Closing the Country Home

THIS is the age of the country home, and we who are children of the age pride ourselves not a little on what we call our return to nature, our devotion to field and wood. True it is that new houses spring up in green valleys every year, that old farmhouses are taken over and transformed, that the mountains are ringed with worshipers from June until October. True it is that our book-shelves abound in manuals of the garden, of bird and flower, and that no self-respecting one of us would venture forth in the summer meadows without an opera-glass. We are very earnest in the pursuit of our outdoor enthusiasm, and, though it occurs to us sometimes to laugh, genially poking fun at one another for our cxcessses in the field, we never seem to doubt in the least the fundamental nature of our love, or its perfect desirability in the scheme of things at large. Perhaps this assurance is just as well; no enthusiasm certainly is worth a straw without it. And the nature-enthusiasm is good for soul and body, heart and brain, of those who acknowledge it. But there is another side to the matter, commanded by the point of view of the country itself and the country people, and this side is worth consideration if our love is really earnest.

The increase of country homes is working a very radical change in the life of the country.

A certain valley I have in mind, hidden among the mountains, remote and silent, a gentle spot, yet not untouched with sublimity in its grandly encircling hills. Meadow and woodland, pasture and stream, are brooded upon by a potent spell which serves to bind all hearts to the place in a devotion which is seldom equaled outside the realm of purely human affection. The people who go there in the summer, returning year after year for long lifetimes, are bound in a brotherhood close and peculiar, so that, when they chance to encounter one another on the city streets during the winter, pleasure leaps up in their eyes, and they turn aside and forget other claims on the spot. The place has laid its still influence commandingly over the depths of many scattered lives. Little by little, the land is bought up for summer cottages, or old farmhouses are made over, and the summer colony spreads.

Time was when the social life of this valley was blithe and vigorous, the indigenous social life, native as rocks and trees. Old inhabitants shake their heads, looking wistfully back through the years. “Those were good days when the Crawfords lived here, when Silas Wilkins was alive, when we had the village orchestra and the Shakespeare Club.” What is it that has so fatally happened to occasion that hopeless past tense? Silas Wilkins has died, to be sure, and no one could help that mortal accident. But the Crawfords have sold their farm to some people from New York, the Perkins family has decamped in favor of a Boston arrival, and Miss Lucy Jones has ceded her cottage for an artist’s studio.

In the summer all is abundant good cheer. The houses and cottages brim with glad life along the winding country roads and in the little village. Horses and carriages climb the hills, picnic parties explore the glens, diligent walkers tramp “round the square,” in the thoroughly conscientious fashion of the “summer boarder.” There is a certain informal degree of social life manifest in tea on the lawn, in games at the tiny club-house, in tennis tournaments. A series of entertainments each year, “for the benefit of the library,” lays claim on the quite unusual talents of the summer residents, resulting in concerts of wonderful music, in masterly readings from the great poets, in exhibitions of pictures which later will adorn the walls of the New York Academy. “What a great thing it is for the valley,” many a visitor has exclaimed, “that all these people should have settled here!”

A natural first conclusion that, inevitable to the urban mind; but one has only to linger a little into the edges of the winter to pause and question its ultimate soundness. This winter season is one which we fair-weather sojourners complacently ignore. Our country year is but half a year, three seasons at the most. What happens after we close our houses and return to our “sweet security of streets,” we have not the least idea. That the moon has to consider and deal with a strange shadowed half, which is just as much a part of its being as its familiar earthward face, is a proposition which no earth-child can realize very acutely.

That something threatens we apprehend in those great days of late October when, hurriedly packing, we glance out through our windows at bare-stripped hills, purple-black beneath flying clouds, at gaunt woods “in the stormy east-wind straining,” at armies of scurrying leaves. But we do not linger to put to the test our shivering apprehensions. The wistful eyes of the country people might tell us a story if we cared to listen. How they dread the winter! Their preparations for it are grave and carefully deliberate, beginning in the middle of autumn, lest something be forgotten, or lest the time prove too short and frost overtake the farmhouse unawares.

“It’s a regular campaign you have to plan, is n’t it?” I said to a farmer’s wife, as I dropped in to see her one November day, and was ushered into the kitchen. All the rooms in the front of the house were closed off, and the front door was locked for the winter.

