“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 noble piles of ashes. Finally we blew out the lamps. Cold moonlight stole in across the floor from the glass 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.”