MacGregor Jenkins

“ Steps are quicker, voices gayer; new tasks come with every hour. A joyous restlessness sets life a-tingle; windows open, [Pg 38] and mops are shaken. Curious caps appear over familiar female faces. All is bustle, eagerness, and mirth.
Outside, great rich black spots of earth appear. The first green things look out from garden tangles, and the sun pours its prodigal warmth into every dark and frozen corner.
There dawns a day set by no calendar, decreed by no lawgiver, when the mystic ritual of spring must be observed. Long since have fireside tasks and recreations been a mockery. ”

“ I never watch a workman without a thrill, if only he be a real craftsman, a man who loves his work. And such a one is he who cleans my horses. I can clean a horse after a fashion, but here is consummate art: free swing of comb and brush following the graceful lines of the creature’s body; the softly spoken word to soothe impatience; the low soft [Pg 82] whistling sound that none but the elect can manage; the tap of comb on hoof or floor; the fearless, accustomed handling of a horse. A perfect art, and loved, I know, by horse as well as man. ”

“ Jones’ eyes twinkle, and her nose twitches, and her tail curls tighter and tighter in sheer delight, until I burst into laughter with a guilty fear that I may have been overheard—may have so set in motion a new series of stories that would inevitably bring disaster to some of our most respected townsfolk.
There is a direct simplicity about a pig. He knows no affectations. He has but two ends in view: one is to wax fat,—and how splendidly he does it,—the other, to amuse with a subtle, ironic humor. He lives a curiously circumscribed life in utter and absolute contentment. ”

“ A garden must have privacy—a wall, a hedge, something to keep the world away, for here the choicest hours will be spent. It must have shade, for here will come repose for mind and body more serene than can be found elsewhere. It should be small or have a part reserved for fellowship with growing things. There must be seats, not horrid wooden things upon which no one in his normal mind would sit. For pure effect against a wall of green they satisfy, but as a place to rest, a mockery and sham. ”

“ With what wealth of ritual do we bestow a name upon a child; with what ecstasies of formality do we celebrate her taking a mate; and yet with what casual indifference do we give that child the first dog! We create a contact—as our scientific friends like to call it—the importance of which no one can conjecture, with a callous unconcern that is the only proper measure of our ignorance. ”

“ I am familiar with two; one the grand manner, which dismisses all details to underlings and which accepts the garden simply as a useful decorative accessory of a highly ornamental life. This manner, for the most obvious of reasons, is not mine. Nor do I accept the over-intimate and prying fussiness of some garden owners: those good people who tell you they know every plant and every flower, who dilate on the doubtful pleasure of doing all the work themselves, who brazenly acclaim the fact that the garden has no secrets from them. ”

“ You catch a suggestion of it sometimes when you ride alone, and horse and rider share the glory of a run across some open meadow before you turn for the long, cool walk homeward with loose rein and lowered head. But to hear it in its perfection scores of hoofs must beat in unison, and it must begin far off and come on toward you with growing intensity. ”

“ There is one friend I have who seems to be part of my garden. He is a fellow worker too, a creature of rare tact, who calls but seldom. When in the twilight I catch sight of his squat black figure on the garden path I know my ally is afield. He seems a lonely soul, but quite content.
I wonder what the far-off recollections are that come to me when I behold a toad: faint pixy notions, sprites, hobgoblins and their ilk, and jewels too, a medley from the past. ”

“ For me a garden should be part of one’s abode, simply another room to step into when the mood requires, a place for early morning investigation and for evening solitude. And such a garden is mine. Why gardens should be made solely a place of exhibition, why they should be tortured into tedious formality and used only on social occasions, is a mystery to me.
Like a good many other things, the use made of gardens by their owners depends a great deal on the owner’s attitude toward gardens in general. ”

“ Murphy and I do not quite understand Midas and Moneybags.
A joyous bark is heard. Shrill voices pierce the air. School is over and life really begins. I leave this oddly assorted pair to work out their problems, grateful for an hour of perfect peace in the presence of perfect understanding.
Finally, a pig is the only animal friend with whom I am able to part at an appropriate time without bitter grief and self-reproaches. It is not that I am not sincerely attached to him by the subtlest ties of kinship, but there seems to be only one logical finale of our life together. ”

“ And this is what a garden does to me; this small soft creature, only out for food, becomes a fabled creature of romance, and surely if in days like these a toad can strike the shackles from your mind and let you be a child in every thought, a toad is well worth while. ”

“ I show the way, and as I turn to watch the others, Experience follows; her stride is easy, every nerve at rest. She takes the tiny jump as part of her day’s work and canters up and stops. Youth now comes, pulling just a bit and nervous in her stride. She takes it well, but jumps a foot too high and does not want to stop when she is over. She will learn; when she has learned she will know that half the work will do it just as well.
And now the end. We whirl. We let them go. For one short moment we thunder side by side. We hear the hoofs; we feel the plunging bodies between our knees ”

“ It rings in our ears, it tingles in our blood. It is more than the fitting climax of a perfect drama; it is the call to action. Tasks await us, enthralling undertakings, and we must not delay. But delay we do, for a moment to feel the glowing warmth of the heightening sun, to let the sweet southwest wind blow in our faces, to smell the cool, wet odor of the awakening soil.
We listen in the stillness for a voice. Eager eyes turn toward the willows, parted lips and straining ears wait for the message, and it comes. The little brook beyond the willows now is free and he is talking to us! ”