“Yes,” she sighed, “we have to change all around, you see, and huddle close together. My husband and I sleep in that little room off the kitchen, with the two youngest children, and the others sleep just above; the stove-pipe goes through their room. Even then, we often suffer with cold. I don’t know as you’ll hardly believe me, but one night last winter I left a fire banked up in the stove and the tea-kettle on the griddle, and in the morning the coals were still there, but the kettle was froze solid.”

“It is n’t the cold that I dread most, though,” she went on after a moment, “it’s the awful loneliness. There’s so few people left in the valley now after the first of November. You see how it is a little yourself, stayin’ so late this year. There ’s nothin’ lonesomer than a closed house, an’ on some roads there ain’t nothin’ else hardly but closed houses. My! how I hate to drive by ’em in a winter twilight. I think there ought to be a law to oblige city people to keep lights burnin’ in their country homes all winter. Don’t you suppose” — this with a sudden appealing turn — “ you are ever goin’ to want to stay with us all through the year?”

Was I ever going to want to, I wondered, as I walked home after this interview. Yes, I wanted to even then with at least one-half of my heart. The solemn November beauty is greater to me than all the light-hearted abundance of summer; the lure of the winter is stirring. If only my comrades would stay with me! If only ! There I betrayed the need common to all our humanity, urban or rural, and quickened my steps to pass the closed houses, and shivered, and was sad. The inestimable benefit accruing to our valley from my summer home and those of my friends seemed suddenly not so evident to me as I had always supposed it to be. If I were the valley, I know full well that I should prefer the old order of things, with houses open all the year round and filled with stout-hearted country people who loyally took storm and sunshine with me and gave me their whole endeavor, who wove a strong social life in my midst and made me a part of the world.

Think what it is that we do in fact, we “lovers of the country!” As soon as the way is conveniently smooth for our delicate feet in the spring, we sweep in, usurping all the best sites, buying up the best farm-land. All authority we blandly assume, even controlling the social life, as by divine right forsooth. The country people are shy and proud. Seeing us so abundantly willing to manage the affairs of the valley, they decamp before us. Any least condescension they recognize, — in our efforts to “make ourselves one with them,” to “draw them out,” — and they retire into the hollow’s of their hills, perturbed and obstinate. Even the villagers, those who have traveled and know the ways of the world, never open out their lives fully to us, so that the barrier disappears and we are no longer “city folks” to them, but just plain everyday “folks.” The relation between us is not the genuine, unstudied one of fellow townsmen, but at best a conscious adaptation.

For the truth of the matter always is that we are not fellow townsmen. No real valley-dwellers are we who take the sweet of its life and leave its bitter doubly pungent. We speak of “our valley,” “our hills,” “our woods;” but they are not in the very least ours, the claim is presumptuous. They are His who made them, of course, supremely; and, after that, they are theirs who live rounded lives in their midst.

To these latter should fall all rights of controlling growth and change. The little valley of my affection has long desired a railroad. The reasons are many and excellent: to facilitate transportation of farm produce, to spare horse and man in the piercing winter cold, to make intercourse possible between scattered farms (a country railroad often runs on the trolley principle of stops), to communicate a little of the pulse of the world. Nothing less than new life would be the gift of that road to the valley. Yet — “Never!” exclaim the owners of country homes, with one voice, and a determination based on the tax-list and reasonably sure of itself. Based on æsthetic considerations, too, of course, and quite conscientious. Shall the lovely valley be defiled, its sanctity invaded ? There is, however, a sanctity of hunger in the human heart which is a more august and reverend thing than any valley solitude, and this the railroad of our abhorrence would honor and subserve. The decision is certainly not ours to make, yet we do make it and enforce it, and the railroad is not yet.

One wishes that the social reformers would turn their attention from city slums for a while and give the country their thoughtful consideration. There is great possibility and great need for readjustment here. Life in the country ought to be all that is sweet and wholesome and glad. Wordsworth realized this obligation and wrote of his high-souled farmers. But Crabbe, for all his lesser genius, looked more squarely into the face of fact, and sadly set forth, —

No, alas! it is not there. The average country life is not a life of happiness. Hard work and poverty chain the body — and with the body the mind — to a hopeless, monotonous round. It is enough to kill the spirit to see no possible end to one’s task, nor any varying. An impious, tragic distortion of values results from this lifelong absorption in material things, so that all the finer issues of life, those for which the soul was created, come to be, if not ignored altogether, scorned at least and neglected. To the average country person a dreamer is a contemptible failure. Books and music have their place, but a scanty one, in the cracks of the day, or at its weary end. It actually transpires at last that the shell of life has all the importance, and the kernel shrivels and is cast away.

