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

Along comes a steamfitter and he, whistling merrily the while, takes a chisel or an adze or an ax and just bodaciously haggles a large ragged orifice in the carpenter’s masterpiece. Through the hole he runs a Queen Rosamond’s maze of iron pipes. He then departs and the carpenter is called back to the scene of the mutilation. After sharpening his saw some more in a restrained and contemplative manner, he patches up the wound as best he can. Enter, then, the boss plumber accompanied by a helper. The boss plumber finds a comfortable two-by-four to sit on and does sit thereon and lights up his pipe and while he smokes and directs operations the assistant or understudy, with edged tools provided for that purpose, tears away some of the cadaver’s most important ribs and several joints of its spinal column for the forthcoming insertion of various concealed fixtures.

Following the departure of these assassins the patient carpenter returns and to the best of his ability reduces all the compound fractures that he conveniently can get at, following which he sharpens his saw – not the big saw which he sharpened from eight-forty-five to ten-fifteen o’clock this morning, but the little buttonhole saw which he has not sharpened since yesterday afternoon; this done, he calls it a day and goes home to teach his little son Elmer, who expects to follow in the paternal footsteps, the rudiments of the art of filing a saw without being in too much of a hurry about it, which after all is the main point in this department of the carpentering profession.

And the next day the plumber remembers where he left his sack of smoking tobacco, or the steam fitter’s attention is directed to the fact that when he stuck in the big pipe like a bass tuba he forgot to insert alongside it the little pipe like a piccolo, and therefore it becomes necessary to maltreat the already thrice-mangled remains of woodwork. A month or so later the plasterers arrive – they were due in a week, but a plasterer who showed up when he was expected or any time within a month after he had solemnly promised on his sacred word of honor that he meant to show up would have his card taken away from him and be put out of the union. Hours after Gabriel has blown his trump for the last call it is going to be incumbent upon the little angel bell hops to go and page the plasterers, else they won’t get there for judgment at all.

Be that as it may and undoubtedly will be, in a month or so the plasterers arrive, wearing in streaks the same effects in laid-on complexion that so many of our leading débutantes are wearing all over their faces. The chief plasterer looks over the prospect and decides that in order to insure a smooth and unbroken surface for his plaster coat the plumbing and the heating connections must have their elbows tucked in a few notches, which ultimatum naturally requires the good offices of the carpenter, first to snatch out and afterward to hammer back into some sort of alignment the shreds and fragments of his original job. When this sort of thing, with variations, has gone on through a period of months, a house has become an intricate and complicated fabric of patchworks and mosaics held together, as nearly as a layman can figure, by the power of cohesion and the pressures of dead weights. The amazing part of it is that it stays put. I am quite sure that our house will stay put, because despite the vagaries – perhaps I should say the morbid curiosity – of various artificers intent on taking the poor thing apart every little while, it was constructed of materials which as humans compute mutabilities are reasonably permanent in their basic characters.

It was our desire to have a new house that would look like an old house; a yearning in which the architect heartily concurred, he having a distaste for the slick, shiny, look-out-for-the-paint look which is common enough in American country houses. In this ambition a combination of circumstances served our ends. For the lower walls we looted two of the ancient stone fences which meandered aimlessly across the face of our acres. According to local tradition, those fences dated back to pre-Revolutionary days; they were bearded thick with lichens and their faces were scored and seamed. In laying them up we were fortunate enough to find and hire a stonemason who was part artificer but mostly real artist – an Italian, with the good taste in masonry which seems to be inherent in his countrymen; only in this case the good taste was developed to a very high degree. Literally he would fondle a stone whose color and contour appealed to him and his final dab with the trowel of mortar was in the nature of a caress.

