose--which was sometimes very mercilessly; and we thrashed it over together. Sometimes, even, I agreed with her!

Once a week we gathered in several high school pupils who lived near by--Mike's Nora, a boy, and three other girls--and read Shakespeare.

It took them two months to read one play in school, but we read a play in two or three evenings, each of us taking a part. I showed them pictures of the ancient playhouses, and explained as best I could the conditions of stage productions in various periods. Stella supplied the necessary philology. We had a real course in Shakespeare, and yet one which interested the children, for they were reading the plays aloud, and visualizing them. One evening we dressed up in costume, so far as we could, amid much laughter, and acted a scene from "As You Like It,"

with Nora as Rosalind (she wore my knickerbockers and a long cape of Stella's, and blushed adorably), and Mrs. Pillig and Peter called in as audience.

Before the winter was over, two or three other children from the village had begged to come to the cla.s.s, and made the long, cold trip out to the farm on foot every week. We had cake and chocolate when the lessons were over. As Stella and I stood in the door listening to the young voices die away down the road, we used to look at one another happily.

"Oh," she once cried, "how much you can do for folks in the country!

In town we'd pay $4 to see Shakespeare, played by professionals, and then go selfishly home. Here we can help give him to these children, with all that means. And some of them so need it! Why, look at Joe Bostwick!

When he first began to come he had the manners of a bear, and read like a seven-year-old child. I don't believe he'd _ever_ read out loud, or been of an evening among nice people. Now he's getting to know how to behave in company, poor fellow, and he reads almost intelligently!"

"You don't want to go back to the city, then?" I smiled.

"Oh, John, I never want to go back to the city," she answered. "I want to live here forever. I want to do more and more for these people. I want to do more and more for Twin Fires. I want to know more and more what I've never known--the sense of being rooted to the land, of having a home. Our grandfathers used to know that, but in our modern cities we have forgotten. I want to die in the house I've always lived in."

"It's a little soon to plan for that," said I, as we entered the south room again, but I knew what she meant.

The hour was late for us in the country--almost eleven. We put away the cups and plates, and went through our nightly ceremony of locking up. First, we peeped out of the window at the thermometer, which registered two degrees above zero, and I set it down in my diary, for the temperature and the weather are important items to record when you are a farmer. Then we locked all the doors, giving Buster a pat as he lay on his old quilt in a corner of the kitchen. The kitchen lamp was out, and the room was lighted only by the moon, but the kettle was singing softly. Then we returned to the south room and banked the fires carefully, so that the fresh logs would catch in the morning, on top of the n.o.ble piles of ashes. Finally we blew out the lamps. Cold moonlight stole in across the floor from the gla.s.s door and windows, and met midway the warm red glow from the fires. The world was very still. The great room, so homelike, so friendly, so full of beautiful things and yet so simple, seemed sleeping. We tiptoed from it with a last loving glance and climbed the stairs. In our dressing-room, which was an extra chamber, an open fire burned, but in our chamber there was no heat. The shades were up and the moonlight showed the fairy frost patterns on the panes. We took a last look out across the silvery world before we retired, a last deep breath of the stinging cold air as the windows were opened, and jumped beneath the covering, with heavy blankets beneath us as well as above.

"It is a very nice old world," said Stella sleepily. "Winter or summer, it is lovely. I think New York is but a dream--and I hope it won't be mine!"

I heard her breathing steadily a few minutes later, and from far off somewhere in the outer world the mournful whistle of a screech owl came to my ears, the andante of the winter night. It seemed to intensify the freezing silence. I thought how at college I used to hear from my chamber the screech of trolley cars rounding a curve and biting my nerves. I thought of that lonely chamber, of all my life there, of Stella's life in the triple turmoil of New York. And I put out my hand and took hers into it, while she stirred in her sleep, her fingers unconsciously closing over mine. So we awoke in the morning, with the sunshine smiting the snow into diamonds and a chickadee piping for breakfast.

Chapter XXIII

SPRING IN THE GARDEN

The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its excitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrill of the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it was Stella's initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south wind walking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the second place, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds were an experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were an experiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put upon the soil (more or less to Mike's disgust) were an experiment. We were learning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that of learning.

The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but cold nasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers on March 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we could spade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant early peas, which I inoculated with nitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mike looked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing process of legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.

"Bugs!" he said. "Puttin' bugs in the soil! No good never came o'

that. Manure's the thing."

About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for, owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as Stella said, the piles "steamed expensively," like small volcanoes, as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting in his beds large quant.i.ties of cauliflowers, which had proved one of our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum, asters, stock, _Phlox Drummondi_, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope, and _Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca_, a plant chosen by Stella because she said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed that that was about its only appeal.

While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to be accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the gra.s.s, and, of course, the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to gra.s.s, and some gra.s.s seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.

"Oh, I don't know which is the real sign of spring," said Stella, one evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. "Sometimes I think it's the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it's the fox sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 A.M. while you were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the gra.s.s. Sometimes I think it's the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes I think it's a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it's the steaming manure piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet painting."

"Lump them," I suggested. "It's all of them combined. In New York it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush counter."

"New York!" sniffed Stella. "There _is_ no such place!"

April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the year before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come through the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the beds fertilized and trimmed.

About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box.

When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike's disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly.

In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which I thinned out to the strongest stalks.

"Now, Mike," said I, "I'll beat you and the town in the market."

"Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don't know nothin'

about farmin' can do some things," he said, regarding my corn with comical amazement.