Mince Pie Part 4

t.i.tania was wrinkling her brow. "But how about that lost hour?" she said. "What happens to it? I don't see how we can just throw an hour away like that. Time goes on just the same. How can we afford to shorten our lives so ruthlessly? It's murder, that's what it is! I told you it was a Bolshevik plot. Just think; there are a hundred million Americans.

Moving on the clock that way brings each of us one hour nearer our graves. That is to say, we are throwing away 100,000,000 hours."

She seized a pencil and a sheet of paper and went through some calculations.

"There are 8,760 hours in a year," she said. "Reckoning seventy years a lifetime, there are 613,200 hours in each person's life. Now, will you please divide that into a hundred million for me? I'm not good at long division."

With docility I did so, and reported the result.

"About 163," I said.

"There you are!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "Throwing away all that perfectly good time amounts simply to murdering 163 harmless old men of seventy, or 326 able-bodied men of thirty-five, or 1,630 innocent little children of seven. If that isn't atrocity, what is? I think Mr. Hoover or Admiral Grayson, or somebody, ought to be prosecuted."

I was aghast at this awful result. Then an idea struck me, and I took the pencil and began to figure on my own account.

"Look here, t.i.tania," I said. "Not so fast. Moving the clock ahead doesn't really bring those people any nearer their graves. What it does do is bring the ratification of the Peace Treaty sooner, which is a fine thing. By deleting a hundred million hours we shorten Senator Borah's speeches against the League by 11,410 years. That's very encouraging."

"According to that way of reckoning," she said with sarcasm, "Mr.

Borah's term must have expired about 11,000 years ago."

"My dear t.i.tania," I said, "the ways of the Government may seem inscrutable, but we have got to follow them with faith. If Mr. Wilson tells us to murder 163 fine old men in elastic-sided boots we must simply do it, that's all. Peace is a dreadful thing. We have got to meet the Germans on their own ground. They adopted this daylight-saving measure years ago. They call it Sonnenuntergangverderbenpraxis, I believe. After all, it is only a temporary measure, because in the fall, when the daylight hours get shorter, we shall have to turn the clocks back a couple of hours in order to compensate the gas and electric light companies for all the money they will have lost. That will bring those 163 old gentlemen to life again and double their remaining term of years to make up for their temporary effacement. They are patriotic hostages to Time for the summer only. You must remember that time is only a philosophical abstraction, with no real or tangible existence, and we have a right to do whatever we want with it."

"I will remind you of that," she said, "at getting-up time on Sunday morning. I still think that if we are going to monkey with the clocks at all it would be better to turn them backward instead of forward.

Certainly that would bring you home from the club a little earlier."

"My dear," I said, "we are in the Government's hands. A little later we may be put on time rations, just as we are on food rations. We may have time cards to encourage thrift in saving time. Every time we save an hour we will get a little stamp to show for it. When we fill out a whole card we will be ent.i.tled to call ourselves a month younger than we are.

Tell that to Mrs. Borgia; it will reconcile her."

A l.u.s.ty uproar made itself heard upstairs and t.i.tania gave a little scream. "Heavens!" she cried. "Here I am talking with you and Junior's bottle is half an hour late. I don't care what Mr. Wilson does to the clocks; he won't be able to fool Junior. He knows when it's, time for meals. Won't you call up Central and find out the exact time?"

A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON

Marathon, Pa., April 2.

This is a very embarra.s.sing time of year for us. Every morning when we get on the 8:13 train at Marathon Bill St.i.tes or Fred Myers or Hank Harris or some other groundsel philosopher on the Cinder and Bloodshot begins to chivvy us about our garden. "Have you planted anything yet?"

they say. "Have you put litmus paper in the soil to test it for lime, potash and phosphorus? Have you got a harrow?"

That sort of thing bothers us, because our ideas of cultivation are very primitive. We did go to the newsstand at the Reading Terminal and try to buy a Litmus paper, but the agent didn't have any. He says he doesn't carry the Jersey papers. So we buried some old copies of the _Philistine_ in the garden, thinking that would strengthen up the soil a bit. This business of nouris.h.i.+ng the soil seems grotesque. It's hard enough to feed the family, let alone throwing away good money on feeding the land. Our idea about soil is that it ought to feed itself.

