Part 6 (1/2)
”Don't laugh at me--I'm getting born all over, and it is hard,” I said with a sob in my throat.
”Forgive me! I'm not really laughing--it's just a form--form of the p.e.c.k.e.rwood's nature-wors.h.i.+p,” he answered as he took my hand in his warm one for a second. ”Let's go finish up with old sheep mother,” he added as he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.
”Yes, I _am_ growing inside,” I a.s.sured myself as I for the second night fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.
One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise, and make this remark: ”If I could only begin life over again, knowing what I do now!”
I'm never going to be impressed by that again, and I'm going to answer straight out from the shoulder, ”Well, it would be a great strain to you if you found yourself doing it.”
That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth, was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first six weeks of life in the rustic.
How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to that realization for a suns.h.i.+ny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addc.o.c.k's mind as a barbarian?
”Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and help you beat and sun the beds the first suns.h.i.+ny day and then turn to with our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing by all this polis.h.i.+ng before a single bed had been beat and aired.” As she spoke Mrs. Addc.o.c.k surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking moment of my muscular strength, a.s.sisted by Polly Corn-ta.s.sel and sometimes Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on invading the horrors of his kitchen.
”Oh, my dear Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, won't you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?” I pleaded as I picked up a small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother's skirts.
”Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the beds now, wrong end first, but next year you'll know,” she answered me with indulgent compromise in her voice. ”And I guess we'll find some broom and mop work yet to be done. Come on, Mrs. Tillett. I guess Nancy can mind the baby all right while we work.”
”Oh, he ain't no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the world by tasting of it. Don't let him eat a worm or sech, and he'll be all right,” answered the beaming young mother of the toddler. ”And, Miss Nancy, I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind of work dress if you would like to use it,” she added as she pointedly did not look at my peasant's smock that hung in such lovely long lines that I found myself pausing much too often before one of the mirrors in the big living-room to admire them. Mrs. Tillett's utility costume was of blue checked gingham and had no lines at all except top and bottom, with a belt in between. Both ladies wore huge gingham ap.r.o.ns, and I must say that they looked like the utility branch of the feminine species while I may have resembled the ornamental. But they were dear neighbors, and the Tillett baby and I had a very busy and happy day with the Golden Bird and his busy family while the two missionaries did over every bed in Elmnest, even invading the living-room and shaking out the cus.h.i.+ons of the old couch in the very face of one of the charges of Xerxes' army. I put his babykins in a big feed-basket in a nest of hay, and the two lamb twins came and licked him every now and then by way of welcome into my barn nursery. The fine young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount, opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of speedometer.
”I see mother ewe knows enough to hang around the lady of the barn and feed-bins. Those lambkins are two pounds heavier than any born within a week of them at Plunkett's,” Pan had said not a week past, and both sheep mother and I had beamed with gratified pride at his commendation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: I put his babykins in a big feed-basket and the lamb twins came and welcomed him]
Then while the renovation of the four-posters went on with a happy buzz, I busied myself in and out and about with the numberless details of care of the Bird family. My knowledge of music earned by many long hours in the practice of harmonics and a delighted and diligent attendance at the opera seasons of New York, Berlin, and Paris, to say nothing of Boston and London, had not, in my new life, in any way aided me to see that I had made a mistake in ordering a three-hundred-egg incubator to start building a prize flock with Mr. Golden Bird and the ten Ladies Leghorn, but in this case Adam had guided me from off that shoal, and by telegram I had changed the order for three fifty-egg improved metal mothers and the implements needed in accomplis.h.i.+ng their maternal purpose. In one of them were now fifty beautiful white pearls that I could not refrain from visiting and regarding through the little window in the metallic side of the metallic mother at least several times an hour, though I knew that twice a day to regulate the heat and fill the lamp was sufficient.
”I don't believe I'll be able to stand seeing them hop out,” I remarked to Baby Tillett, the lambkins, and the good old red ally, who was patiently seated on a box over fifteen of the pearls. Adam had kept the poor old darling covering some white china eggs for nearly two weeks before he gave her the pearls on the same day we put the forty-five in the interior of her metal rival. I didn't at first understand his sinister purpose in thus holding her back until the metal rival could get an even start, but I did later.
”I hope you have a mighty good hatching, Nancy, but I have no faith in half-way measures, and a tin box is a half-way measure for a hen, just as cleaning house without bed-sunning is trifling,” said Mrs. Addc.o.c.k, with a final prod as she came out to the barn with Mrs. Tillett to reclaim Baby Tillett.
”You ain't married, Miss Nancy, and you won't understand how babies need mothers, even the chicken kind,” said Mrs. Tillett, as she cuddled Baby Tillett gurglingly against her shoulder and followed in the wake of Mrs.
Addc.o.c.k with the mops and buckets down the walk and around the house.
I stood beside the tin triumph of science, with my baby lambs licking at my hands, while Mrs. Ewe nuzzled for corn in one of my huge pockets, and a baby collie, which Pan had brought the week before, when her eyes were scarcely open, tumbled about my feet, and looked after the retreating women--and I did understand.
”Still, I'll do the best I can by your--your progeny, Mr. G. Bird,” I said as the great big, white old fellow came and pecked in my pocket for corn in perfect friendliness with Mrs. Ewe.
I was called upon to keep my promise in less than a week. It might have been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford's practical sense had not helped save my affections from a panic. This is how it happened.
”Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion. I'm not at all surprised at your friends,” Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin mother when they want to. She says she believes eternal vigilance is the price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. ”I'd sell her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce as they ought to with their blood and such--such care as she intends to bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an idle woman into a producer,” said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.
I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly Corn-ta.s.sel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole sh.e.l.ls.
Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought out his and the Beesleys' poultry and had either had supper with us at Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud. I had subjugated Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed slightly. The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and history that absorbed them. Also almost every day Pan brought me young green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.
”Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld,” said Bess when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our near tragedy. ”You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in name only. Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much attention from me that I don't know how I'll amount to anything in this world. He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father, and that I get so much because there is no possible compet.i.tion as I am an only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me. Just wait until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I'm going to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my bank-book.”
”Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess,” I remonstrated feebly, because I knew that I couldn't have made myself believe all I had learned in just two months at Elmnest the day I started in business.