The Idyl of Twin Fires

by Walter Prichard Eaton

I paid him brusquely, and he drove away. I stood in the middle of the road, my suitcase beside me, the long afternoon shadows coming down through my dilapidated orchard, and surveyed the scene. Milt Noble had gone. So had my enthusiasm. The house was bare and desolate. It hadn’t been painted for twenty years, at the least, I decided. My trunks, which I had sent ahead by express, were standing disconsolately on the kitchen porch. Behind me I heard my horse stamping in the stable, and saw my two cows feeding in the pasture. A postcard from one Bert Temple, my nearest neighbour up the Slab City road, had informed me that he was milking them for me–and, I gathered, for the milk. Well, if he didn’t, goodness knew who would! I never felt so lonely, so helpless, so hopeless, in my life.

Then an odd fancy struck me. George Meredith made his living, too, by reading manuscripts for a publisher! The picture of George Meredith trying to reclaim a New England farm as an avocation restored my spirits, though just why, perhaps it would be difficult to make any one but a fellow English instructor understand. I suddenly tossed my suitcase into the barn, and began a tour of inspection over my thirty acres.

There was tonic in that turn! Twenty of my acres, as I have said, lay on the south side of the road, surrounding the house. The other ten, behind the barn, were pasture. The old orchard in front of the house (which faced the east, instead of the road) led down a slope half an acre in extent to the brook. That brook ran south close to the road which formed my eastern boundary, along the entire extent of the farm–some three hundred yards. At first it flowed through a wild tangle of weeds and wild flowers, then entered a grove of maples, then a stand of white pines, and finally burbled out into a swampy little grove of tamaracks. I walked down through the orchard, seeing again the white bench across the brook, against the roadside hedge, and seeing now tall iris flowers besides, and a lily pool–all “the sweetest delight of gardens,” as Sir Thomas Browne mellifluously put it. As I followed the brook into the maples and then into the sudden hushed quiet of my little stand of pines, I thought how all this was mine–my own, to play with, to develop as a sculptor molds his clay, to walk in, to read in, to dream in. Think of owning even a half acre of pine woods, stillest and coolest of spots! I planned my path beside the brook as I went along, and my spirits rose like the songs of the sparrows from the roadside trees beyond.

The bulk of my farm lay to the south of the house, on a gentle slope which rose from the brook to a pasture plateau higher than the dwelling. Most of the slope had been cultivated, and some of it had been ploughed in the fall. I climbed westward, a hundred yards south of the house, over the rough ground, looked into the hayfield, and then continued along the wall of the hayfield, over ground evidently used as pasture, to my western boundary, where my acres met the cauliflower fields of my neighbour, Bert Temple.

A single great pine, with wide-spreading, storm-tossed branches, like a cedar of Lebanon, stood at the stone wall, just inside my land. The wall, indeed, ran almost over its roots, a pretty, gray, bramble-covered wall, so old that it looked like a work of nature. Beneath the lower limbs of the pine, and over the wall, one saw the blue mountains framed like a Japanese print. Standing off a way, however, the pine stood out sharply against the hills and the sky, a noble veteran, almost black.

Then and there I saw my book plate–a coloured woodcut, green and blue, with the pine in black on the key block!

Then I reflected how I stood on soil which must be made to pay me back in potatoes for the outlay, stood, as it were, on top of my practical problem–and dreamed of book plates!

“Somebody ought to get amusement out of this!” I said aloud, as I set off for the barn, gathered up my suitcase, and climbed the road toward Bert Temple’s.

If I live to be a hundred, I can never repay Bert Temple, artist in cauliflowers and best of friends in my hour of need. Bert and his wife took me in, treated me as a human, if helpless, fellow being, not as a “city man” to be fleeced, and gave me the best advice and the best supper a man ever had, meantime assuring me that my cows had been tested, and both were sound.

The supper came first. I hadn’t eaten such a supper since grandmother died. There were brown bread Joes–only rival of Rhode Island Johnny cake for the title of the lost ambrosia of Olympus. They were so hot that the butter melted over them instantly, and crisp outside, with delicious, runny insides.