The Abandoned Farmers

by Irvin S. Cobb

  CHAPTER IX. US LANDED PROPRIETORS

  To the best of my ability I have been quoting Lady Maude verbatim; butif unintentionally I have permitted any erroneous quotations to creepinto her remarks they will be corrected before these lines reach thereader's eye, because the next time she and Scott come over--they areneighbors of ours out here in Westchester--I mean to ask her to readcopy on this book. They drop in on us quite frequently and we talkfurnishings, and Scott sits by and smokes and occasionally utters lowmocking sounds under his breath, for as yet he has not been entirely wonover to antiques. There are times when I fear that Scott, though a mostworthy person in all other regards, is hopelessly provincial. Well, Iwas a trifle provincial myself before I took the cure.

  Perhaps I should say that sometimes we talk furnishings with MistressMaude, but more often we talk farming problems, with particularreference to our own successes and the failures of our friends in thesame sphere of endeavor. Indeed, farming is the commonest topic ofconversation in our vicinity. Because, like us, nearly all our friendsin this part of the country were formerly flat dwellers and because,like us, all of them have done a lot of experimenting in the line ofintensified, impractical agriculture since they moved to the country.

  We seek to profit by one another's mistakes, and we do--that is, weprofit by them to the extent of gloating over them. Then we go andmake a few glaring mistakes on our own account, and when the word of itspreads through the neighborhood, seemingly on the wings of the wind,it is their turn to gloat. We have a regular Gloat Club with an openmembership and no dues. If an amateur tiller of the soil and his wifedrop in on us on a fine spring evening to announce that yesterday theyhad their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines are stillin the blossoming state; or if in midsummer they come for the expresspurpose of informing us that they have been eating roasting ears fora week--they knowing full well that our early corn has suffered abackset--we compliment them with honeyed words, and outwardly our mannermay bespeak a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in our souls all isbitterness.

  After they have left one catches oneself saying to one's helpmeet:"Well, the Joneses are nice people in a good many respects. Jones wouldloan you the last cent he had on earth if you were in trouble and neededit, and in most regards Mrs. Jones is about as fine a little woman asyou'd meet in a day's ride. But dog-gone it, I wish they didn't brag somuch!" Then one of us opportunely recalls that last year their potatoesdeveloped a slow and mysterious wasting disease resembling malignanttetter, which carried off the entire crop in its infancy, whereas weharvested a cellarful of wonderful praties free from skin blemishes ofwhatever sort; and warmed by that delectable recollection we cheer upa bit. And if our strawberries turn out well or our apple trees bearheavily or our cow has twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose notime in going about the countryside to spread the tidings, leaving inour wake saddened firesides and hearts all abrim with the concentratedessence of envy.

  Practically all our little group specialize. We go in for some line thatis absolutely guaranteed to be profitable until the expense becomes toogreat for a person of limited means any longer to bear up under. Thenwe drop that and specialize in another line, also recommended as beinghighly lucrative, for so long as we can afford it; and then we tacklesomething else again. It is a never-ending round of new experiences,because no matter how disastrously one's most recent experiment hasturned out the agricultural weeklies are constantly holding forth theadvantages of a field as yet new and untried and morally insured tobe one that will yield large and nourishing dividends. It is my soberconviction that the most inspired fiction writers in America--the menwith the most buoyant imaginations--are the regular contributors toour standard agricultural journals. And next to them the most giftedromancers are the fellows who sell bulbs and seeds. They are notfabulists exactly, because fables have morals and frequently thesepersons have none, but they are inspired fancifiers, I'll tell theworld.

  Each succeeding season finds each family among us embarking upon somenew and fascinating venture. For instance, I have one friend who thisyear went in for bees--Italian bees, I think he said they were, thoughwhy he should have been prejudiced against the native-born variety Icannot understand. He used to drop in at our place to borrow a littlecooking soda--he was constantly running out of cooking soda at his houseowing to using so much of it on his face and hands and his neck forpoulticing purposes--and tell us what charming creatures bees were andhow much honey he expected to lay by that fall. From what he said wegathered that the half had never been told by Maeterlinck about theengaging personal habits and captivating tribal customs of bees;bees, we gathered, were, as a race, perhaps a trifle quicktempered andhot-headed, or if not exactly hotheaded at least hot elsewhere, but everready to forgive and forget and, once the heat of passion had passed,to let bygones be bygones. A bee, it seemed from his accounts, was onecreature that always stood ready to meet you halfway.

