Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
The Abandoned Farmers. His Humorous Account of a Retreat from the City to the Farm

I did my feeble best to fight him off; but it was of no use. He just naturally surrounded me. Inside of three minutes he had me as thoroughly mined, flanked and invested as though he’d been Grant and I’d been Richmond. I could tell he was prepared to stay right on until I capitulated.

So, in order for me to be able to live my own life, it became necessary to give him an order. I made it as small an order as possible, because, as I have just said and as I told him repeatedly, I had no place in which to plant the things I bought of him, and could not tell when I should have a place in which to plant them. That petty detail did not concern him in the least. He promised to postpone delivery until I had taken title to some land somewhere; and then he smiled his all-ivory smile and released me from captivity, and took his departure.

Two months later, when we had joined the landed classes, the consignment arrived – peach, pear, quince, cherry and apple. I was quite shocked at the appearance of the various items when we undid the wrappings. The pictures from which I had made my selections showed splendid trees, thick with foliage and laden with the most delicious fruit imaginable. But here, seemingly, was merely a collection of golf clubs in a crude and unfinished state – that is to say, they were about the right length and the right thickness to make golf clubs, but were unfinished to the extent that they had small tentacles or roots adhering to them at their butt ends.

However, our gardener – we had acquired a gardener by then – was of the opinion that they might develop into something. Having advanced this exceedingly sanguine and optimistic belief, he took out a pocket-knife and further maimed the poor little things by pruning off certain minute sprouts or nubs or sprigs that grew upon them; and then he stuck them in the earth. Nevertheless, they grew. At this hour they are still growing, and in time I think they may bear fruit. As a promise of future productivity they bore leaves during the summer – not many leaves, but still enough leaves to keep them from looking so much like walking sticks, and just enough leaves to nourish certain varieties of worms.

I sincerely trust the reader will not think I have been exaggerating in detailing my dealings with the artificers, agents and solicitors who descended upon us when the hue and cry – personally I have never seen a hue, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever heard one; but it is customary to speak of it in connection with a cry and I do so – when, as I say, the presumable hue and the indubitable cry were raised in regard to our ambition to own a country place. Believe me, I am but telling the plain, unvarnished truth. And now we come to the home-seeking enterprise:

Sometimes alone, but more frequently in the company of friends, we toured Westchester, its main highways and its back roads, its nooks and its corners, until we felt that we knew its topography much better than many born and reared in it. Reason totters on her throne when confronted with the task of trying to remember how many places we looked at – places done, places overdone, places underdone, and places undone. Wherever we went, though, one of two baffling situations invariably arose: If we liked a place the price for that place uniformly would be out of our financial reach. If the price were within our reach the place failed to satisfy our desires.

After weeks of questing about, we did almost close for one estate. It was an estate where a rich man, who made his money in town and spent it in the country, had invested a fortune in apple trees. The trees were there – several thousand of them; but they were all such young trees. It would be several years before they would begin to bear, and meantime the services of a small army of men would be required to care for the orchards and prune them, and spray them, and coddle them, and chase insects away from them. I calculated that if we bought this place it would cost me about seven thousand dollars a year for five years ahead in order to enjoy three weeks of pink-and-white beauty in the blossoming time each spring.

Besides, it occurred to me that by the time the trees did begin to bear plentifully the fashionable folk in New York might quit eating apples; in which case everybody else would undoubtedly follow suit and quit eating them too. Ours is a fickle race, as witness the passing of the vogue for iron dogs on front lawns, and for cut-glass vinegar cruets on the dinner table; and a lot of other things, fashionable once but unfashionable now.

Also, the house stood on a bluff directly overlooking the river, with the tracks of the New York Central in plain view and trains constantly ski-hooting by. At the time of our inspection of the premises, long restless strings of freight cars were backing in and out of sidings not more than a quarter of a mile away. We were prepared, after we had moved to the country, to rise with the skylarks, but we could not see the advantage to be derived from rising with the switch engines. Switch engines are notorious for keeping early hours; or possibly the engineers suffer from insomnia.

