The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 28

"Now I can work here when you want to create literature in your room, or I can receive my distinguished visitors here when you are busy," she laughed, setting some ornaments on the mantel. "My, but I've got a lot of curtains to make! I never did so much sewing in my life."

Bureaus were carried upstairs with Mike's a.s.sistance, and the ivory backs of a woman's toilet articles appeared upon them; open closets showed me rows of women's garments; gla.s.s candlesticks were unpacked and set upon the dining-table, and the new dining-chairs "dressed up"

the room remarkably. Everywhere we went Mrs. Pillig followed with dust pan and broom, slicking up behind us. When night came it was still an incomplete house--"Oh, a million things yet to get," cried Stella, "just one by one, as we can afford it, which will be fun!"--but a house that spoke everywhere of a dainty mistress. Outside, by the woodshed, was a pile of packing-boxes and opened crates and excelsior.

"There's _your_ work, Peter," I said, pointing.

Peter looked rueful, but said nothing.

That evening I tried to work, but found it difficult, for watching my wife sew.

"You've no technique," I laughed.

She made a little _moue_ at me, and went on hemming the curtains, getting up now and then to measure them. "Why should I have?" she said presently. "You knew I was a Ph. D. when you married me. These curtains be on your own head! I'm doing the best I can."

There was suddenly the suspicion of moisture in her eyes, and I ran to comfort her.

"I--I so want to make Twin Fires lovely," she added, p.r.i.c.king her finger. "Oh, tell me I can, if I am only a highbrow!"

Of course the finger had to be kissed, and she had to be kissed, and the hem had to be inspected and praised, and now, long, long afterward, I smile to think how alike we all of us are on a honeymoon.

It was the next morning that we resolved to begin the pool. "I don't expect to be married again for several years," said I, "and so I'm going to take a holiday this week. We'll carry the vegetables to market and bring back the cement, and begin on our water garden."

Mike loaded the wagon with peas, the last of the rhubarb, and ten quarts of currants picked by Peter, and off we started.

"What is this horse's name?" asked Stella, taking the reins to learn to drive.

"He has none, I guess. Mike calls him 'Giddup.'"

"No, it's Dobbin. He looks just like a Dobbin. He has a kind of conventional, discouraged tail, like a Dobbin. Giddup, Dobbin!"

The horse started to trot. "There, you see, it _is_ his name!" she laughed.

On Bentford Main Street we pa.s.sed several motors and a trap drawn by a prancing span, and all the occupants stared at us, or rather at Stella, who was beaming from her humble seat on the farm wagon more like an eighteenth century shepherdess than a New England farmer's wife. We added over $3 more in the account book with the market, and read with delight the grand total of $40.80 already in two weeks.

"Next year," said I, "I'll double it!"

Then I spent the $3, and some more, for Portland cement.

We got into our oldest clothes when we reached home, I put on rubber boots, and we tackled the pool. Even with the brook as low as it was, the engineering feat was not easy for our unskilful hands. Peter soon joined us, and lent at least unlimited enthusiasm.

"Peter," said I, "you never worked this hard splitting kindlings."

Peter grinned. "Ho, I like to make dams," he said.

The first thing we did was to divert the brook by digging a new channel above the spot where we were to build the dam, and letting the water flow around to the left, close to one of the flower beds. Then, when the old channel had dried out a little, I spaded a trench across it and two feet into the banks on each side, and with Peter helping, filled the trench nearly full of the largest, flattest stones we could find, which we all then tramped upon to firm down. Then, a foot apart, we stood two boards on edge across the s.p.a.ce, to make a mould for the concrete above the stones. I sent Peter with a wheelbarrow to pick up a load of small pebbles in the road, of the most irregular shape he could find, and I myself dug deeper in the hole where I had got the sand when we built the bird bath, and brought loads of it to the brookside. We dumped sand, pebbles, and cement into a big box, one pail of cement to one pail of pebbles and three of sand, and Peter and Stella fought for the hoe to mix them, while I poured in the water from a watering-pot, for I had read and seen the reason for the fact that the success of the cement depends upon every particle being thoroughly mixed. As fast as we had a box full of mixture prepared, we dumped it into the mould between the boards. It took an astonis.h.i.+ng quant.i.ty of cement--quite all we had, in fact--and to finish off the top smooth and level I had to get the quarter bag left from my orchard work and the bird bath. It was evening when we had it done, and Peter, who had deserted us soon after dinner to play ball, returned to beg us to take the boards away, and grew quite unreasonable when we refused.