  He finally gave up bee culture though, not because his enthusiasm hadwaned, for it did not, but for professional reasons solely. He is adistinguished actor and when he got the leading role in a new play itbroke in on his study of the part to be dropping the manuscript everyfew minutes and grabbing up a tin dish and running out in an endeavor,by the power of music, to induce a flock of swarming bees to rehivethemselves, or whatever it is bees are supposed to do when favored witha pie-pan solo. It seemed his bees had a perfect mania for swarming.The least little thing would set them off. There must have been too muchartistic temperament about the premises for such emotional and flightycreatures as bees appear to be.

  Then there was another reason: After the play went on he found itinterfered with his giving the best that was in him to his art if he hadto go on for a performance all bumpy in spots; also he discovered thatgrease paint had the effect of irritating a sting rather than soothingit. The other afternoon he came over and offered to give me his lastremaining hive of bees. Indeed, he almost pressed them on me.

  I declined though. I told him to unload his little playmates on somestranger; that I valued his friendship and hoped to keep it; the moreespecially, as I now confessed to him, since I had lately thought thatif literature ever petered out I might take up the drama as a congenialmode of livelihood, and in such case would naturally benefit through thegood offices of a friend who was already in the business and doingwell at it. Not, however, that I felt any doubt regarding my ultimatesuccess. I do not mean by this that I have seriously consideredplaywriting as a regular profession. Once I did seriously consider it,but nobody else did, and especially the critics didn't. Remembering whathappened to the only dramatic offering I ever wrote, I long ago made upmy mind that if ever I wrote another play--which, please heaven, I shallnot--I would call it Solomon Grundy, whether I had a character of thatname in it or not. You may recall what happened to the original SolomonGrundy--how he was born on a Monday, began to fail on Thursday, passedaway on Saturday of the same week and was laid to eternal rest onSunday. So even though I never do another play I have the name pickedout and ready and waiting.

  No, my next venture into the realm of Thespis, should necessity directmy steps thither, would land me directly upon the histrionic boards.Ever since I began to fill out noticeably I have nourished this ambitionsecretly. As I look at it, a pleasing plumpness of outline should be nohandicap but on the contrary rather a help. My sex of course is againstmy undertaking to play The Two Orphans, otherwise I should feel no doubtof my ability to play both of them, and if they had a little sister Ishouldn't be afraid to take her on, too. But I do rather fancy myselfin the title roles of The Corsican Brothers. If I should show someenterprising manager how he might pay out one salary and save another,surely the idea would appeal to him; and some of these fine days I maygive the idea a try. So having this contingency in mind I gently butfirmly told my friend to take his bees elsewhere. I told him I had nointention of looking a gift bee in the mouth.

  We have another neighbor who has gone in rather extensively for bloodedstock wit
h the intention ultimately of producing butter and milk forthe city market. During practically all his active life he has been asuccessful theatrical manager, which naturally qualifies him for the cowbusiness. He is doing very well at it too. So long as he continues toenjoy successful theatrical seasons he feels that he will be able to goon with cows. Being a shrewd and far seeing business man he has it allfigured out that a minimum of three substantial enduring hits everyautumn will justify him in maintaining his herd at its presentproportions, whereas with four shows on Broadway all playing to capacityhe might even increase it to the extent of investing in a few more headof registered thoroughbred stock.

  From him I have gleaned much regarding cows. Before, the life of a cowfancier had been to me as a closed book. Generally speaking, cows, sofar as my personal knowledge went, were divided roughly into regularcows running true to sex, and the other kind of cows, which wereinvariably referred to with a deep blush by old-fashioned maiden ladies.True enough, we owned cows during the earlier stages of our rural life;in fact, we own one now, a mild-eyed creature originally christenedButtercup but called by us Sahara because of her prevalent habits. Butgentle bone-dry Sahara is just a plain ordinary cow of undistinguishedancestry. In the preceding generations of her line scandal after scandalmust have occurred; were she a bagpipe solo instead of a cow scarcelycould she have in her more mixed strains than she has. We acquired herat a bargain in an auction sale; she is a bargain to any one desiring acow of settled and steady habits, regular at her meals, always with anunfailing appetite and having a deep far-reaching voice. There is alsoan expectation that some future day we may also derive from her milk.However, this contingency rests, as one might say, upon the laps of thegods.