Our garden ought to be l.u.s.ty enough to raise the few beans and beets and blisters we aspire to. We have been out looking at the soil. It looks fairly potent and certainly it goes a long way down. There are quite a lot of broken magnesia bottles and old s.h.i.+nbones scattered through it, and they ought to help along. The topsoil and the humus may be a little mixed, but we are not going to sort them out by hand.

Our method is to go out at twilight the first Sunday in April, about the time the cutworms go to roost, and take a sharp-pointed stick. We draw lines in the ground with this stick, preferably in a pleasant geometrical pattern that will confuse the birds and other observers. It is important not to do this until twilight, so that no robins or insects can watch you. Then we go back in the house and put on our old trousers, the pair that has holes in each pocket. We fill the pockets with the seed, we want to plant and loiter slowly along the grooves we have made in the earth. The seed sifts down the trousers legs and spreads itself in the furrow far better than any mechanical drill could do it. The secret of gardening is to stick to nature's old appointed ways. Then we read a chapter of Bernard Shaw aloud, by candle light or lantern light.

As soon as they hear the voice of Shaw all the vegetables dig themselves in. This saves going all along the rows with a s.h.i.+ngle to pat down the topsoil or the humus or the magnesia bottles or whatever else is uppermost.

Fred says that certain vegetables--kohl-rabi and colanders, we think--extract nitrogen from the air and give it back to the soil. It may be so, but what has that to do with us? If our soil can't keep itself supplied with nitrogen, that's its lookout. We don't need the nitrogen in the air. The baby isn't old enough to have warts yet.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Hank says it's no use watering the garden from above. He says that watering from above lures the roots toward the surface and next day the hot sun kills them. The answer to that is that the rain comes from above, doesn't it? Roots have learned certain habits in the past million years and we haven't time to teach them to duck when it rains. Hank has some irrigation plan which involves sinking tomato cans in the ground and filling them with water.

Bill says it's dangerous to put a.r.s.enic on the plants, because it may kill the cook. He says nicotine or tobacco dust is far better. The answer to that is that we never put fertilizers on our garden, anyway.

If we want to kill the cook there is a more direct method, and we reserve the tobacco for ourself. No cutworm shall get a blighty one from our cherished baccy pouch.

Fred says we ought to have a wheel-barrow; Hank swears by a mulching iron; Bill is all for cold frames. All three say that h.e.l.lebore is the best thing for sucking insects. We echo the expletive, with a different application.

You see, we have no instinct for gardening. Some fellows, like Bill St.i.tes, have a divinely implanted zest for the propagation of chard and rhubarb and self-blanching celery and kohl-rabi; they are kohl-rabid, we might say. They know, just what to do when they see a weed; they can a.s.sa.s.sinate a weevil by just looking at it. But weevils and cabbage worms are unterrified by us. We can't tell a weed from a young onion. We never mulched anything in our life; we wouldn't know how to begin.

But the deuce of it is, public opinion says that we must raise a garden.

It is no use to hire a man to do it for us. However badly we may do it, patriotism demands that we monkey around with a garden of our own. We may get bitten by a snapping bean or routed by a rutabaga or infected by a parsnip. But with Bill and those fellows at our heels we have just got to face it. h.e.l.lebore!

What we want to know is, How do you ever find out all these things about vegetables? We bought an ounce of tomato seeds in desperation, and now Fred says "one ounce of tomato seeds will produce 3,000 plants. You should have bought two dozen plants instead of the seed." How does he know those things? Hank says beans are very delicate and must not be handled while they are wet or they may get rusty. Again we ask, how does he know? Where do they learn these matters? Bill says that stones draw out the moisture from the soil and every stone in the garden should be removed by hand before we plant. We offered him twenty cents an hour to do it.

The most tragic odor in the world hangs over Marathon these days; the smell of freshly spaded earth. It is extolled by the poets and all those happy sons of the pavement who know nothing about it. But here are we, who hardly know a loam from a lentil, breaking our back over seed catalogues. Public opinion may compel us to raise vegetables, but we are going to go about it our own way. If the stones are going to act like werewolves and suck the moisture from our soil, let them do so. We don't believe in thwarting nature. Maybe it will be a very wet summer and we shall have the laugh on Bill, who has carted away all his stones.

And we should just like to see Bill St.i.tes write a poem. We bet it wouldn't look as much like a poem as our beans look like beans. And as for Hank and Fred, they wouldn't even know how to begin to plant a poem!

BULLIED BY THE BIRDS

Marathon, Pa., May 2.

