Part 38

Why should I not answer the cry? Why should I not be a farmer? Before I knew it I was at least going through the motions, having fields plowed, putting in crops, planting an orchard, supporting horses, a cow, a pig, a poultry yard—giving up a new evening gown to buy fertilizer!

Seeing what I was in for and fearing lest I should do as so many of my friends had done—go in deeper than my income justified, find myself borrowing and mortgaging in order to carry out the fascinating things I saw to do—I laid down a strict rule which I have followed ever since, and which I recommend to people of limited incomes who acquire a spot in the country, and want it to be a continuous pleasure instead of a continuous anxiety. I resolved that I would spend only what I could lay aside from income, that I would divide this appropriation into three parts—one for the land, one for the house, one for furnishing. As the budget was very small it meant that a thousand things that I wanted to do went undone, and still are undone. But it meant also that I had little or no financial anxiety.

If the call of the land had been unexpected and not to be denied, even more unexpected and still less to be denied was the call of the neighborhood. I was not long in learning that in the houses I could see in valley and on hillside centered the most genuine of human dramas, tragic and comic.

After the land and its background, the greatest gift of God to us (“us” including my niece Esther) was our nearest neighbors Mr. and Mrs. G. Burr Tucker, at the side of whose house swung a sign, “Antiques for Sale.”

But it was as neighbors, not as customers Mr. and Mrs. Tucker regarded us from the start. When Burr was not over helping us settle he was watching what was going on from his front porch. I have never had more pungent, salty, faithful friends. They had spent most of their lives on the corner, not always selling antiques. Mrs. Tucker had taught in the schoolhouse at the top of the hill for twenty-nine years, and Burr had had a varied and picturesque career as a salesman of pumps, fruit trees, any gadget that seemed to be useful to his country neighbors.

Not long before we moved in he had discovered by accident that there were people in the outside world who bought old spinning wheels, ancient chairs, ancient pottery. Burr knew the contents of every garret and woodshed for twenty miles around, and when he made his discovery he began systematically to buy them out. By the time I arrived on the scene he had an established business.

Not knowing whether we were going to like our new acquisition well enough to make it permanent, Esther and I had decided to furnish out of a department store basement. But in looking over Burr’s miscellaneous assortment my eye fell on an old-fashioned melodeon, charming in line, its bellows broken but easy to repair—$10. I couldn’t resist it, and so I became almost from the first day a customer of my nearest neighbor. It was a great day when Burr went “teeking,” as they called the hunt for treasures. We would watch for his return, and when his white horse and wagon loaded high with loot appeared down the road we were on the ground as soon as he was.

Not only did the immediate vicinity yield rich and exciting material, but a little distance away there were people from the world we knew. There were the friends who had first shown me the country—Noble and Ella Hoggson, up the Valley, the center of a jolly and interesting group known as the “Valley Crowd.” A mile or so away was one of the most interesting women in the literary world of that day—Jeannette Gilder, sister of Richard Watson Gilder, a lively writer and editor.

Perhaps no woman in her time carried to more perfection the then feminine vogue for severe masculine dress: stout shoes, short skirt, mannish jacket, shirt, tie, hat, stick. They were the last word in style. They suited her as they did few, for she was large of frame, with strong, bold features and a fine swinging gait; but the masculinity was all on the surface. Esther came home one day shouting with laughter: “Miss Gilder is a fake. She wears silk petticoats and is afraid of mice.”

Soon after I acquired my farm the countryside was stirred by the news that Mark Twain was building only eight or nine miles away from us. Everybody seemed to know what was happening with the building, the settling, the life going on. That was partly because of our omnivorous curiosity and partly because Mark Twain was a friendly neighbor. He every now and then gave a great party, sending the invitations around by our peripatetic butcher, a member of one of our first families, a gentleman as well as a good tradesman.

I have a few treasured recollections of days when Jeannette Gilder and I drove over to tea or lunch with Mark Twain, heard great stories of the doings in his new home. It was from him that I heard the story of the famous burglary; it was from him I heard the story of one of the best practical jokes ever played—when Peter Dunne and Robert Collier sent him an elephant.

Not only was all this fun and excitement and novelty shared by my niece and those of my family who came to see what we were so excited about, but every member of the American staff sooner or later appeared at the farm to look us over. From the start our chief counselor had been Bert Boyden, who six months after I had taken the first option on the place had insisted on accompanying me to see whether I had better take it up.

Bert looked at the oaks, he looked at the gay little stream that ran across the land, and without hesitation said, “Buy it.” And buy it, I did. Having had a part in the purchase, Bert superintended henceforth all changes. He approved my plan of budgeting. He helped me select the wallpapers which were hung; he was interested in the larder for the winter.

In the summer when his family was at a distance J. S. P. came often to discuss the perplexities of the magazine and rest himself from the commotion of the office. The Norrises came, and Kathleen named my pig. Who but Kathleen would have called him “Juicy”? He looked it, fat as butter. The Siddalls came often, for in the summer we kept their famous cat, “Sammy Siddall.” The Rices, the Martins, the Bakers—all came to look on that rough land and shell of a house and wonder, I suspect, how I could be happy with anything so simple, be satisfied with no more pretentious plans than I had.