  The point I am getting at though is that Sahara, whatever else of meritshe may possess in the matters of a kind disposition and a willingnessto eat whatever is put before her, is after all but a mere commoncountry-bred cow; whereas the cows whose society my wealthy neighborcultivates are the pedigreed aristocrats of their breed, and for buyingand selling purposes are valued accordingly. Why, from the way theproprietors of registered cows brag about their ancient lineage andtheir blue-blooded forbears you might think they were all from SouthCarolina or Massachusetts--the cows, I mean, not necessarily theproprietors.

  So it is with the man of whom I have been speaking. Having become abreeder of fancy stock he now appraises a cow not for what she can do onher own intrinsic merits but for the size of her family tree, providedshe brings with her the documents to prove it. So far as cows areconcerned he has become a confirmed ancestor worshipper. I am sure hewould rather own a quarter interest in a collateral descendant of oldPrince Bullcon the First of the royal family of the Island of Guernsey,even though the present bearer of the name were but an indifferentmilker and of unsettled habits, than to be the sole possessor of someuntitled but versatile cow giving malted milk and whipped cream. Suchvagaries I cannot fathom. In a democratic country like this, or at leastin a country which used to be democratic, it seems to me we should valuea cow not for what her grandparents may have been; not for the namesemblazoned on her genealogical record, but for what she herself is.

  The other Sunday we drove over to his place ostensibly to pay aneighborly call but really to plant distress in his fireside circleby incidentally mentioning that our young grapevines were bearingmagnificently.

  You see, a member of the Gloat Club is expected to work at his tradeSundays as well as weekdays; and besides we had heard that his arbors,with the coming of the autumn, had seemed a bit puny. So the opportunitywas too good to be lost and we went over.

  After I had driven the harpoon into his soul and watched it sink intohim up to the barbs he took me out to see the latest improvements he hadmade in his cow bam and to call upon the newest addition to his herd.These times you can bed a hired hand down almost anywhere, but if you goin for blooded stock you must surround them with the luxuries to whichthey have been accustomed, else they are apt to go into a decline. Heinvited my inspection of the porcelain-walled stalls and the patentfeeding devices and the sanitary fixtures which abounded on every hand,and to his recently installed cream separator. In my youth the onlycream separator commonly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache wornby the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, with it, cream separatingwas merely incidental, the real purposes of the mustache being to beornamental and impressive and subtly to convey a proper respect for themajesty of the law. Often a town marshal wore one too. But the modernseparator is a product of science and not a gift of Nature skillfullyelaborated by the art of the barber. It costs a heap of money and itoperates by machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is completewithout it.

  When I had viewed these wonders he led me to a glorified pasture lot andpresented me to the occupant--a smallish cow of a prevalent henna tone.Except that she had rather slender legs and a permanent wave between thehorns she seemed to my uninitiated eyes much the same as any other cowof the Jersey persuasion. I realized, however, that she must be veryhigh-church. My friend, I knew, would harbor no nonconformist cows inhis place, and besides, she distinctly had the high-church manner, athing which is indefinable in terms of speech but unmistakably to berecognized wherever found. Otherwise, though, I could observe nothingabout her calculated to excite the casual passer-by. But my friend wasall enthusiasm.

  "Now," he said proudly, "what do you think of that for a perfectspecimen?"

  "Well," I said, "anybody could tell that she's had a lot of refininginfluences coming into her life. She's no doubt cultured and ladylike toa degree; and she has the fashionable complexion of the hour and she'sall marcelled up and everything, but excepting for these adornments hasshe any special accomplishments that are calculated to give her class?"

  "Class!" he repeated. "Class, did you say? Say, listen! That cow has allthe class there is. She's less than two years old and she cost me a coolfifteen hundred cash--and cheap at the figure, at that."

  "Fifteen hundred," I murmured dazedly. "What does she give?"

  "Why, she gives milk, of course," he explained. "What else would she begiving?"

  "Well," I said, "I should think that at that price she should at leastgive music lessons. Perhaps she does plain sewing?"

  "Say," he demanded, "what do you expect for fifteen hundred dollars?Fifteen hundred is a perfectly ridiculous price to pay for a cow witha pedigree such as this cow has. She's registered back I don't know howfar. It's the regal breeding you pay for when you get an animal likethis--not the animal herself."

  But I refused to be swept off my feet. Before this I had associated withroyalty. I once met a lineal descendant of William the Conqueror;he told me so himself. Being a descendant was apparently the onlyprofession he had, and I judged this cow was in much the same line ofbusiness. "Well," I replied, "all I can say is that I wouldn't care ifher ancestors came over on the Mayflower--if she belonged to me she'dhave to show me something in the line of special endeavor. She'd have tohave talents or we'd part company pretty pronto, I'm telling you."

