THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES

Chapter I
I BUY A FARM ON SIGHT

I was sitting at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes. I had sat at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes, for it seemed an interminable number of years–was it six or seven? I had no great love for it, certainly. Some men who go into teaching, and of course all men who become great teachers, do have a genuine love for their work. But I am afraid I was one of those unfortunates who take up teaching as a stop-gap, a means of livelihood while awaiting “wider opportunities.” These opportunities in my case were to be the authorship of an epoch-making novel, or a great drama, or some similar masterpiece. I had been accredited with “brilliant promise” in my undergraduate days, and the college had taken me into the English department upon graduation.

Well, that was seven years ago. I was still correcting daily themes.

It was a warm night in early April. I had a touch of spring fever, and wrote vicious, sarcastic comments on the poor undergraduate pages of unexpressiveness before me, as through my open windows drifted up from the Yard a snatch of song from some returning theatre party. Most of these themes were hopeless. Your average man has no sense of literature. Moreover, by the time he reaches college it is too late to teach him even common, idiomatic expressiveness. That ought to be done in the secondary schools–and isn’t. I toiled on. Near the bottom of the pile came the signature, James Robinson. I opened the sheet with relief. He was one of the few in the class with the real literary instinct–a lad from some nearby New England village who went home over Sunday and brought back unconscious records of his changing life there. I enjoyed the little drama, for I, too, had come from a suburban village, and knew the first bitter awakening to its narrowness.

I opened the theme, and this is what I read:

So Robinson had spring fever, too! How it makes us turn back home! I made some flattering comment or other on the paper (especially, I recall, starring the verb coot as good hen lore), and put it with the rest. Then I fell to dreaming. Home! I, John Upton, academic bachelor, had no home, no parents, no kith nor kin. I had my study lined with books, my little monastic bedroom behind it, my college position, and a shabby remnant of my old ambitions. The soft “coot, coot” of a hen picking up grain on the old barn floor! I closed my eyes in delicious memory–memory of my grandfather’s farm down in Essex County. The sweet call of the village church bell came back to me, the drone of the preacher, the smell of lilacs outside, the stamp of an impatient horse in the horse sheds where liniment for man and beast was advertised on tin posters!

“Why don’t I go back to it, and give up this grind?” I thought. Then, being an English instructor, I added learnedly, “and be a disciple of Rousseau!”

It was a warm April night, and I was foolish with spring fever. I began to play with the idea. I got up and opened my tin box, to investigate the visible paper tokens of my little fortune. There was, in all, about $30,000, the result of my legacy from my parents and my slender savings from my slender salary, for I had never had any extravagances except books and golf balls. I had heard of farms being bought for $1,500. That would still leave me more than $1,200 a year. Perhaps, with the freedom from this college grind, I could write some of those masterpieces at last–even a best seller! I grew as rosy with hope as an undergraduate. I looked at myself in the glass–not yet bald, face smooth, rather academic, shoulders good, thanks to daily rowing. Hands hard, too! I sought for a copy of the Transcript, and ran over the real estate ads. Here was a gentleman’s estate, with two butler’s pantries and a concrete garage–that would hardly do! No, I should have to consult somebody. Besides $1,200 a year would hardly be enough to run even a $1,500 farm on, not for a year or two, because I should have to hire help. I must find something practical to do to support myself. What? What could I do, except put sarcastic comments on the daily themes of helpless undergraduates? I went to bed with a very poor opinion of English instructors.

But God, as the hymn remarks, works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Waking with my flicker of resolution quite gone out, I met my chief in the English department who quite floored me by asking me if