I insist that the place for birds is in the air or on the bushy tops of trees or on smooth-shaven lawns. Let them twitter and strut on the greens of golf courses and intimidate the tired business men. Let them peck cinders along the railroad track and keep the trains waiting. But really they have no right to take possession of a man's house as they have mine.

The nesting season is a time of tyranny and oppression for those who live in Marathon. The birds are upon us like Hindenburg in Belgium. We go about on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, for fear of annoying them. It is all the fault of the Marathon Bird Club, which has offered all sorts of inducements to the fowls of the air to come and live in our suburb, quite forgetting that humble commuters have to live there, too. Birds have moved all the way from Wynnewood and Ambler and Chestnut Hill to enjoy the congenial air of Marathon and the informing little pamphlets of our club, telling them just what to eat and which houses offer the best hospitality. All our dwellings are girt about with little villas made of condensed milk boxes, but the feathered tyrants have grown too pernickety to inhabit these. They come closer still, and make our homes their own. They take the grossest liberties.

I am fond of birds, but I think the line must be drawn somewhere. The clothes-line, for instance. The other day t.i.tania sent me out to put up a new clothesline; I found that a shrike or a barn swallow or some other veery had built a nest in the clothespin basket. That means we won't be able to hang out our laundry in the fresh Monday air and equally fresh Monday suns.h.i.+ne until the nesting season is over.

Then there is a gross, fat, indiscreet robin that has taken a home in an evergreen or mimosa or banyan tree just under our veranda railing. It is an absurdly exposed, almost indecently exposed position, for the confidential family business she intends to carry on. The iceman and the butcher and the boy who brings up the Sunday ice cream from the apothecary can't help seeing those three big blue eggs she has laid.

But, because she has nested there for the last three springs, while the house was unoccupied, she thinks she has a perpetual lease on that bush. She hotly resents the iceman and the butcher and the apothecary's boy, to say nothing of me. So these worthy merchants have to trail round a circuitous route, violating the neutral ground of a neighbor, in order to reach the house from behind and deliver their wares through the cellar. We none of us dare use the veranda at all for fear of frightening her, and I have given up having the morning paper delivered at the house because she made such shrill protest.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Frightening her, do I say? Nay, it is _we_ who are frightened. I go round to the side of the house to prune my benzine bushes or to plant a mess of spinach and a profane starling or woodp.e.c.k.e.r bustles off her nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave and t.i.tania whispers sharply, "You mustn't shave in there. There's a tomt.i.t nesting in the shutter hinge and the light from your shaving mirror will make the poor little birds crosseyed when they're hatched." I try to shave in the dining-room and I find a sparrow's nest on the window sill. Finally I do my toilet in the coal bin, even though there is a young squeaking bat down there.

A bat is half mouse anyway, so t.i.tania has less compa.s.sion for its feelings. Even if that bat grows up bow-legged on account of premature excitement, I have to shave somewhere.

We can't play croquet at this time of year, because the lawn must be kept clear for the robins to quarry out worms. The sound of mallet and ball frightens the worms and sends them underground, and then it's harder for the robins to find them. I suppose we really ought to keep a stringed orchestra playing in the garden to entice the worms to the surface. We have given up frying onions because the mother robins don't like the odor while they're raising a family. I love my toast crusts, but t.i.tania takes them away from me for the blackbirds. "Now," she says, "they're raising a family. You must be generous."

If my garden doesn't amount to anything this year the birds will be my alibi. t.i.tania makes me do my gardening in rubber-soled shoes so as not to disturb the birds when they are going to bed. (They begin yelping at 4 a.m. right outside the window and never think of my slumbers.) The other evening I put on my planting trousers and was about to sow a specially fine pea I had brought home from town when t.i.tania made signs from the window. "You simply mustn't wear those trousers around the house in nesting season. Don't you know the birds are very sensitive just now?" And we have been paying board for our cat on Long Island for a whole year because the birds wouldn't like his society and plebeian ways.

Marathon has come to a pretty pa.s.s, indeed, when the commuters are to be dispossessed in this way by a lot of birds, orioles and tomt.i.ts and yellow-bellied nuthatches. Some of these days a wren will take it into its head to build a nest on the railroad track and we'll all have to walk to town. Or a chicken hawk will settle in our icebox and we'll starve to death.

As I have said before, I believe in keeping nature in its proper place.