  "It is evident you do not understand anything about blooded stock,"he said. "The grandmother of this cow was insured for fifteen thousanddollars, and her great-grandfather, King Bulbul, was worth a fortune.The owner was offered fifty thousand for him--and refused it."

  In my surprise I could only mutter over and over again the name ofWilliam Tell's brother. A great many people do not know that WilliamTell ever had a brother. His first name was Wat.

  After that my friend gave me up as one hopelessly sunken in ignorance,and by a mutual yet unspoken consent we turned the subject to theactors' strike, which was then in full blast. But at intervals eversince I have been thinking of what he told me. To my way of thinkingthere is something wrong with the economic system of a country whichsaddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an income of more thantwo thousand dollars a year and if he be married sinks the ax into allhe makes above three thousand, leaving him the interest deduction on theextra one thousand, amounting, I believe, to about
twelve dollars and ahalf, for the support of his wife, on the theory that under the presentscale of living any reasonably prudent man can suitably maintain a wifeon twelve-fifty a year--I repeat, there is something radically wrongwith a government which does this to the wage-earner and yet passesright on by a cow that carries fifteen thousand in life insurance anda bull worth fifty thousand in his own right. It amounts to classprivilege, I maintain. It's almost enough to make a man vote theRepublican ticket, and I may yet do it, too, sometime when there aren'tany Democrats running, just to show how I feel about it.

  Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur-farming group have takenup fruit growing or pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares havebeen highly recommended to us as being very prolific. You start inwith one pair of domestic-minded Belgian hares and presently countlessthousands of little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening thelandscape. From what I can hear the average Belgian hare has almost asmany aunts and uncles and cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too.You can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who has never tried to eatone. But as we have only about sixty acres and part of that in woodland,we have felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to go infor Belgian hares without sacrificing space which we may require forourselves.

  Mainly our experiments have been confined to hogs and poultry. I willnot claim that we have been entirely successful in these directions. Thetrouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremendously opposed to racesuicide and that our hens are so firmly committed to it. Now offhandyou might think an adult animal of the swine family that completely gaveherself over to the idea of multiplying and replenishing the earth withher species would be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience Ihave found that such is not always the case. Into the world a brood oflittle pinky-white squealers are ushered. They grow apace, devouringwith avidity the most expensive brands of pig food that the grocerhas in stock; and then, just when your mind is filled with delectablevisions of hams in the smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellarand tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare-ribs andcrackling and home-made country sausage and pork tenderloins on thetable--why, your prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera andare shortly no more. They have a perfect mania for it. They'll travelmiles out of their way to catch it; they'll sit up until all hours ofthe night in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the MississippiRiver--and it full of ice--to get where hog cholera is. Our hogs havebeen observed in the act of standing in the pen with their snouts in theair, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs of it rightout of the air. It is very disheartening to be counting on bacon wortheighty cents a pound only to find that all you have on your hands is aseries of hurried interments.

  In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicidally minded as hogsare. I speak with authority here because we tried raising turkeys, too.For a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells doom for theturkey, and accordingly it practically devotes its life to gettingits feet wet. If it cannot escape from the pen into the damp grassimmediately following a rain it will in its desperation take othermeasures with a view to catching its death of cold. One of the mostdistressing spectacles to be witnessed in all Nature is a half-grownfeebleminded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that it was born apuddle duck, running round and round a coop trying to find a damp spotto stand on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In order to getits feet wet an infant turkey has been known to jump down an artesianwell two hundred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it if ascientific fact well authenticated. If somebody would only invent astyle of overshoe that might be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkeywithout making the turkey feel distraught or self-concious, thatperson would confer a boon upon the entire turkey race and at the sametime be in a fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know that a fewmonths back if such an article had been in the market I would gladlyhave taken fifty pairs, assorted misses' and children's sizes.

  As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt like altogetherabandoning my belief in the good faith and honest intentions of hens.Naturally one thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, but myexperience has been that the hen does not follow this line of reasoning.She prefers to go off on a different bent. She figures she was createdto adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter of man. Or at anyrate I would state that this has been the obsession customarily harboredby the hens which we have owned and which we persistently continue, inthe face of disappointment compounded, to go on owning.

