“That I’m going back home!” I cried. And I took off my hat and let the April wind rush through my hair.
Chapter II
MY MONEY GOES AND MY FARMER COMES
Three days later I got a report on the water from a chemist in Springfield; it was pure. Meanwhile, I had decided to tap the town main, so it didn’t make any difference, anyway. We ran the car back to Bentford, and I closed the deal, took an inventory of the farm implements and equipment which went with the place, made a few hasty arrangements for my permanent coming, and hastened back to college. There I remained only long enough to see that the faculty had a competent man to fill my unexpired term (so much of conscience remained to me!), to pack up my books, pictures, and furniture, to purchase a few necessary household goods, or what I thought were necessary, and to consult the college botanical department. Professor Grey of the department assigned his chief assistant at the gardens to my case. He took me to Boston, and, armed with my inventory, in one day he spent exactly $641 of my precious savings, while I gasped, helpless in my ignorance. He bought, it appeared to me, barrels of seeds, tons of fertilizers, thousands of wheel hoes for horse and man, millions of pruning saws and spraying machines, hotbed frames and sashes, tomato trellises, and I knew not what other nameless implements and impedimenta.
“There!” he cried, at 5 p.m. “Now you can make a beginning. You’ll have to find out this summer what else you need. Probably you’ll want to sink another $600 in the fall. I told ’em not to ship your small fruits–raspberries, etc.–till you ordered ’em to. You won’t be ready for some weeks. The first thing you must do now is to hire a first-class farmer and call in a tree specialist. Meanwhile, I’ll give you a batch of government bulletins on orchards, field crops, cattle, and the like. You’d better read ’em up right away.”
“You’re damn cheerful about it!” I cried. “You talk as if I were a millionaire, with nothing to do but read bulletins and spend money!”
“That’s about all you will do, for the next twelve months,” he grinned.
This was rather disconcerting. But the die was cast, and I came to a sudden realization that seven years of teaching the young idea how to punctuate isn’t the best possible training for running a farm, and if I were to get out of my experiment with a whole skin I had got to turn to and be my own chief labourer, and hereafter my own purchaser, as well.
All that night I packed and planned, and the next morning I left college forever. I slipped away quietly, before the chapel bell had begun to ring, avoiding all tender good-byes. I had a stack of experiment station bulletins in my grip, and during the four hours I spent on the train my eyes never left their pages. Four hours is not enough to make a man a qualified agriculturist, but it is sufficient to make him humble. I had left college without any sentimental regrets, my head being too full of plans and projects. I arrived at Bentford without any sentimental enthusiasms, my head being too full of rules for pruning and spraying, for cover crops, for tuberculin tests, for soil renewal. I’m sorry to confess this, because in all the “back to the land” books I have read–especially the popular ones, and I want this one to be popular, for certain very obvious reasons–the hero has landed on his new-found acres with all kinds of fine emotions and superb sentiments. The city folks who read his book, sitting by their steam radiators in their ten by twelve flats, love to fancy these emotions, glow to these sentiments. But I, alas, for seven long years preached realism to my classes, and even now the chains are on me; I must tell the truth. I landed at Bentford station, hired a hack, and drove at once to my farm, and my first thought on alighting was this: “Good Lord, I never realized the frightful condition of that orchard! It will take me a solid week to save any of it, and I suppose I’ll have to set out a lot of new trees besides. More expense!”
“It’s a dollar up here,” said the driver of the hack, in a mildly insidious voice.