That night there was a shower, and the brook rose a trifle. When we hastened down through the orchard after breakfast the new channel had curved itself still farther, as streams do when once they get started off the straight line, and had washed the southeast flower bed half away. Stella, with a cry of grief, ran down the brook into the pines, and came back with sadly bedraggled _Phlox Drummondi_ plants in her hands, their trailing roots washed white, their blooms broken. "Horrid brook," she said. "Let's put it right back into its proper place. I don't like it any more."

"A sudden change of habit is always dangerous," said I. "Put the plants in the mud somewhere till we can set 'em in again."

We now took away the boards from the new dam, which had begun to harden nicely. The next thing to do was to stake out the pool above it. As the dam was 10 feet below the line between the proposed bench and the front door of the house, the other end of the pool was marked off 20 feet upstream, and between the two extremes we dug out the soil into an oval basin. This was easily accomplished by chopping out the turf with a grub hoe, and then hitching Dobbin to the drag sc.r.a.per. The soil was a black, loamy sand, which came up easily, and was hauled over and dumped for dressing on the site of our little lawn beyond the pool. When we had the basin excavated to a depth of about a foot, all three of us (for Peter was once more on the job) scattered to find stones to hold the banks.

New England farms are traditionally stony--till you want stones. We ended by taking some here and there from the stone walls after we had scoured the pasture behind the barn for half a barrow load. When once the circ.u.mference of the pool had been ringed with stones, stood up on edge, we raked the bottom smooth, sprinkled clean sand upon it, and were ready to let the water against the dam as soon as the concrete hardened. We gave it one more day, and then shovelled away the temporary dam, filled up the new channel where it turned out of the old, and stood beside the dam while the current, with a first muddy rush, swirled against it, eddied back, and began very slowly to rise.

"She holds, she holds!" I cried. "But we've forgotten to put stones for the water to fall over upon. It will undermine the structure if we don't."

"'Structure' is good," laughed Stella, regarding our little six-foot long and eighteen-inch high piece of engineering.

We shouted for Peter, and ran to the nearest stone wall, tugging back some flat stones which we placed directly below the dam for the overflow to fall on. Then, while Stella sat on the bank and watched the water rise, I shovelled some of the earth removed from the basin into the now abandoned temporary channel, and packed it down.

"Say, we can have fish in here," cried Peter, who was also watching the water rise.

"You can have a four-legged fish," laughed Stella, as Buster came down the bank with a gleeful bark and went splash into the pool, emerging to shake himself and spray us all.

I had scarce finished filling in the temporary trench, and was setting the poor uprooted plants back into the bed, with my back turned, when I heard a simultaneous shout from Peter and Stella.

"One, two, three--and over she goes!" cried Stella.

I faced around just in time to see the first line of the water crawling over the top of the dam, and a second later it splashed on the stones below; behind it came the waterfall.

Stella was dancing up and down. "Oh, it's a real waterfall!" she cried. "I've got a real waterfall all my own! Come on downstream and look back at it!"

From the grove below it certainly did look pretty, flas.h.i.+ng in the morning sun. "And when there are iris blossoms, great j.a.panese iris, nodding over it!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, can't we plant those right away?" she asked.

"No," said I. "Gardens are like Rome, I'm afraid."

We went back and surveyed our pool at close range. It was clearing now.

But the second pile of earth remained to be removed from the west side.

Peter and I carted that off in wheelbarrows at once, dumping part of it into the hole where we had dug the sand, and the rest into a heap behind some bushes upstream for future compost. Then we climbed the orchard slope for dinner. Midway we looked back. There glistened our pool, a twenty-foot brown crystal mirror, with the four flower beds all askew about it, the ragged weeds and bushes pressing them close, and beyond it only the rough ground I had cleared with a brush scythe, and the scraggly trees by the wall.

"Alas" said I, "now we've built the pool, we've got to build a whole garden to go with it!"

"But it tinkles! Hear it tinkle!" cried Stella.

We listened, hand in hand. The tiny waterfall was certainly tinkling, a cool, delicate, plashy sound, which mingled with the sound of the breeze in the trees above our heads, and the sweet twitterings of birds.

"Oh, John, it's a very nice dam, and a very nice world!" she whispered, as we went through the door. "And, after all, it seems to me the greatest fun of gardening is all the nice other things it makes you want to do after you've done the first one."

"That," said I sententiously, "is perhaps the secret of all successful living."

Chapter XIX

THE NICE OTHER THINGS