They have their vague misgivings of course, these fettered farmer-folk (no wronged soul can utterly fail of indignant protest), and therefore their eyes are wistful. But the finer issues of life are perhaps after all a community product, a divine result of comradeship, of love and faith and intercourse, an urban growth rather than a rural. Scattered, lonely, separate lives cannot well attain it. This theory contradicts the poets, and that is another tragic and impious act. But etymology bears it out. The one word civilization itself tells the whole of the story.

They say that the state in which lies the valley to which I have referred is steadily degenerating, that crime is on the increase. That should be a shocking matter of concern to all of us who love the state and have our summer homes there. What shall be done? “A return to the soil” is everywhere cried as the remedy, and perhaps we think we are meeting the need in the May to November return we make, in our “fancy farming.” But halfway methods never succeed, and ours is no real return. What the valley needs is the whole allegiance of the best of its native sons, who shall abide in it and work its weal instead of selling their houses and setting forth to see if they, too, cannot become “city folks;” and of its sons by adoption also, for there is room in the valley for all who will come and work for it honestly.

Just here comes in the great opportunity of the country home. Work-room or play-ground — that is the question on which the whole issue depends: which is the valley to the owner of the country home? At least it is certainly true that no lover who is worth his nectar fails to devote himself heart and soul to the good of his beloved; and, if our love for the country be real, we will see to it that the country profits, not suffers in the slightest way, by our presence in it. All this reasoning seems to point to one logical conclusion: that the country home be kept open through the year. After what has been said of the urban birth of the finer issues of life, the conclusion sounds like a condemnation; and indeed the lure of “the friendly town” is as strong as that of “the open road” to us of the modern world. But, if we all stayed in the country together, those of us who have country homes, there would be a real community life, a civilization of numbers. The country people would swell our ranks, — or we should swell theirs, which is the truer and assuredly the more gracious way of putting the case, — and the valley would have one established life, one purpose, and one hope. The good old days might come again, or — since of course they never do — better ones perhaps. The wistfulness might leave the eyes of the farmer-folk and their hunger be appeased by the constant presence of their kind. Crime is often enough but a desperate effort at selfdefense against the arch-foe ennui, a miserable refuge. What if we of the country homes leave the path open by our desertion, our positive infliction of loneliness through our negative absence ? It is a point to consider.

Nor need we suppose that our sacrifice (complacent creatures that we are!) would be any greater than our gain if we stayed in the country all winter. A comradeship very close and informal would grace our long seclusion. Apart from the hurry and rush of the city, we should have time to know one another, to build up a real society based on eternal things. Around “ our neighborly open ” fires, abroad on snow-shoes or skates together, sharing the fight with the elements, we should have intercourse real and substantial, worth everything else in life. Our books, too, — how we should revel in them, by the hour, by the day, with the snow falling softly outside, and the wind in the chimney! And the crisp morning’s work at easel or desk, and the long cosy evenings! Surely the life would be good. As for the beauty, do we understand what we forego when we turn away and leave the valley to winter ? Days of dazzling blue and white — a white world of silence, beneath a blue sky in which the stars await only the swift going down of the sun to blaze forth, hanging in space. Soft gray days of whirling, muffling flakes; dark, fierce days of rushing winds. Winter woods to explore, winter brooks to follow, and winter ponds to skim. The greatest season of all the year is this King Winter, and we will have none of it.

Then there is the first approach of spring, that most exquisite surprise. The earliest corners-back of us are never in time for this revelation; it belongs to February. We feel it in our city streets and respond to it with a leap of the heart; but what it must mean to be touched by it some gusty morning across snowy fields, and to burst, out of our winter prison, rejoicing utterly!

It is only a question mooted, this of the duty and present failure of the country home. I who write have no more mind to relinquish my city apartment than my old farmhouse. But one has spells now and then of debating, not what he has a mind for, so much as what effect he is producing by his line of conduct; and when one of these virtuous moods is upon me, my heart misgives me for my little valley. It lies at a distance among the hills. The deep snows wrap it, the silence broods, the evening lamps shine too far apart to be aware of one another. Along the roads and in the village closed houses stand in cheerless gloom, forbidding presences. Loneliness, dreariness, and desertion, — while here hive we in our cosy city, safe and warm and happy together. The contrast gives one pause.