At length we decided to buy an undeveloped tract and do our own developing. In pursuance of this altered plan we climbed craggy heights with fine views to be had from their crests, but with no water anywhere near; and we waded through marshy meadows, where there was any amount of water but no views. This was discouraging; but we persevered, and eventually perseverance found its reward. Thanks to some kindly souls who guided us to it, we found what we thought we wanted.

We found a sixty-acre tract on a fine road less than a mile and a half from one of the best towns in the lower Hudson Valley. It combined accessibility with privacy; for after you quitted the cleared lands at the front of the property, and entered the woodland at the back, you were instantly in a stretch of timber which by rights belonged in the Adirondacks. About a third of the land was cleared – or, rather, had been cleared once upon a time. The rest was virgin forest running up to the comb of a little mountain, from the top of which you might see, spread out before you and below you, a panorama with a sweep of perhaps forty miles round three sides of the horizon.

There were dells, glades, steep bluffs and rolling stretches of fallow land; there were seven springs on the place; there was a cloven rift in the hill with a fine little valley at the bottom of it, and the first time I clambered up its slope from the bottom I flushed a big cock grouse that went booming away through the underbrush with a noise like a burst of baby thunder. That settled it for me. All my life I have been trying to kill a grouse on the wing, and here was a target right on the premises. Next day we signed the papers and paid over the binder money. We were landowners. Presently we had a deed in the safe-deposit box and some notes in the bank to prove it.

Over most of our friends we had one advantage. They had taken old-fashioned farms and made them over into modern country places. But once upon a time, sixty or seventy years back, the place of which we were now the proud proprietors had been the property of a man of means and good taste, a college professor; and, by the somewhat primitive standards of those days, it had been an estate of considerable pretensions.

This gentleman had done things of which we were now the legatees. For example, he had spared the fine big trees, which grew about the dooryard of his house; and when he had cleared the tillable acres he had left in them here and there little thickets and little rocky copses which stood up like islands from the green expanses of his meadows. The pioneer American farmer’s idea of a tree in a field or on a lawn was something that could be cut down right away. Also the original owner had planted orchards of apples and groves of cherries; and he had thrown up stout stone walls, which still stood in fair order.

But – alas! – he had been dead for more than forty years. And during most of those forty years his estate had been in possession of an absentee landlord, a woman, who allowed a squatter to live on the property, rent free, upon one unusual condition – namely, that he repair nothing, change nothing, improve nothing, and, except for the patch where he grew his garden truck, till no land. As well as might be judged by the present conditions, the squatter had lived up to the contract. If a windowpane was smashed he stuffed up the orifice with rags; if a roof broke away he patched the hole with scraps of tarred paper; if a tree fell its molder-ing trunk stayed where it lay; if brambles sprang up they flourished unvexed by bush hook or pruning blade.

Buried in this wilderness was an old frame residence, slanting tipsily on its rotted sills; and the cellar under it was a noisome damp hole, half filled with stones that had dropped out of the tottering foundation walls. There was a farmer’s cottage which from decay and neglect seemed ready to topple over; likewise the remains of a cow barn, where no self-respecting cow would voluntarily spend a night; the moldy ruins of a coach house, an ice house and a chicken house; and flanking these, piles of broken, crumbling boards to mark the sites of sundry cribs and sheds.

The barn alone had resisted neglect and the gnawing tooth of time. This was because it had been built in the time when barns were built to stay. It had big, hand-hewn oak sticks for its beams and rafters and sills; and though its roof was a lacework of rotted shingles and its sides were full of gaps to let the weather in, its frame was as solid and enduring as on the day when it was finished. This, in short and in fine, was what we in our ignorance had acquired. To us it was a splendid asset. Persons who knew more than we did might have called it a liability.

All our friends, though, were most sanguine and most cheerful regarding the prospect. Jauntily and with few words they dismissed the difficulties of the prospect that faced us; and with the same jauntiness we, also, dismissed them.

