CHAPTER VIII
GOOD food, and plenty of it, was required to maintain the talents for leisure, racing, and Websterian grandeur that distinguished the men of Griggsby. As a rule, the women, therefore, were overworked. Men who could not afford the grandeur or the sport indulged in dreams of it, and surrendered their lives to inelegant leisure. Some left their farms and moved into the village to make Dan'l Websters of their sons. Some talked of going West, where the opportunities were better. You could hear men in blue denim dreaming of wealth on the pavements and cracker barrels of Griggsby, while their wives battled with poverty at home.
Wifehood was still a form of bondage, as it was bound to be among a people who for generations had spent every Sabbath and the beginning and the end of every other day with Abraham and his descendants. Their ideals and their duties were from three to four thousand years apart—so far apart that they seldom got acquainted with one another. Among the highest of their ideals was Ruth, of the country of Moab. Did she not touch her face to the ground to find favor with the man she loved? Did she not glean in the fields till even, and thresh out her bundles, and then lie down at the feet of Boaz?
In love and fear the wives of the Yankees were always gleaning. They found a certain joy in trouble. Sorrow was a form of dissipation to many, disappointment a welcome means of grace, and weariness a comforting sign of duty done. Their fears were an ever-present trouble in time of need. They were three—idleness, God, and the poorhouse. Whatever the men might do or fail to do in Griggsby, it was the part of the women to work and save. They squandered to save; squandered their abundant strength to save the earnings of the family, the souls of husbands, sons, and daughters, the lives of the sick. If ever they thought of themselves it was in secret. Their hands were never idle.
The Yankee was often an orator to his own wife at least, and had convinced his little audience of one of two things, either that he had achieved greatness or was soon to be crowned. The lures of politics, invention, horsemanship, speculation, religion, and even poesy, led their victims from the ax and the plow. In certain homes you found soft-handed, horny-hearted tyrants of vast hope and good nature, and one or more slaves in calico. In my humble opinion, these willing slaves suffered from injustice more profound than did their dark-skinned sisters of the South.
You might see a judge or a statesman strutting in purple and fine linen, or exchanging compliments in noble rhetoric at a mahogany bar, while his aproned wife, with bare arms, was hard at work in the kitchen, trying to save the expense of a second hired girl. And you would find her immensely proud of her rhetorical peacock. His drinking and his maudlin conduct were often excused as the sad but inevitable accessories of Websterian genius.
But the Websterian impulse had begun to show itself in a new generation of women. It flowered in resounding rhetoric.
Now and then Florence Dunbar called at the home of the Smeads, and had learned to enjoy the jests of Dan'l, and especially his talk about social conditions in Griggsby. It was there that she got the notion of buying the Corporal and hiring Smead to help her reform the place.
One evening a number of my schoolmates were asked to meet the daughters of Smead, who had attended the normal school before going out to teach.
“Ruth, won't you get up and give us a piece?” Mrs. Smead asked one of her daughters.
“Mince, apple, or pumpkin, mother?” Dan'l W. inquired, playfully.
“Oh, stop your joking!” said Mrs. Smead.
The young lady stepped to the middle of the floor, after the fashion of Charlotte Cushman in the sleep-walking scene of “Lady Macbeth.” She gave us Warren's “Address,” trilling her (r's) and pronouncing “my” like “me.”
“There's the makin' of another D. W.,” said Smead, soberly.
Ruth did not get the point, and he went on. “She makes the boys and girls roar like cottage organs up there at the red school-house. They know how to work every stop in the organ, too—patriotic defiance, king hatred, sorrow, despair, torpid liver, pious rant. They need two more stops on the organ, humor and sanity.”
Betsey, the younger sister of Ruth, would not speak “a piece,” and I was glad of it. She sat by me and modestly told of her work, and now and then gave me a look out of her lovely blue eyes that would have moved the heart of a stone. What a mouth and face she had, what a fair, full, soft crown of hair! What a slim, inviting waist! And I liked her; that is the most I can say of it. Soc Potter, another schoolmate of those days, was said to be in love with her and to have the inside track.
Two other young ladies possessed by the demon of elocution shook out a few faded rags of literature with noble gestures and high-flavored tones. Yet these ladies of Griggsby were content with the intoxication of whirling words, while their husbands, sons, and brothers indulged in feelings of grandeur not so easily supported. But I do not wish you to forget that the women were always busy. If it had not been for them Griggsby would long ago have perished of dignity and indolence, or of that trouble which the Germans call katzenjammer.
To sum up, the women stood for industry, the men sat down for it; the women worked for decency, and every man recommended it to his neighbor. But the women had no voice in the government of the town.
A year had passed since Ralph's departure. For months no word from him had come to me, or to Florence, as she informed me.
“I'm very sorry,” I said, as we were walking together..
“I'm afraid I'm not,” she surprised me by saying.
I turned and looked into her eyes.
“For a long time I've been trying to make a hero of Ralph, but it's hard work,” she went on; “I fear it's impossible.”
“Why?”
“He doesn't help me a bit; he doesn't give me any material to work with.”
There was a moment of silence, in which the girl seemed to be trying to hold her poise. Then she added.
