"It was all worth-while," he said — "all!"
And she smiled, and quoted some lines from the poem —•
"Thou too^ 0 Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound; Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour!
Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest, If men esteemed thee feeble, gave thee power,
If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest!"
§ 1. THIS illness of the baby's had been a fearful drain upon their strength; and Thyrsis perceived that they had now got to a point where they could no longer stand alone. There must be a servant in the house, to help Corydon, and do for the baby what had to be done. It was a hard decision for him to face, for his money was almost gone, and the book loomed larger than ever. But there was no escaping the necessity.
They would get a married couple, they decided— the man could pay for himself by working the farm. So they put an advertisement in a city paper, and perused the scores of mis-spelled replies. After due correspondence, and much consultation, they decided upon Patrick and Mary Flanagan; and Thyrsis hired a two-seated carriage and drove in to meet them at the depot.
It was all very funny; years afterwards, when the clouds of tragedy were dispersed, they were able to laugh over the situation. Thyrsis had been used to servants in boyhood, but that was before he had acquired any ideas as to universal brotherhood and the rights of man. Now he hated all the symbols and symptoms of mastership; he shrunk from any sort of clash with unlovely personalities—he would be courteous and deprecating to the very tramp who came to his door to beg. And here were Patrick and Mary, very Irish, enormously stout, and devotedly Roman Catholic, having spent all their lives as caretakers of "gentlemen's country-places". They had most precise ideas as to what gentlemen's country-places should be, and how
they should be equipped, and how the gentlemen of the country-places should treat their servants. And needless to say, they found nothing in this new situation which met with their approval. There were signs of humiliating poverty everywhere, and the farm-outfit was inadequate. As to the master and mistress, they must have been puzzling phenomena for Patrick and Mary to make up their minds about—possessing so many of the attributes of the lady and gentleman, and yet being lacking in so many others!
Patrick was a precise and particular person; he wanted his work laid out just so, and then he would do it without interference. As for Mary—he stood in awe of Mary himself, and so he accepted the idea that Cory-don and Thyrsis should stand in awe of her too. Mary it was who announced that their dietary was inadequate; she took no stock at all in Fletcher and Chittenden— she knew that working-people must have meat at least four times a week. Also Mary maintained that their room was not large enough for so stout a couple. Also she arranged it that Corydon and Thyrsis should get the dinner on Sundays—the Roman Catholic church being five miles away, and the hour of mass being late, and the horse very old and slow.
For two months Corydon and Thyrsis struggled along under the dark and terrible shadow of the disapproval of the Flanagan family. Then one day there came a violent crisis between Corydon and Mary—occasioned by a discussion of the effect of an excess of grease upon the digestibility of potato-starch. Corydon fled in tears to her husband, who started for the kitchen forthwith, meaning to dispose of the Flanagans ; when, to his vast astonishment, Corydon experienced one of her surges of energy, and thrust him to
one side, and striding out upon the field of combat, proceeded to deliver herself of her pent-up sentiments. It was a discourse in the grandest style of tragedy, and Mary Flanagan was quite dumbfounded—apparently this was a "lady" after all! So the Flanagan family packed its belongings and departed in a chastened frame of mind; and Corydon turned to her spouse, her eyes still flashing, and remarked, "If only I had talked to her that way from the beginning!"
§ 2. THEN once more there was answering of advertisements, and another couple was spewed forth from the maw of the metropolis—"Henery and Bessie Dobbs", as they subscribed themselves. "Henery" proved to be the adult stage of tke East Side "gamin"; lean and cynical, full of slang and humor and the odor of cigarettes. He was fresh from a "ticket-chopper's" job in the subway, and he knew no more about farming than Thyrsis did; but he put up a clever "bluff", and was so prompt with his wits that it was hard to find fault with him successfully. As for his wife, she had come out of a paper-box factory, and was as skilled at housekeeping as her husband was at agriculture; she was frail and consumptive, and told Corydon the story of her pitiful life, with the result that she was able to impose upon her even more than her predecessor had done.
"Henery" was slow at pitching hay and loading stone, but when the season came, he developed a genius for peddling fruit; he was always hungry for any sort of chance to bargain, and was forever coming upon things which Thyrsis ought to buy. Very quickly the neighborhood discovered this propensity of his, and there was a constant stream of farmers who came to
offer second-hand buggies, and wind-broken horses, and dried-up cows, and patent hay-rakes and churns and corn-shellers at reduced values; all of which rather tended to reveal to Thyrsis the unlovely aspects of his neighbors, and to weaken his faith in the perfectibility of the race.
Among Henery's discoveries was a pair of aged and emaciated mules. He became eloquent as to how he could fatten up these mules and what crops he could raise in the spring. So Thyrsis bought the mules, and also a supply of feed; but the fattening process failed to take effect—for the reason, as Thyrsis finally discovered, that the mules were in need of new teeth. When the plowing season began, Henery at first expended a vast amount of energy in beating the creatures with a stick, but finally he put his inventive genius to work, and devised a way to drive them without beating. It was some time before Thyrsis noted the change; when he made inquiries, he learned to his con-. sternation that the ingenious Henery had fixed up the stick with a pin in the end!
At any time of the day one might stand upon the piazza of the house and gaze out across the corn-field, and see a long procession marching through the furrow. First there came the mules, and then came the plow, and then came Henery; and after Henery followed the dog, and after the dog followed the baby, and after the baby followed a train of chickens, foraging for worms. Little Cedric was apparently content to trot back and forth in the field for hours; which to his much-occupied parents seemed a delightful solution of a problem. But it happened one day when they had a visit from Mr. Harding, that Thyrsis and the clergyman came round the side of the house, and discovered
the child engaged in trying to drag a heavy arm-chair through a door that was too small for it. He was wrestling like a young titan, purple in the face with rage; and shouting, in a perfect reproduction of Henery's voice and accent, "Come round here, God damn you, come round here!"
There were many such drawbacks to be balanced against the joys of "life on a farm". Thyrsis reflected with a bitter smile that his experiences and Corydon's had been calculated to destroy their illusions as to several kinds of romance. They had tried "Grub Street", and the poet's garret, and the cultivating of literature upon a little oatmeal; they had not found that a joyful adventure. They had tried the gypsy style of existence; they had gone back "to the bosom of nature"—and had found it a cold and stony bosom. They had tried out "love in a cottage", and the story-writer's dream of domestic raptures. And now they were chasing another will o' the wisp—that of "amateur farming"! When Thyrsis had purchased half the old junk in the township, and had seen the mules go lame, and the cows break into the pear-orchard and "founder" themselves; when he had expended two hundred dollars' worth of money and two thousand dollars' worth of energy to raise one hundred dollars' worth of vegetables and fruit, he framed for himself the conclusion that a farm is an excellent place for a literary man, provided that he can be kept from farming it.