“Oh, you won’t have so very much to do!” I hear them saying. “To be sure, there’s a road to be built – not over a quarter of a mile of road, exclusive of the turnround at your garage – when you’ve built your garage – and the turn in front of your house – when you’ve built your house. It shouldn’t take you long to clear up the fields and get them under cultivation. All you’ll have to do there is pick the loose stones off of them and plow the land up, and harrow it and grade it in places, and spread a few hundred wagonloads of fertilizer; and then sow your grass seed. That old horsepond yonder will make you a perfectly lovely swimming pool, once you’ve cleaned it out and deepened it at this end, and built retaining walls round it, and put in a concrete basin, and waterproofed the sides and bottom. You must have a swimming pool by all means!

“And then, by running a hundred-foot dam across that low place in the valley you can have a wonderful little lake. You surely must have a lake to go with the swimming pool! Then, when you’ve dug your artesian well, you can couple up all your springs for an emergency supply. You know you can easily pipe the spring water into a tank and conserve it there. Then you’ll have all the water you possibly can need – except, of course, in very dry weather in mid-summer.

“And, after that, when you’ve torn the old house down and put up your new house, and built your barn and your stable, and your farmer’s cottage and your ice house, and your greenhouses, and your corn-crib, and your tool-shed, and your tennis court, and laid out some terraces up on that hillside yonder, and planned out your flower gardens and your vegetable garden, and your potato patch and your corn patch, and stuck up your chicken runs, and bought your work stock and your cows and chickens and things – oh, yes, and your kennels, if you are going in for dogs – No? All right, then; never mind the kennels. Anyhow, when you’ve done those things and set out your shrubs and made your rose beds and planted your grapevines, you’ll be all ready just to move right in and settle down and enjoy yourselves.”

I do not mean that all of these suggestions came at once. As here enumerated they represent the combined fruitage of several conversations on the subject. We listened attentively, making notes of the various notions for our comfort and satisfaction as they occurred to others. If any one had advanced the idea that we should install a private race track, and lay out nine holes, say, of a private golf course, we should have agreed to those items too. These things do sound so easy when you are talking them over and when the first splendid fever of land ownership is upon you!

Had I but known then what I know now! These times, when, going along the road, I pass a manure heap I am filled with envy of the plutocrat who owns it, though, at the same time, deploring the vulgar ostentation that leads him to spread his wealth before the view of the public. When I see a masonry wall along the front of an estate I begin to make mental calculations, for I understand now what that masonry costs, and know that it is cheaper, in the long run, to have your walls erected by a lapidary than by a union stonemason.

And as for a bluestone road – well, you, reader, may think bluestone is but a simple thing and an inexpensive one. Just wait until you have had handed to you the estimates on the cost of killing the nerve and cleaning out the cavities and inserting the fillings, and putting in the falsework and the bridgework, and the drains and the arches – and all! You might think dentists are well paid for such jobs; but a professional road contractor – I started to say road agent – makes any dentist look a perfect piker.

And any time you feel you really must have a swimming pool that is all your very own, take my advice and think twice. Think oftener than twice; and then compromise on a neat little outdoor sitz bath that is all your very own.

But the inner knowledge of these things was to come to us later. For the time being, pending the letting of contracts, we were content to enjoy the two most pleasurable sensations mortals may know – possession and anticipation: the sense of the reality of present ownership and, coupled with this, dreams of future creation and future achievement. We were on the verge of making come true the treasured vision of months – we were about to become abandoned farmers.

No being who is blessed with imagination can have any finer joy than this, I think – the joy of proprietorship of a strip of the green footstool. The soil you kick up when you walk over your acres is different soil from that which you kick up on your neighbor’s land – different because it is yours. Another man’s tree, another man’s rock heap, is a simple tree or a mere rock heap, as the case may be; and nothing more. But your tree and your rock heap assume a peculiar value, a special interest, a unique and individual picturesqueness.