Among those who came in those early days was one who has left a crimson streak across the history of his time—Jack Reed. Jack, just out of Harvard, was giving half-time to the American, half-time to writing. We would invite him for the week end but he was never at the station when we drove over to find him. Likely he had missed his train, taken a freight—that was more fun. And late in the evening he would come walking over the hilltop demanding food and a bed, and we would sit long hearing the adventures of his day.

It was on one of these trips that Jack found near by a natural amphitheater. Before he had left he had planned to buy the place and worked out in detail a Greek theater. He started towards New York on foot, expecting to raise the money from friends en route. “I was all ready to put up money,” one of them told me not many years ago.

From Lumière autochrome by Arnold Genthe, N. Y.

Miss Tarbell in her garden at her Connecticut farm, 1914 ]

But when Jack was back at his desk in New York he forgot the theater—I never heard of it afterwards. That was the delightful creature Jack Reed was, up to the time that he discovered what is called life. He took it hard. Now his bones lie under a tomb in Moscow, one of the martyrs to Lenin’s great vision of the communal life.

All this was good for me, cushioned the shock I had suffered, convinced me that at least I had gotten my hands on something permanent, a fundamental factor in my future security—a home—a home capable of feeding me if the worst came to the worst. But while it was good for me it was not so good for my work on the magazine.

I had believed I could work better in the quiet of the country, but I was discovering that the country was more exciting than the town and the office as I knew it. Its attractions were proving too much for the difficult task which had been assigned me in the planning for the first year of the American. The task was nothing less than to write a history of the making of our tariff schedules from the Civil War on. It had been a natural enough selection for me after the experience with the history of the Standard Oil Company for the tariff was quite as much a matter of popular concern at the moment as the trust had been in 1900. There was a growing demand for revision. How could we get into the fight? A subject must be found for me. How about the tariff? Was a historical treatment possible? I thought so; at least I so despised the prohibitive tariff that I was willing to try if the magazine was willing to back me.

I suppose most of us have had at various periods of our life homemade remedies for the economic ills we see about us. When I was a girl in high school I looked on an eight-hour day of productive labor for everybody as the way out. I was much less worried by the hardships the long day brought working people than the mental and moral deterioration I imagined suffered by people who did not work. Idleness, not labor, was the scourge of the world. For me the eight-hour day was a save-the-idle day!

Before I left The Chautauquan I had concluded that there was a trilogy of wrongs—all curable—responsible for our repeated depressions and our poorly distributed wealth: discrimination in transportation; tariffs save for revenue only; private ownership of natural resources. I was still of that opinion when, largely by accident, I had my chance to strike at number one in my trilogy. Could I by the method I had followed in that case, and the only one I knew how to use, present a plausible argument against Number Two?

What had particularly aroused me was the way tariff schedules were made, the strength of what we now call pressure groups—the powerful lobbies in wool and cotton and iron and sugar which for twenty-five years I had watched mowing Congress down like a high wind. There was no concealment of the pressure. The lobbyists went at it hammer and tongs and battered down opposition with threats, bribes, and unparalleled arrogance. By these tactics they had overcome Mr. Cleveland’s famous tariff message of 1886, had passed the outrageous McKinley bill of 1890, had ruined the Wilson bill of 1893, had defeated the promise of McKinley and Dingley and Aldrich to lower duties in 1896, and had substituted the highest and most distorted schedules the country had yet seen. But it looked in 1906 as if the Day of Judgment was near, and I asked nothing better than to be on the jury.

I went into it blindly—on faith, certainly not on knowledge—and I had a handicap that I was far from realizing at the time: that was that, while in the case of the Standard Oil I had spent my life close to the events, the tariff and its makers had never touched my life. This was something that I had read in a book.

Another handicap was that my indignation was directed towards legal acts. Congress had adopted these schedules, under coercion if you please, but still it had adopted them. The beneficiaries had the sanction of law. It was a different case from challenging railroad discriminations, which were forbidden by law.

As I worked on the Congressional Record and related documents I looked up men still living who had had a part in the struggle on one side or the other. There were many of them scattered around the country, now out of Congress for the most part, but not averse to talking. As a rule I got little from them. The fight which seemed to me so important was a dead issue to them. They had lost or won. It was all part of a game. Fresh from reading the daily discussions in the Record, curious about this or that man or argument, I found them hazy, often not particularly interested. There was little of the righteous indignation which I thought I found in their recorded speeches. Had that been political, instead of righteous, indignation? I began to think so.

It was Grover Cleveland who put heart in me. He had lost none of his righteous indignation over the aid prohibitive tariffs were giving certain trusts, none of his alarm over the growing disparity between industry and agriculture they were fostering. He felt deeply the wrong of the prices they were inflicting on the farmer, the professional class, the poor. I got nothing but encouragement from him for the review I had planned.