On top of this find came another and even luckier one. Three miles away was an abandoned brickyard. Once an extensive busy plant, it had lain idle for many years. Lately it had been sold and the new owners were now preparing to salvage the material it contained. Thanks to the forethought of the architect, we secured the pick of these pickings. From old pits we exhumed fine hard brick which had been stacked there for a generation, taking on those colors and that texture which only long exposure to wind and rain and sun can give to brick. These went into our upper walls. For a lower price than knotty, wavy, fresh-cut, half-green spruce would have cost us at a lumber yard, modern prices and lumber yards being what they are, we stripped from the old kiln sheds beautiful dear North Carolina boards, seasoned and staunch. These were for the rough flooring and the sheathing. The same treasure mine provided us with iron bars for reënforcing; with heavy beams and splendid thick wide rafters; with fire brick glazed over by clays and minerals which in a molten state had flowed down their surfaces; with girders and underpinnings of better grade and greater weight than any housebuilder of moderate means can afford these times. Finally, for roofing we procured old field slates of all colors and thicknesses and all sizes; and these by intent were laid on in irregular catch-as-catch-can fashion, suggestive when viewed at a little distance of the effect of thatching. Another Italian, a wood carver this time, craftily cut the scrolled beam ends which show beneath our friendly eaves and in the shadows of our gables. It was necessary only to darken with stains the newly gouged surfaces; the rest had been antiquated already by fifty years of Hudson River climate. Before the second beam was in place a wren was building her nest on the sloped top of the first one. We used to envy that wren – she had moved in before we had.

CHAPTER VII. “AND SOLD TO – ”

When the house was up as far as the second floor and the first mortgage, talk rose touching on the furnishings. To me it seemed there would be ample time a decade or so thence to begin thinking of the furnishings. So far as I could tell there was no hurry and probably there never would be any hurry. For the job had reached that stage so dismally familiar to any one who ever started a house with intent to live in it when completed, if ever. I refer to the stage when a large and variegated assortment of hired help are ostensibly busy upon the premises and yet everything seems practically to be at a standstill. From the standpoint of a mere bystander whose only function is to pay the bills, it seems that the workmen are only coming to the job of a morning because they hate the idea of hanging round their own homes all day with nothing to do.

So it was with us. Sawing and hammering and steam fitting and plumbing and stone-lying and brick-lying were presumed to be going on; laborers were wielding the languid pick; a roof layer was defying the laws of gravitation on our ridgepole; at stated intervals there were great gobs of payments on account of this or that to be met and still and yet and notwithstanding, to the lay eye the progress appeared infinitesimal. For the first time I could understand why Pharaoh or Rameses or whoever it was that built the Pyramids displayed peevishness toward the Children of Israel. Indeed I developed a cordial sympathy for him. He had my best wishes. They were four or five thousand years late, but even so he had ‘em and welcome.

Accordingly when the matter of investing in furnishings was broached I stoutly demurred. As I recall, I spoke substantially as follows:

“Why all this mad haste? Rome wasn’t built in a day, as I have often heard, and in view of my own recent experiences I am ready to make affidavit to the fact. I’ll go further than that. I’ll bet any sum within reason, up to a million dollars, that the meanest smokehouse in Rome was not built in a day. No Roman smokehouse – Ionic, Doric, Corinthian or Old Line Etruscan – is barred.

“Unless workingmen have changed a whole lot since those times, it was not possible to begin to start to commence to get ready to go ahead to proceed to advance with that smokehouse or any other smokehouse in a day. And after they did get started they dallied along and dallied along and killed time until process curing came into fashion among the best families of Ancient Rome and smokehouses lost their vogue altogether. Let us not be too impetuous about the detail of furnishings. I have a feeling – a feeling based on my own observations over yonder at the site of our own little undertaking – that when that house is really done the only furnishings we’ll require will be a couple of wheel chairs and something to warm up spoon victuals in.

“Anyhow, what’s wrong with the furnishings we already have in storage? Judging by the present rate of non-progress – of static advancement, if I may use such a phrase – long before we have a place to set them up in our furnishings will be so entirely out of style that they’ll be back in style all over again, if you get me. These things move in cycles, you know. One generation buys furniture and uses it. The next generation finding it hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date burns it up or casts it away or gives it away or stores it in the attic – anything to get rid of it. The third generation spends vast sums of money trying to restore it or the likes of it, for by that time the stuff which was despised and discarded is in strong demand and fetching fancy prices.