And oh, the thrill that permeates your being when you see the first furrow of brown earth turned up in your field, or the first shovel-load of sod lifted from the spot where your home is to stand! And oh, the first walk through the budding woods in the springtime! And the first spray of trailing arbutus! And the first spray of trailing poison ivy! And the first mortgage! And the first time you tread on one of those large slick brown worms, designed, inside and out, like a chocolate éclair!

After all, it’s the only life! But on the way to it there are pitfalls and obstacles and setbacks, and steadily mounting monthly pay rolls.

As shall presently develop.

CHAPTER IV. HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM

Soon after we moved to the country we became eligible to join the Westchester County Despair Association, on account of an artesian well – or, to be exact, on account of three artesian wells, complicated with several springs.

I spoke some pages back of the Westchester County Despair Association, which was founded by George Creel and which has a large membership in our immediate section. As I stated then, any city-bred man who turns amateur farmer and moves into our neighborhood, and who in developing his country place has a streak of hard labor, is eligible to join this organization. And sooner or later – but as a general thing sooner – all the urbanites who settle up our way do join. Some day we shall be strong enough to club in and elect our own county officers on a ticket pledged to run a macadam highway past the estate of each member.

Our main claim to qualification was based upon the water question; and yet at the outset it appeared to us that lack of water would be the very least of our troubles. When we took title to our abandoned farm, and for the first time explored the bramble-grown valley leading up from the proposed site of our house to the woodland, we several times had to wade, and once or twice thought we should have to swim. Why, we actually congratulated ourselves upon having acquired riparian rights without paying for them.

This was in the springtime; and the springs along the haunches of the hills upon either side of the little ravine were speaking in burbly murmuring voices, like overflowing mouths, as they spilled forth their accumulated store of the melted snows of the winter before; and the April rainstorms had made a pond of every low place in the county.

In our ignorance we assumed that, since there was now plenty of water of Nature’s furnishing, there always would be plenty of water forthcoming from the same prodigal source – more water than we could possibly ever need unless we opened up a fresh-water bathing beach in the lower meadow of our place. So we dug out and stoned up the uppermost spring, which seemed to have the most generous vein of them all, and put in pipes. The lay of the land and the laws of gravity did the rest, bringing the flow downgrade in a gurgling comforting stream, which poured day and night without cessation.

This detail having been attended to, we turned our attention to other things. Goodness knows there were plenty of things requiring attention. I figured at that period of our pioneering work that if we got into the Despair Association at all it would follow as the result of my being indicted for more or less justifiable manslaughter in having destroyed an elderly gentleman of the vicinity, whom upon the occasion of our first meeting I rechristened as Old Major Gloom, and of whom we still speak behind his back by that same name.

The major lived a short distance from us, within easy walking distance, and he speedily proved that he was an easy walker. I shall not forget the first day he came to call. He ambled up a trail that the previous tenants, through a chronic delusion, had insisted upon calling a road; and he found me up to my gills in the midst of the preliminary job of trying to decide where we should make a start at clearing out the jungle, which once upon a time, probably back in the Stone Age, as nearly as we might judge from its present condition, had been the house garden.

We had been camping on the place only a few days. We climbed over, through and under mystic mazes of household belongings to get our meals, or to get to our beds, or to get anywhere, and altogether were existing in a state of disorder that might be likened to the condition the Germans created with such thoroughgoing and painstaking efficiency when falling back from an occupied French community.

I trust we are not lacking in hospitality; but, for the moment, we were in no mood to receive visitors. However, upon first judgment the old major’s appearance was such as to disarm hostility and re-arouse the slumbering instincts of cordiality. He was of a benevolent aspect, with fine white whiskers and an engaging manner. If you can imagine one of the Minor Prophets, who had stepped right out of the Old Testament, stopping en route at a ready-made clothing store, you will have a very fair mental picture of the major as he looked when he approached me, with hand outstretched, and in warm tones bade me welcome to Upper Westchester. He fooled me; he would have fooled anybody unless possibly it were an expert criminologist, trained at discerning depravity when masked behind a pleasing exterior.

