The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by Professor Grey’s assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure. Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues–like a second marriage, alas! too often “the triumph of hope over experience”–or else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.
But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun, beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to; very often I didn’t know whether they could be transplanted. (As it turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait. As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors’ buttons, love-in-a-mist, Drummond’s phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently watered the hopeful earth.
Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was my farm, thence would come my profits–if profits there should be. But just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my dwelling a dream of gardens.
“After all,” I thought, “a country place is but half realized without its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that. I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a gardener–an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within; I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!”
I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.
“What are yez doin’ that for?” he asked.
I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. “Just to be a kid, I guess,” I laughed.
There are some things Mike couldn’t understand. Perhaps I did not clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had waked the echo of their mood.
But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those memories came back with haunting clearness–a summer day, a long tramp, the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden passion, the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!
The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit, too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a manuscript by a rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.