“The only mistake is to belong to the middle generation, which curiously enough is always the present one. We crave what our grandparents owned but our parents did not. Our grandchildren will crave what we had but our own children won’t. They’ll junk it. To-day’s monstrosity is day-after-tomorrow’s art treasure just as today’s museum piece is day-before-yesterday’s monstrosity. Therefore, I repeat, let us remain calm. I figure that when we actually get into that house our grandchildren will be of a proper age to appreciate the belongings now appertaining to us, and all will be well.”

Thus in substance I spoke. The counter argument offered was that – conceding what I said to be true – the fact remained and was not to be gainsaid that we did not have anywhere near enough of furnishings to equip the house we hoped at some distant date to occupy.

“You must remember,” I was told, “that for the six or eight years before we decided to move out here to the country we lived in a flat.”

“What of it?” I retorted instantly. “What of it?” I repeated, for when in the heat of controversy I think up an apt bit of repartee like that I am apt to utter it a second time for the sake of emphasis. Pausing only to see if my stroke of instantaneous retort had struck in, I continued:

“That last flat we had swallowed up furniture as a rat hole swallows sand. First and last we must have poured enough stuff into that flat to furnish the state of Rhode Island. And what about the monthly statements we are getting now from the storage warehouse signed by the president of the company, old man Pl. Remit? Doesn’t the size of them prove that in the furniture-owning line at least we are to be regarded as persons of considerable consequence?”

“Don’t be absurd,” I was admonished. “Just compare the size of the largest bedroom in that last flat we had in One Hundred and Tenth Street with the size of the smallest bedroom we expect to have in the new place. Why, you could put the biggest bedroom we had there into the smallest bedroom we are going to have here and lose it! And then think of the halls we must furnish and the living room and the breakfast porch and everything. Did we have a breakfast porch in the flat? We did not! Did we have a living room forty feet one way and twenty-eight the other? We did not! Did we have a dining room in that flat that was big enough to swing a cat in?”

“We didn’t have any cat.”

“All the same, we – ”

“I doubt whether any of the neighbors would have loaned us a cat just for that purpose.” I felt I had the upper hand and I meant to keep it. “Besides, you know I don’t like cats. What is the use of importing foreign matters such as cats – and purely problematical cats at that – into a discussion about something else? What relation does a cat bear to furniture, I ask you? Still, speaking of cats, I’m reminded – ”

“Never mind trying to be funny. And never mind trying to steer the conversation off the right track either. Please pay attention to what I am saying – let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes: Did we have a hall in that flat worthy to be dignified by the name of a hall? We did not! We had a passageway – that’s what it was – a passageway. Now there is a difference between furnishing a mere passageway and a regular hall, as you are about to discover before you are many months older.”

On second thought I had to concede there was something in what had just been said. One could not have swung one’s cat in our dining room in the flat with any expectation of doing the cat any real good. And the hallway we had in our flat was like nearly all halls in New York flats. It was comfortably filled when you hung a water-color picture up on its wall and uncomfortably crowded if you put a clarionet in the corner. It would have been bad luck to open an umbrella anywhere in our flat – bad luck for the umbrella if for nothing else. Despite its enormous capacity for inhaling furniture it had been, when you came right down to cases, a form-fitting fiat. So mentally confessing myself worsted at this angle of the controversy, I fell back on my original argument that certainly it would be years and years and it might be forever before we possibly could expect – at the current rate of speed of the building operations, or speaking exactly, at the current rate of the lack of speed – to move in.

