The Idyl of Twin Fires

by Walter Prichard Eaton

The preceding summer I had made about $200 out of my produce, which in my first naïve enthusiasm pleased me greatly. But it was surely a poor return on my investment, reckoned merely in dollars and cents, and the second season showed a different result. Having two cows and a small family, I managed to dispose of my surplus milk and cream to a farmer who ran a milk route. This brought me in $73 a year. As I further saved at least $100 by not having to buy milk, and $60 by Peter’s efforts at the churn, and could reckon a further profit from manure and calves, my cows were worth between $300 and $400 a year to me. Now that we had hens and chickens, we could reckon on another $100 saved in egg and poultry bills. To this total I was able to add at the end of the summer more than $500 received from the sale of fruit and vegetables, not only to the market but to the hotels. I was the only person in Bentford who had cultivated raspberries for sale, for instance, and the fact that I could deliver them absolutely fresh to the hotels was appreciated in so delicate a fruit. Stella and Peter were the pickers. I also supplied the inns with peas, cauliflowers, and tomatoes. Thus the farm was actually paying me in cash or saving at least $1,000 a year–indeed, much more, since we had no fruit nor vegetable bills the year through, Mrs. Pillig being an artist in preserving what would not keep in the cellar. But we will call it $1,000, and let the rest go as interest on the investment represented by seeds and implements. To offset this, I paid Mike $600 a year, and employed his son Joe at $1.75 a day, for twenty weeks. This left me a profit of about $200 on my first full season at Twin Fires, which paid my taxes and bought my coal. Out of my salary, then, came no rent, no bills for butter, eggs, milk, poultry, nor vegetables. I had to pay Mrs. Pillig her $20 a month therefrom, I had to pay the upkeep of the place, and grocery and meat bills (the latter being comparatively small in summer). But with the great item of rent eliminated, and my farm help paying for itself, it was astonishing to me to contemplate what a beautiful, comfortable home we were able to afford on an income which in New York would coop us in an Upper West Side apartment. We had thirty acres of beautiful land, we had a brook, a pine grove, an orchard, a not too formal garden, a lovely house in which we were slowly assembling mahogany furniture which fitted it. We had summer society as sophisticated as we cared to mix with, and winter society to which we could give gladly of our own stores of knowledge or enthusiasm and find joy in the giving. We had health as never before, and air and sunshine and a world of beauty all about us to the far blue wall of hills.

Above all, we had the perpetual incentive of gardening to keep our eyes toward the future. A true garden, like a life well lived, is forever becoming, forever in process, forever leading on toward new goals. Life, indeed, goes hand in hand with your garden, and never a fair thought but you write it in flowers, never a beautiful picture but you paint it if you can, and with the striving learn patience, and with the half accomplishment, the “divine unrest.”

reads the ancient motto on our dial plate, and as I look back on the years of Twin Fires’ genesis, or forward into the future, the hours that are not sunny are indeed not marked for me. I am writing now at a table beneath the pergola. The floor is of brick, laid (somewhat irregularly) by Stella and me, for we still are poor, as the Eckstroms would reckon poverty, and none of what Mrs. Deland has called “the grim inhibitions of wealth” prevents us from doing whatever we can with our own hands, and finding therein a double satisfaction. Over my head rustle the thick vines–a wistaria among them, which may or may not survive another winter.

It is June again. The ghost of Rome in roses is marching across the lawn beyond the white sundial, and there are arches in perspective now beneath the level superstructure. The little brick bird bath is covered with ivy, and last year’s self-sown double Emperor Williams are already blue about it. The lawn is a thick, rich green. To the west the grape arbour rises above a white bench of real marble, and I can see dappled shadows beneath the whitish young leaves. I know that around the pool stately Japanese iris are budding now, great clumps of them revelling in the moisture they so dearly love, soon to break into blooms as large as plates, and beyond them is a little lawn, with the bench our own hands made against a clump of cedars, and on each side a small statue of marble on a slender chestnut pedestal, carved and painted to balance the bench.

I know also that a path now wanders up the brook almost to the road, amid the wild tangle, and ends suddenly in the most unexpected nook beneath a willow tree, where irises fringe a second tiny pool. I know that the path still wanders the other way into the pines–pines larger now and more murmurous of the sea–past beds of ferns and a lone cardinal flower that will bloom in a shaft of sunlight. Somewhere down that path my wife is wandering, and she is not alone. A little form (at least she says it has form!) sleeps beside her, while she sits, perhaps, with a book or more likely with sewing in her busy fingers, or more likely still with hands that stray toward the sleeping child and ears that listen to the sea-shell murmur of the pines whispering secrets of the future. Is he to be a Napoleon or a Pasteur? No less a genius, surely, the prophetic pines whisper to the listening mother!

My own pen halts in its progress and the ink dries on the point.

–that indeed we desire for our children, for our loved ones! Dim, forgotten perils of adolescence come to my mind, as a cloud obscures the summer sun. Then the cloud sweeps by. I see the white dial post focussing the sunlight once again on the green lawn, amid its ring of stately queens, and the thought comes over me not that I possess these thirty acres of Twin Fires, but that they possess me, that they are mine only in trust to do their bidding, to hand them on still fairer than I found them to the new generation of my stock. They are the Upton home–forever.

Already we have bought a tall grandfather’s clock, with little Nat’s name and birth date on a plate inside the door. I can hear it ticking somnolently now, out in the hall. Already the quaint rubbish is accumulating in our attic which in twenty years will be a dusty, historical record of many things, from sartorial styles to literary fashions. Some day little Nat will rummage them for forgotten books of his childhood, and come upon my derby, now in the latest fashion, to wonder that men ever wore such outlandish headgear.