When he spoke I placed him with regard to his antecedents, for I had been on the spot long enough to recognize the breed to which he belonged. There is a type of native-born citizen of this part of New York State who comes of an undiluted New England strain, being the descendant of pioneering Yankees who settled along the lower Hudson Valley after the Revolution and immediately started in to trade the original Dutch settlers out of their lands and their eyeteeth.

The subsequent generations of this transplanted stock have preserved some of the customs and many of the idioms of their stern and rock-bound forebears; at the same time they have acquired most of the linguistic eccentricities of the New York cockney. Except that they dwell in proximity to it, they have nothing in common with the great city that is only thirty or forty miles away as the motorist flies. Generally they profess a contempt for New York and all its works. They may not visit it once a year; but, all the same, its influence has crept up through the hills to tincture their mode of speech with queer distinctive modes of pronunciation.

The result is a composite dialectic system not to be found anywhere else except in this little strip of upland country and in certain isolated communities over on Long Island, along the outer edge of the zone of metropolitan life and excitement. For instance, a member of this race of beings will call a raspberry a “rosbry”; and he will call a bluebird a “blubbud,” thereby displaying the inherited vernacular of the Down East country. He will say “oily” when he means early, and “early” when he means oily, and occasionally he will even say “yous” for you – peculiarities which in other environment serve unmistakably to mark the born-and-bred Manhattanite.

The major at once betrayed himself as such a person. He introduced himself, adding that as a neighbor he had felt it incumbent to call. I removed a couple of the family portraits and a collection of Indian relics and a few kitchen utensils, and one thing and another, from the seat of a chair, and begged him to sit down and make himself at home, which he did. He accepted a cigar, which I fished out of a humidor temporarily tucked away beneath a roll of carpet; and we spoke of the weather, to which he gave a qualified and cautious indorsement. Then, without further delay, he hitched his chair over and laid a paternal hand upon my arm.

“I hear you’ve got Blank, the lawyer, searching out the title to your propputty here.”

“Yes,” I said; “Mr. Blank took the matter in hand for us. Fine man, isn’t he?”

“Well, some people think so,” he said with an emphasis of profound significance.

“Doesn’t everybody think so?” I inquired. “Listen,” he said; “my motto is, Live and let live. And, anyhow, I’m the last man in the world to go round prejudicing a newcomer against an old resident. Now I’ve just met you and, on the other hand, I’ve known Blank all my life; in fact, we’re sort of related by marriage – a relative of his married a relative of my wife’s. So, of course, I’ve got nothing to say to you on that score except this – and I’m going to say it to you now in the strictest confidence – if I was doing business with Blank I’d be mighty, mighty careful, young man.”

“You astonish me,” I said. “Mr. So-and-So” – naming a prominent business man of the county seat – “recommended his firm to me.”

“Oh, So-and-So, eh? I wonder what the understanding between those two is? Probably they’ve hatched up something.”

“Why, isn’t So-and-So above suspicion?” I asked. “I wouldn’t say he was and I wouldn’t say he wasn’t. But, just between you and me, I’d think twice about taking any advice he gave me. They tell me you’ve let the contract for some work to Dash & Space?”

“Yes; I gave them one small job.”

“Too bad!”

“What’s too bad?”

“You’ll be finding out for yourself before you’re done; so I won’t say anything more on that subject neither. I could tell you a good deal about those fellows if I was a-mind to; but I never believed in repeating anything behind a man’s back I wouldn’t say to his face. Live and let live! – that’s my motto. Anyhow, if you’ve already signed up with Dash & Space it’s too late for you to be backing out – but keep your eyes open, young man; keep your eyes wide open. Who’s your architect going to be?”

I told him. He repeated the name in rather a disappointed fashion.

“Never heard of him,” he admitted; “but I take it he’s like the run of his kind of people. I never yet saw the architect that I’d trust as far as I could sling him by the coat-tails. Say, ain’t that Bink’s delivery wagon standing over yonder in front of your stable?”