“But the architect has promised us on his solemn word of honor – ”

“Don’t tell me what the architect has promised!” I said bitterly. “Next to waiters, architects are the most optimistic creatures on earth. A waiter is always morally certain that twenty minutes is the extreme limit of time that will be required to cook anything. You think that you would like, say, to have a fish that is not listed on the bill of fare under the subheading ‘Ready Dishes’ – it may be a whale or it may be a minnow: that detail makes no difference to him – and you ask the waiter how about it, and he is absolutely certain that it will be possible to borrow a fishing pole somewhere and dig bait and send out and catch that fish and bring it back in and clean it and take the scales and the fins off and garnish it with sprigs of parsley and potatoes and lemon and make some drawn butter sauce to pour over it and bring it to you in twenty minutes. If he didn’t think so he would not be a waiter. An architect is exactly like a waiter, except that he thinks in terms of days instead of terms of minutes. Don’t tell me about architects! I only wish I were as sure of heaven as the average architect is regarding that which no mortal possibly can be sure of, labor conditions being what chronically they are.”

But conceded that the reader is but a humble husbandman – meaning by that a man who is married – he doubtless has already figured out the result of this debate. Himself, he knows how such debates usually do terminate. In the end I surrendered, and the final upshot was that we set about the task of furnishing the rooms that were to be. From that hour dated the beginning of my wider and fuller education into the system commonly in vogue these times in or near the larger cities along our Atlantic seaboard for the furnishing of homes. I have learned though. It has cost me a good deal of time and some money and my nervous system is not what it was, having suffered a series of abrupt shocks, but I have learned. I know something now – not much, but a little – about period furniture.

A period, as you may recall, is equal to a full stop; in fact a period is a full stop. This is a rule in punctuation which applies in other departments of life, as I have discovered. Go in extensively for the period stuff in your interior equipments and presently you will be coming to a full stop in your funds on hand. The thing works out the same way every time. I care not how voluminously large and plethoric your cash balance may be, period furniture carried to an excess will convert it into a recent site and then the bank will be sending you one of those little printed notices politely intimating that “your account appears overdrawn.” And any time a banker goes so far as to hint that your account appears overdrawn you may bet the last cent you haven’t left that he is correct. He knows darned good and well it is overdrawn and this merely is his kindly way of softening the blow to you.

I have a theory that when checks begin to roll in from the clearing house made out to this or that dealer in period furniture the paying teller hastens to the adjusting department to see how your deposits seem to be bearing up under the strain. It is as though he heard you were buying oil stocks or playing the races out of your savings and he might as well begin figuring now about how long approximately it will be before your account will become absolutely vacant in appearance.

As I was remarking, I know a trifle about period furniture. Offhand now, I can distinguish a piece which dates back to Battle Abbey from something which goes back no farther than Battle Creek. Before I could not do this. I was forever getting stuff of the time of the Grand Monarch confused with something right fresh out of Grand Rapids. Generally speaking, all antiques – whether handed down from antiquity or made on the premises – looked alike to me. But in the light of my painfully acquired knowledge I now can see the difference almost at a glance. Sometimes I may waver a trifle. I look at a piece of furniture which purports to be an authentic antique. It is decrepit and creaky and infirm; the upholstering is frayed and faded and stained; the legs are splayed and tottery; the seams gape and there are cracks in the paneling. If it is a chair, no plump person in his or her right mind would dare sit down in it. If it is a bedstead, any sizable adult undertaking to sleep in it would do so at his peril. So, outwardly and visibly it seems to bear the stamp of authenticity. Yet still I doubt. It may be a craftily devised counterfeit. It may be something of comparatively recent manufacture which has undergone careless handling. In such a case I seek for the wormholes – if any – the same as any other seasoned collector would.

Up until comparatively recently wormholes, considered as such, had no great lure to me. If I thought of them at all I thought of them as a topic which was rather lacking in interest to begin with and one easily exhausted. If you had asked me about wormholes I – speaking offhand – probably would say that this was a matter which naturally might appeal to a worm but would probably hold forth no great attraction for a human being, unless he happened to be thinking of going fishing. But this was in my more ignorant, cruder days, before I took a beginner’s easy course in the general science of wormholes. I am proud of my progress, but I would not go so far just yet as to say that I am a professional. Still I am out of the amateur class. I suppose you might call me a semi-pro, able under ordinary circumstances to do any given wormhole in par.