“ Of course, man starts no enterprise, no undertaking for his betterment, without attack from myriads of foes. Just why this should be so, I do not know. Perhaps his ignorance is cause; perhaps he counts as foes a thousand things that help him though he know it not. But certainly it seems ordained that garden joys should pay the highest toll in watchfulness and toil. Why cannot things be beautiful without a battle for the right to live? Perhaps it is that pleasures lightly won are lightly held. If this be so, then any garden which has won its way should give its owner deepest gratitude. ”

“ For days we glory in the matchless product of our skill, but we know this leisure must not last. That is the great fact at the bottom of man’s devotion to the hen. She is an insistent creature and goads you on to activity. She demands an industry equal to her own. There are only brief, infrequent periods of contemplative pleasure in your association with a hen. No hours of easy talk, no placid silences, no moments of tender abstraction. A hen does not sentimentalize, she acts, and she insists that your relationship be that of a working partner ”

“ There is no need to enlarge upon the economic value of the pig. The billboards and the press are radiant with tasteful illustrations of the appetizing final state of this succulent animal. It is in other ways and for other reasons that I admire and love him.
He is the one animal with which man can ever hope to be on intimate terms, who is an incorrigible wag. He is the humorist of the farm. It seems strange that it should be so. Bred for countless generations for nothing but culinary purposes, daily approaching an inevitably tragic end, he has preserved inviolate the comic tradition. ”

“ It is one of those sacred things that even an Internal Revenue Inspector must dismiss in reverent awe, and the Head of the Household must rest content with the explanation that there are but two hidden things in my life: one is the price paid for the dog in question and the other is the extent of my devotion to my wife. After the matter is presented in these terms, further inquiry seems indelicate.
But the bitter fact remains—I did buy him. A dog should never be purchased, should never be made the subject of barter and dickering. ”

“ My dog has but one eye. He was the beginning of things. Just how far he has controlled my destiny, just how far he has shaped the lives of those about him, will never be known until the dull human mind has evolved a keener perception of the real values of life and has learned to become conscious of influences too subtle to be recognized by man in his present fallen estate. ”

“ And of all the creatures I know man is in some ways the least fitted to teach them. He is vain, imperious, and often cowardly; that is why a perfect horseman is just a bit more rare than a perfect poet. I have long since given over any ambition to write an epic poem, but I do hope, if life be spared, by patience, humility, and the sternest application to the task, to learn to ride a horse. ”

“ The soft air is full of myriads of little voices; small rustling things disturb the grass; the soft sod yields beneath my step, and pungent odors float down the wind. Life, imperious life is singing in the night its message of growth. Grow and multiply, grow, grow for to-morrow the harvest. ”

“ There is the occasional dog, of course, who has not withstood the corrupting influences of human associations as well as his more fortunate brothers, but even he is vastly better than no dog at all.
And once the contact made, the relationship established, what unlimited vistas of speculation lie temptingly before the reflective mind! Those two little figures on the hearthrug—one in the image of man, one showing the sleek and perfect lines of a half-wild creature. Two heads together—one of tousled gold, the other close-cropped and tapering to nostrils of nervous sensitiveness ”

“ And certainly when that crowning moment of our existence comes—when as in the fairy tale we make the one wish allowed us—we should do it with a high degree of decorum and with all decent elaboration of detail.
I say we cannot make a mistake—I mean from the child’s standpoint. We may create a relationship trying to the dog, by giving him to a very inferior child upon whom he must lavish years of loving instruction before improvement appears, but we cannot hurt the child by giving him a bad dog, for the simple reason that there is no such thing, broadly speaking, as a bad dog. ”

“ Even in my little garden, so “informal” as to be almost slovenly, I know that many cruelties are done: plants of varying and hostile habit thrown together, all living, like myself, under unnatural and often abhorred conditions, trying with all the strength that is in them to escape, to assert themselves, to be as Nature meant them to be. These I try to restrain gently and to correct their wayward tendencies. Often I find some [Pg 98] plant that for countless generations has known but one habit of growth. ”

“ It is during these periods that my garden suffers and my always doubtful popularity with my neighbors sinks to its lowest ebb. So when a flash of white, a pair of ears dart through my garden I content myself with shouts and harmless missiles badly thrown, for how can I tell that this tiny intruder is not some vagrant member of my own increasing flock? ”

“ In the first place; a pig, more than any of your other animal friends, looks like many people you know. The moment you see a new pig you have at once a dozen names in mind, every one of them fitting perfectly. I will admit that I have encountered a curious prejudice on the part of some people against having a pig named after them. This can be remedied in a simple and most effective manner. In my case, I have a pig that irresistibly reminded me of a near relative, a man of pronounced opinions. ”

“ Youth takes the lead; a word must bring her back. This is no race or steeplechase. So back she comes, but shakes her head and dashes foam upon her shoulder. Experience travels neck and neck with me, a tranquil eye, but nostrils quiver, and I wonder if she is recalling days when this pace was mere play for her. At the brow of the hill we pull up and loosen rein. ”

“ We make the meal a mockery and hurry to the stable. No having horses brought round to the door—not in our simple life are things like that. We seek them out, and make the pleasure greater.
They stand in single file upon the floor, saddled and bridled, waiting our command. Each is covered with a bright plaid cooler; ears are erect, and nervous lips jingle the shining bits.
The Incomparable One is as busily important as if each steed were a prospective Derby winner. We pull off the coolers, each our own. ”

“ It is idle to prate of the lessons he teaches. They have been told and retold. Patience, loyalty, devotion—we know them all. It is in the finer shades of his relationship with [Pg 10] those about him that his quality appears. His is a wonderful life. Countless hours are spent in investigation. Every nook and cranny, every tree and every stone, every dark and mysterious hole, every living creature in pasture, garden, or stable must be run to earth. ”