Peggy’s hoofs are swift, going home, and the road, although the same, seems twice as short as before. At one point we vary it, cutting across country through a wood of pines. Beneath the pines the earth is all brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is clear amber, except that at the far edge of the grove there are bright gold gleams through the distant tree stems. Above our heads the color is not brown; it is that strange deep gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart of a pine tree where the branches meet the trunk. We have not talked very much to-day, she and I, but here no one could speak any words. These seem the stillest woods in all the world. We draw rein. Suddenly from out uttermost silence there rings the chime of a thrush.
But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is panting. Were the animals urgent just like this, I wonder, when Adam and Eve longed to listen to some archangel’s voice?
It is Peggy’s will that we get home. The master is there before us, and at the barn. That is another thing I have noticed about husbands, when they are not at “The Works,” they are likely to be at the barn, if there is one. Jennie is flying about, singing to her feet to keep them lively while she makes us a dinner. Even when that meal comes I find I am still dreaming, for I was not ready to come home. Afterward in the clear May twilight we move forth to doorstep and lawn. It is Peggy’s hour for evening cropping. The master leads her about. Every turn of her head, every lift of her foot, is a movement of grace. In the gathering twilight, soft and misty, Peggy seems some beautiful horse stepping delicately out of elfland. Mac is tugging at the other end of her tether rope, and the master is somehow strung between them.
The level meadows flow away before us. The deepening blue of the sky softly puts out the sunset. Suddenly, as at some signal, the frogs begin to pipe from the meadow pool. My friend crosses the dusky lawn to join those others. She moves at Peggy’s head in her dim white dress. One star comes out.
Across their heads I see, hardly discernible, the spires of the city, and its red earth-lights, and somehow, although I know all its fever, all its pain, I hear the far crying of its spirit to my spirit, cry of innermost comradeship, the call of Home. I rise now from my seat on the doorstep, signal of good-night. She comes flying to my side; of all the words she might say, she chooses that best one, “It was our very nicest picnic.”
XV
The Farm Feminine
THERE are in my summer neighborhood three gentlemen farmers who are women. There is an implied distinction in the implied definition. The three I have under observation are quite different from those women farmers who have shouldered their husbands’ acres when forced to do so by widowhood or other marital disability. This difference, among others that readily occur, is primarily the same as that between all actual and amateur farming, the difference between those who grow up out of the soil and know its tricks, and those who come to the soil from another plane, and don’t suspect it of having any tricks. At any rate, the lady farmers of our neighborhood farm because they want to, not because they have to; otherwise, perhaps, they would not be in our neighborhood at all, although it is one of the loveliest in all the land.
Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of the South and the beautiful austerity of New England lies Pennsylvania. This countryside is rich in mellow old farms, far retired from railways. There are low, rolling hills and woodsy back roads. Houses are set far up grassy lanes, lined with trees. Doorways back and front are deep in shade. Barns are big and white, and spread broad wings over plentiful harvesting. Houses are white, too, of stucco or of stone, old, kindly, solidly built. To these shady bricked porches, where the roses clamber against gray-white walls, Washington’s colonials might have come clattering up. Small wonder that women desiring farms should desire just this deep-verdured beauty, and no less wonder that the farms, many good miles from market, should be so abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to surround herself with fields and fowls, may readily choose her own particular frame and setting.
The three have chosen, each according to her heart’s requirements. Lady One is the lady of the flowers, and she is the youngest. Her throat is round and white, nor beneath the droop of her great garden hat is it too much exposed to the sun. She wears gloves, white ones and unique among garden gloves because they fit. Her shoes, her kerchief, are always freshly white, and her muslin dress of soft shade, lavender or blue, or sprigged and flounced. She might have stepped forth from fancy’s gallery where we all keep pictures hanging of gardens and of grandmothers. She herself may be dreaming of just such a portrait-picture. But don’t think that she is a drone because she is perhaps a dreamer. There are no such flowers in thirty miles, and flowers mean tireless toil; they take more good soil-sweat than a whole field of potatoes.
She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly seedy, but she retouched all its fading picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame, low, and white. Small grilled windows wink with garret mysteries above the high porch roof, and all is deep in shade and set far back beyond low terraces with mossy flower urns and steps of cracked flags. There are trim green globes of box trees before the front door, and to the left is her garden of flowers set within a labyrinthine box hedge. Everywhere are roses, roses,—starry little yellow blossoms, red, pink, white, roses whose very names are fragrant: Flower of Fairfield, Perle de Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d’Or, Crimson Globe, Killarney.