For example, at present I have an average of three correct guesses out of five chances – which is a very high average for one who but a little while ago was the veriest novice at distinguishing between ancient wormholes, as made by a worm, and modern wormholing done by piece-work. I cannot explain to you just how I do this – it is a thing which after a while just seems to come to you. But of course you must have a natural gift for it to start with – an inherent affinity for wormholes, as it were.

However, I will say that I did not thoroughly master the cardinal principles of this art until after I had studied under one of the leading wormhole experts in this country – a man who has devoted years of his life just to wormholes. True, like most great specialists he is a person of one idea. Get him off of wormholes and the conversation is apt to drag, but discussing his own topic he can go on for hours and hours. I really believe he gets more pleasure out of one first-class, sixteenth-century wormhole than the original worm did. And as Kipling would say: I learned about wormholes from him.

At the outset I must confess I rather leaned toward a nice, neat, up-to-date wormhole as produced amid sanitary surroundings in an inspected factory out in Michigan, where no scab wormholes would be tolerated, rather than toward one which had been done by an unorganized foreign worm – possibly even a pauperized worm – two or three hundred years ago, when there was no such thing as a closed shop and no protection against germs. Whenever possible I believe in patronizing the products of union labor. But the expert speedily set me right on this point. He made me see that in furnishings and decorations nothing modern can possibly compare with something which is crumbly and tottery with the accumulated weight of the hoary years.

He taught me about patina, too. Patina is a most fascinating subject, once you get thoroughly into it. Everybody who goes in for period furniture must get into it sooner or later, and the sooner the better, because if you are not able to recognize patina at a glance you are as good as lost when you undertake to appraise antique furniture. When a connoisseur lays hold upon a piece of furniture al-leged to have rightful claims to antiquity the first thing he does is to run his hand along the exposed surfaces to ascertain by the practiced touch of his fingers whether the patina is on the level or was applied by a crafty counterfeiter. After that he upends it to look for the wormholes. If both are orthodox he gives it his validation as the genuine article. If they are not he brands the article a spurious imitation and rejects it with ill-concealed scorn. There are other tests, but these two are the surest ones.

For the benefit of those who may not have had any advantages as recently and expensively enjoyed I will state that patina is the gloss or film which certain sorts of metal and certain sorts of polished woods acquire through age, long usage and wear. With the passage of time fabrics also may acquire it. You may have noticed it in connection with a pair of black diagonal trousers that had seen long and severe wear or on the elbows of summer-before-last’s blue serge coat. However, patina in pants or on the braided seams of a presiding elder’s Sunday suit is not so highly valued as when it occurs in relation to a Jacobean church pew or a William-and-Mary what-not.

When I look back on my untutored state before we began to patronize the antique shops and the auction shops I am ashamed – honestly I am. The only excuse I can offer is based on the grounds of my earlier training. Like so many of my fellow countrymen, born and reared as I was in the crude raw atmosphere of interior America – anyhow, almost any wealthy New Yorker will tell you it is a crude raw atmosphere and not in any way to be compared with the refined atmosphere which is about the only thing you can get for nothing in Europe – as I say, brought up as I was amid such raw surroundings and from the cradle made the unconscious victim of this environment, I had an idea that when a person craved furniture he went for it to a regular furniture store having ice boxes and porch hammocks and unparalleled bargains in golden oak dining-room sets in the show windows, and there he made his selection and gave his order and paid a deposit down and the people at the shop sent it up to his house in a truck with historic scenes such as Washington Crossing the Delaware and Daniel in the Lions’ Den painted on the sides of the truck, and after that he had nothing to worry about in connection with the transaction except the monthly installments.

You see, I date back to the Rutherford B. Hayes period of American architecture and applied designing – a period which had a solid background of mid-Victorian influence with a trace of Philadelphia Centennial running through it, being bounded at the farther end by such sterling examples of parlor statuary as the popular pieces respectively entitled, “Welcoming the New Minister,” “Bringing Home the Bride,” and “Baby’s First Bath,” and bounded at the nearer end by burnt-wood plaques and frames for family portraits with plush insets and hand-painted flowers on the moldings. By the conceptions of those primitive times nothing so set off the likeness of a departed great-aunt as a few red-plush insets.