“I think so. We’ve been buying some things from Bink.”

“You’ve opened up a regular account with him, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wouldn’t reflect on Bink’s honesty for any amount of money in the world. Of my own knowledge I don’t know anything against him one way or the other. Of course, from time to time I’ve heard a lot of things that other people said about him; but that’s only hearsay evidence, and I make it a rule not to repeat gossip about anybody. Still” – he lingered over the word – “still, if it was me instead of you, I’d go over his bills very carefully – that’s all!

“I don’t blame any fellow for trying to get along in his business; and I guess the competition is so keen in the retail merchandising line that oncet in a while a man just naturally has to skin his customers a little. But that’s no argument why he should try to take the entire hide off of ‘em. They tell me Bink’s bookkeeper is a regular wizard when it comes to making up an account, ‘specially for a stranger.” He took a puff or two at his cigar, meantime squinting across our weed-grown fields. “Don’t I see ‘Lonzo Begee chopping dead trees down there alongside the road?”

“Yes; I believe that’s his name. He only came to work for us this morning. Seems to be a hustler.”

“Does he, now? Well, ain’t it a curious circumstance how many fellers starting in at a new job just naturally work their heads off and wind up at the end of the second week loafing? Strikes me that’s particularly the case with the farm laborers round here. Now you take ‘Lonzo Begee’s case. He never worked for me – I’m mighty careful about who I hire, lemme tell you! – but it always struck me as a strange thing that ‘Lonzo changes jobs so often. I make it a point to keep an eye on what’s happening in this neighborhood; and seems like every time I run acrost him he’s working in a different place for a different party.

“And yet you never can tell – he might turn out to be a satisfactory hand for you. Stranger things have happened. And besides, what suits one man don’t suit another. I believe in letting a man find out about these things for himself. The bitterer the experience and the more it costs him, the more likely he is to remember the lesson and profit by it. Don’t you think so yourself?”

I told him I thought so; and presently he took his departure, after remarking that we had purchased a place with a good many possibilities in it; though, from what he had heard, we probably paid too much for it, and he only hoped we didn’t waste too much money in developing. He left me filled with so many doubts and so many misgivings that I felt congested. Within two days he was back, though, still actuated by the neighborly spirit, to warn me against a few more persons with whom we had already had dealings, or with whom we expected to have dealings, or with whom conceivably we might some day have dealings.

And within a week after that he returned a third time to put me on my guard against one or two more individuals who somehow had been overlooked by him in his previous visits. Rarely did he come out in the open and accuse anybody of anything. He was too crafty, too subtle for that. The major was a regular sutler. But he certainly did understand the art of planting the poison. Give him time enough, and he could destroy a fellow’s confidence in the entire human race.

He specialized in no single direction; his gifts were ample for all emergencies. When he tired of making you distrustful of those about you, or when temporarily he ran out of material, he knew the knack of making you distrustful of your own judgment. For example, there was the time, in the second month of our acquaintance I think it was, when he meandered in to inspect the work of renovation that had just been started on the stable. He spent perhaps ten minutes going over the premises, now and then uttering low, disparaging, clucking sounds under his breath. I followed him about fearsomely. I was distressed on account of the disclosures that I felt would presently be forthcoming.

“Putting on a slate roof, eh?” he said when he was done with the investigation. “Expect it to stay put?”

I admitted that such had been the calculation of the builder.

“Nothing like being one of these here optimists,” he commented dryly. “But I want to tell you that it’s the biggest mistake you ever made to put a slate roof on those sloping gables without sticking in some metal uprights to keep the snow from sliding off in a lump when the winter thaws come.”

It had always seemed to me that snow had few enough pleasures as it was. Though I had given the subject but little thought, it appeared to me that if sliding off a roof gave the snow any satisfaction it would ill become me or any one else to interfere. I ventured to say as much.

“I guess you don’t get my meaning,” he explained. “When the snow starts sliding, if there’s enough of it, it’s purty sure to take most of those slates along with it. And then where’ll you be, I want to know?”