“Daddy, Martha won’t play in her turn, and I say—”
“Marjorie takes the heavy mallet—”
The chorus rose shrill about him, but he laughed and went into the house, shouting only:
“Out of the way! I’m in a hurry! The beans are dying, the tomatoes are clamoring for me, the peas are holding out their hands!”
“Daddy says the beans are dying. Isn’t he silly!”
“Let’s get to the garden before daddy does.”
As he closed the door he heard the shrieks trailing off round the corner of the house, diminuendo. He hung up coat and hat with a rapid gesture and hurried to the kitchen. Hilda, stirring the cocoa with a long spoon, looked round at him laconically.
“Chocolate!” he shouted, and pulled a cake of chocolate out of his pocket. He was astonished, he rolled his eyes, for it appeared to have been sat upon—“in the train.” Hilda shrieked with laughter. He thrust it into her apron pocket and fled up the stairs to change.
He could not find his old flannel trousers. Not in the cupboard—not in the bureau. He surrendered to an impulse to comic rage. “Not under the bed!” he cried. He thrust his head out of the window that overlooked the garden and addressed his children.
“Martha! bring my trousers here this instant!”
He drew in his head again from the shower of replies that flew up at him like missiles and going to the door roared down to his wife.
“I’ve lost my trousers!”
Then he found them in the closet behind the door, and, laughing, put them on.
II.
He ran out of the side door, under the wisteria-covered trellis, and down the slippery stone steps to the vegetable garden.
“Here comes daddy, now,” shrilled to him from Martha.
He lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and stood in profound meditation before the orderly, dignified, and extraordinarily vigorous rows of beans. They were in blossom—bees were tumbling the delicate lilac-pink little hoods. Clouds of fragrance came up from them. The crickets were begining to tune up for the evening. The sun was poised above the black water tower on the far hill.
Martha and Marjorie began giggling mysteriously behind the lilacs.
“My hoe!” he wailed.
The hoe was thrust out from behind the lilacs.
“If anybody should drive up in a scarlet taxi,” he said to Martha, accepting the hoe, “and inform you that your soul is free, don’t believe him. Tell him he’s a liar. Point me out to him as a symbol of the abject slavery that all life is. Say that I’m a miserable thrall to wife, children, and beans—particularly beans. I spend my days on my knees before my beans.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Martha.
He held his hoe under his arm and walked solemnly among the beans. The two girls followed him.
“Here’s a caterpillar, daddy!”
“Kill him!”
“Here’s another—a funny green one with red sparkles on his back. Oh, look at him!”
“Don’t look at him! Kill him.”
“He squirts out like green toothpaste.”
“Don’t, Martha!” he cried, pained. “Don’t say such things! Spare your neurotic father.”
He shrank visibly and strode off to the corner where his peas were planted and started methodically hoeing the rows, turning the rich loam up about the pale stalks. Now and again a pebble clinked, he stooped and threw it off into the meadow. Mary, the youngest, came to the top of the steps and cried. Martha and Marjorie went to her, and he forgot them. The rising and falling of the hoe-blade, shiny with much polishing in the brown soil, hypnotized him, and his thoughts fell into a sort of rhythm, came and went without his interference. “Ridiculous!” he thought, “that this solemn singular biped, whom other bipeds for convenience call Andrew, should stand here with a stick and scratch the skin of this aged planet. What does he expect to get for it? It pleases the aged planet. She stretches herself in the twilight, purrs like an old cat, and expresses her pleasure in the odd and useful effluvium we call peas. And this biped wears clothes. Think of it! He wears clothes; things made out of plant-fiber and sheep’s wool, cunningly and hideously made to fit his arms and legs. He has in his pocket—a small pouch made in these singular garments—a watch, a small, shiny round object in which he has reduced to feeble but regular iambics the majestic motions of the sun, earth, and stars. He takes it out and looks at it with an air of comprehension and puts it back again. Why doesn’t he laugh at himself?”… He chuckled.… “This object tells him that he has time for two more rows before dinner. Clink, clink. Damn these pebbles. My antediluvian anthropoid ape of an ancestor had to walk round them, they were so huge. He sat on them, cracked nuts against them, chattered with his family. He had no watch, and his trousers grew like grass.… Thank the lord, they’ve become pebbles.”
He sighed, and for a moment rested his chin on the hoe-handle, peering out toward the tree-encircled swamp. The hylas were beginning to jingle their elfin bells. A red-winged blackbird sailed in the last sunlight from one apple tree to another.
“All a vicious circle—and all fascinating. Utterly preposterous and futile, but fascinating.”
He dropped the hoe and trundled the wheelbarrow to the edge of the strawberry bed.
“Why can’t you stay where you’re put?” he said. “Why do you grow all over the place like this?”
With a trowel he began digging up the runners and placing them on the wheelbarrow. It delighted him to part the soft cool soil with his fingers, to thrust them sensitively among the finely filamented roots. The delicate snap, subterranean, of rootlets gave him a delicious pang. “Blood flows—but it’s all for the best; in the best of all possible worlds. Yield to me, strawberries, and you shall bear. I am the resurrection and the life.” When he had a sufficient pile of plants, he trundled the wheelbarrow to the new bed, exquisitely prepared, rich, warm, inviting. With the hoe he made a series of holes, and then, stooping, thrust the hairy roots back into the earth, pressing the soil tenderly about them. Then he rose, stretched his back, and lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and enshrining the flame, which danced, in the hollow of his stained hands. The cloud of smoke went up like incense.
“Water!” he cried. “Water! Water!”
Martha appeared, after a moment, bringing the watering pot. She held it in front of her with both hands.
“Quick, Martha, before they die. Their tongues are turning black.”
“Silly!” Martha replied.
The earth about each plant was darkened with the tilted water, and the soiled leaves and stems were brightened.
“Listen, daddy! they’re smacking their lips.”
“They are pale, they have their eyes shut, they are reaching desperately down into the darkness for something to hold on to. They grope and tickle at atoms of soil, they shrink away from pebbles, they sigh and relax.”