Some of my most cherished boyhood memories centered about bird’s-eye-maple bedroom sets and parlor furniture of heavy black walnut trimmed in a manner which subsequently came to be popular among undertakers for the adornment of the casket when they had orders to spare no expense for a really fashionable or – as the saying went then – a tony funeral. Tony subsequently became nobby and nobby is now swagger, but though the idioms change with the years the meaning remains the same. When the parlor was opened for a formal occasion – it remained closed while the ordinary life of the household went on – its interior gave off a rich deep turpentiny smell like a paint-and-varnish store on a hot day. And the bird’s-eye maple, as I recall, had a high slick finish which, however, did not dim the staring, unwinking effect of the round knots which so plentifully dappled its graining. Lying on the bed and contemplating the footboard gave one the feeling that countless eyes were looking at one, which in those days was regarded as highly desirable.

I remember all our best people favored bird’s-eye maple for the company room. They clung to it, too. East Aurora had a hard struggle before it made any noticeable impress upon the decorative tendencies of West Kentucky, for we were a conservative breed and slow to take up the mission styles featuring armchairs weighing a couple of hundred pounds apiece and art-craft designs in hammered metals and semi-tanned leathers. Moreover, a second-hand shop in our town was not an antique shop; it was what its name implied – a second-hand shop. You didn’t go there to buy things you wanted, but to sell things you did not want.

So in view of these youthful influences it should be patent to all that, having other things to think of – such, for example, as making a living – I did not realize that in New York at least those wishful of following the modes did not go to a good live shop making a specialty of easy payments when they had a house-furnishing proposition on their hands. That might be all very well for the pedestrian classes and for those living in the remote districts who kept a mail-order catalogue on the center table and wrote on from time to time with the money order enclosed.

I soon was made to understand that the really correct thing was first of all to call in a professional decorator, if one could afford it. A professional decorator is a person of either sex who can think up more ways and quicker ways of spending other people’s money than the director of a shipping board can. But whether you retained the services of a regular decorator or elected to struggle along on your own, you went for your purchases to specialty shops or to antique shops, or – best of all – to the smart auction shops on or hard by Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue.

Than the auction rooms in the Fifth Avenue district I know of no places better adapted for studying patina, wormholing and human nature in a variety of interesting phases. To such an establishment, on the days when a sale is announced – which means two or three times a week for a good part of the year – repair wealthy patrons, patrons who were wealthy before the mania for bidding in things came upon them, as it does come upon so many, and patrons who are trying to look as though they were wealthy. The third group are in the majority.

Amateur collectors come, on the lookout for lace fans or Japanese bronzes or Chinese ceramics or furniture or pictures or hangings or rugs or tapestries, or whatever it is that constitutes their favorite hobby. There are sure to be prominent actor folk and author folk in this category. Dealers are on hand, each as wise looking as a barnful of hoot-owls and talking the jargon of the craft.

Agents from rival auction houses are sometimes seen, ready, should the opportunity present itself, to snap up a bargain with intent to reauction it at their own houses at a profit. With the resident proprietor one of this gentry is about as popular as a bat in a boarding school, but since there is no law to bar him out and since it is in the line of business for him to be present, why present he generally is.

Rich women drive up in their town cars and shabby purveyors of antique wares from little clutter-hole shops on cross streets at the fringe of the East Side shamble in on their fiat arches. Then, too, there are the habitués of the auction room habit; women mostly, but some men too, unfortunate creatures who have fallen victim to an incurable vice and to whom the announcement in the papers of an unusual sale is lure sufficient to draw them hither whether or not they hope to buy anything; and finally there are representatives of a common class in any big city – individuals who go wherever free entertainment is provided and especially to spots where they are likely to see assembled notables of the stage or society or of high financial circles.