All very foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,—I was renewing my youth. I was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms broadened, my appetite became prodigious. I lost all fear of indigestion and ate anything which my friend Dudley was good enough to provide. I even drank coffee at every opportunity, and went so far as to eat doughnuts and pancakes at breakfast! To be deliciously hungry as of old was heartening.
The weather continued merciful. Each day the sun rose red and genial, and at noon the warm haze of Indian summer trailed along the hills—though I had little time in which to enjoy it. Each sunset marked a new stanza in my poem, a completed phrase, a recovered figure. "Our small affairs have shut out the light of the sun," I said to father, "the political situation has lost all interest for me."
Bare, clean and sweet, the library and music-room at last were ready for furniture. All these must be replaced. A hurried trip to the city, three days of determined shopping with Zulime, and a stream of new goods (necessary to refurnish), began to set toward the threshold. The draymen plied busily between the station and the gate.
By November first my father and I were camping in the library and cooking our own food in the dining-room. We rose each day before dawn and ate our bacon and coffee while yet the stars twinkled in the west, and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm, when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight. My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my mind refused to compose even letters—but the pen was not needed. "My poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked to Dudley.
At last the yard was cleared of its charred rubbish, the porch restored to its old foundation, and the new metal roof, broad-spreading and hospitable, gleamed like snow in dusk and dawn, and from the uncurtained windows our relighted lamps called to the world that the Garland household was about to reassemble and the author permitted himself to straighten up. Changing to my city garments I took the train for Chicago, promising to bring the children with me when our Thanksgiving turkey was fatted for the fire.
My daughters listened eagerly to my tale of the new house, but expressed a fear of sleeping in it. This fear I determined to expel.
On the Saturday before Thanksgiving I rejoined my workmen, finding the house in a worse state of disarray than when I had last seen it. The floors were littered with dust and shavings, and in the dining-room my father, deeply discouraged, was gloomily cooking his breakfast on an oil stove set in the middle of the floor. "It'll take another month to finish the job," he said.
"Oh, no it won't," I replied. "It won't take a week."
Fortunately the stain on the floor was dry and with the aid of two good men I finished the woodwork and beat the rugs. In a couple of days the lower house was livable.
On Wednesday at five o'clock I went to the train, leaving the electric lights all ablaze and the fire snapping in the chimney. It looked amazingly comfortable, restored, settled, and I was confident the children would respond to its cheer.