  We started out by buying, at a perfectly scandalous outlay, a collectionof blooded hens of the white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been toldthat the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth Rock hen; that awhite Plymouth Rock hen which had had the right sort of influences inher life and the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in hermaturer career would inevitably dedicate her entire being to producingeggs. And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselvesoffered proof to the absolute contrary.

  It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed,full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her headoff, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hoursof daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself:"Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on mynervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for thesake of these people? If they were able to pay four dollars for me,sight unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their own eggs. Am Iright? I'll say I am!"

  You could look at her expression and tell what she was thinking. Andthen when you went and made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nestsyou knew that you had correctly fathomed the workings of her mind.

  We tried every known argument on those hens in an effort to make themsee the error of their ways and the advantages of eggs. We administeredto them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas and sifted graveland ground-up oyster shells; the only result was to make them finickyand particular regarding their diet. No longer were they satisfied withthe things we ate ourselves; no, they must have special dishes; theywished to be pampered like invalids. We bought for them large quantitiesof costly chick feed--compounds guaranteed to start the most confirmedspinster hen to laying her head off.

  So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no avail. The moreconfirmed imbibers of the special dishes merely developed lumpydropsical figures and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a morbidway as though they had heavy loads on their minds. We killed one of themas a sacrifice to scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, shewas burdened inside with half-developed yolks--a case, one might say, ofmislaid eggs.

  In desperation I even thought of invoking the power of mental suggestionon them. Possibly it might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeonin the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them into a group and readaloud to them the begat chapter in the Old Testament?

  While I was considering these expedients some one suggested thatprobably the trouble lay in the fact that our fowls either were toohighly bred or were too closely related and perhaps an infusion of newblood was what was needed. So now we went to the other extreme and addedto our flock a collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed andhomely as to their outward appearance, but declared--by their formerowner--to be passionately addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs.Conceding that this was true, the fact remained that immediately theypassed into our possession they became slackers and nonproducers. Iimagine the mistake we made was in permitting them to associate with thefrivolous white debutantes we already owned; undoubtedly those confirmedbachelor maids put queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believethere was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be served up with acomparative stranger's fried ham. On the theory that they might requireexercise to stimulate their creative faculties we let them range throughthe meadows. Some among them promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravageour garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of the thickets, wherethe hawks and the weasels an
d the skunks and the crows might fatten onthe fruits of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them up againin their run, whereupon they developed rheumatism and sore eyes and aperverted craving for eating one another's tail feathers. At present ourchicken yard is nothing more nor less than a hen sanitarium. But we donot despair of ultimate success with our hens. We may have to crossthem with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere until victory hasperched upon our roosts. As Rupert Hughes remarked when, after writinga long list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually produced ariotous hit of hits: "Well, I'm only human--I couldn't fail every time."

  I should have said that there is one fad to which all our WestchesterCounty colony of amateur farmers are addicted. Some may pursue oneagricultural hobby and some another, but almost without exception themembers of our little community are confirmed hired-help fanciers. Youmeet a neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous experience withPolled Polaks he is now about to try the White Face Cockneys; they havebeen highly recommended to him. And next month when you encounter himagain he is experimenting with Italian road builders or Scotch gardenersor Swedish stable hands or Afro-American tree trimmers or what not.

  One member of our group after a prolonged season of alternating hopesand disappointments during which he first hired and then for good andsufficient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the commonervarieties--plain and colored, domestic and imported, strays, culls andmavericks--decided to try his luck in the city at one of the employmentagencies specializing in domestic servitors for country places.He procured the address of such an establishment and repairedthither--simply attired in his everyday clothes. As soon as he enteredthe place he realized that he was in the wrong pew; here, plainly, wasa shop to which repaired the proprietors of ostentatious estates ratherthan the modest owners of farms, among whom he numbered himself. Hetried to back out, making himself as inconspicuous as possible in sodoing, but at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two good jobsoffered to him--one as assistant groom in a racing stable over on LongIsland and one as general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecticut.He is convinced now that the rich are so hard pressed for servants thatthey'll hire almost anybody without requiring references.

  None of us will ever be rich; we're all convinced of that, the cost ofimpractical farming being what it is, but by the same token none ofus would give up the pleasures of a landed proprietor's lot--the wordlanded being here used to imply one baited, hooked and caught; i.e., alanded sucker--for the life of a flat dweller again. It's a great lifeif a fellow doesn't weaken--and we'll never weaken.

  THE END