“Either he doesn't care or he is very easily fooled.”
I said nothing, but I heartily agreed with her.
Congress had adjourned, and the Colonel had returned to his native haunts with all his Websterian accessories. There were moral weather prophets in Griggsby who used to say, when the Colonel came back, that they could tell whether it was going to be a wet or a dry summer by the color of his nose and the set of his high hat. “Wet” was now the general verdict as he strode down the main street swinging his gold-headed cane.
On a lovely May day I tramped off into the country to attend Betsey Smead's last day of school and to walk home with her. The latter was the main part of it. She was glad to see me, and I enjoyed the children, and the songs of the birds in the maples of the old schoolyard.
In the middle of the afternoon a stern-faced old man with a hickory cane in his hand entered the schoolhouse, and Betsey hurried to meet and kiss him. Then she helped him to a seat at the teacher's desk. He was stoutly built, and wore a high collar, a black stock, and a suit of faded brown. There was a fringe of iron-gray hair above his ears, with tufts of the same color in front of them. The rest of his rugged, deep-lined face was as bare as the top of his head. His stem, gray eyes quizzically regarded the girl and the pupils.
“Describe the course of the Connecticut River,” he demanded of a member of the geography class.
To my joy, the frightened girl answered correctly.
“Very well, very well,” said he, loudly, as though it were a matter of small credit, after all.
A member of the first class in arithmetic was not so fortunate. To him he put a problem.
“Go to the blackboard,” the old gentleman commanded. “A man had three sons—put down three, if you please.
“To A he willed half his property, to B a quarter, and to C a sixth. Now, his property consisted of eleven sheep. The sons wished to divide the sheep without killing any, so they consulted a neighbor. The neighbor came with one of his own sheep and put it in with the eleven, making twelve in all. Then he gave one-half to A, making six; one-quarter to B, making three; one-sixth to C, making two—a total of eleven—and drove back his own sheep. Now, tell me, young man, what is the matter with that problem—tell me at once, sir.”
The boy trembled, looked stupidly at the blackboard, and gave up.
“Huh! that will do,” snapped the old gentleman.
Here was the grand, stentorian method applied to geography and mathematics.
At last school was dismissed. The tears of the children as they parted with Betsey seemed to please the old gentleman. His face softened a little.
“Ah, you'll make a good mother, Betsey,” he said, rather snappishly, as he came down from his seat, drawing his breath at the proper places of punctuation and touching his right leg as though he had a pain in it. “Do ye know how to work, eh?”
“I've always had to work,” said Betsey.
“That's good, that's good!” the old man exclaimed. “Your grandmother was a good woman to work.”
“Grandfather, this is Mr. Havelock,” said Betsey, as she presented me.
“How d' do?” snapped the old gentleman, looking sharply into my face. Then he turned to Betsey and said: “Don't be in a hurry to get married. There are plenty of fish in the sea, girl—plenty of fish. Huh! Tell your father that I am very much pleased with the last news of him—very much pleased; but I shall not trust him again—never, nor any of them except you.”
A man was waiting for him in a buggy outside the door. I withdrew a little, and waited while Betsey spoke with the old gentleman. The girl joined me as her grandfather drove away, and together we walked down the hills to Griggsby, that lovely afternoon of the early summer. We talked of many things, and always when I have thought of that hour I have heard the hum of new life in ponds and marshes and seen the light of a day's end glowing on windows, woods, and hills, and felt the joy of youth again.
“You are a friend of Florence Dunbar,” said Betsey, as we were crossing a field. “She has told me lots about you.”
“I fear that I'm not much of a success either as a subject or a predicate,” I said.
“She thinks you are a great hero, and there are others who think it, too.”
I blushed and stumbled a little in trying to say:
“Well—it—it isn't my fault. I've—I've done my best to—to keep her from making any mistake.”
“We've been hoping that you and she would make a match,” the little school teacher went on.
“It's—it's impossible,” I said, bitterly.
“Impossible? Why?”
“Well, she—she feels so horribly grateful to me that—that if I asked her to be my wife, I—I suppose she would think it her duty to say yes.”
Betsey laughed, and we walked along in silence for half a minute. Then she stopped, and her glowing eyes looked into mine as she said, very soberly:
“Havelock, you're a strange boy. I don't want to spoil you, but I think—well, I won't say what I think.”
So I never knew what she thought, but I well remember there were tears in her eyes and mine as we walked in silence. She was the first to speak.
“If Florence said yes, it would be because she loves you,” said Betsey.
“But you do not know all that I know,” was my answer.
“I want to be decently modest, but I know some things that you do not,” she declared.
Then, as if she dared go no further in that direction, she timidly veered about.
“I believe you are acquainted with Socrates Potter?”
“Yes, and I like him. He can say such funny things.”
“Sometimes I fear that he hasn't a serious thought in his head.”
“Oh yes! He has at least one,” I said.
“Well, I should like to know what it is.”
“His thought of you.”
She blushed and looked away, and I could see that she was in quite a flutter of excitement.
Oh, what a day was that, and—we were in its last moments!
We were nearing the village, and had begun to meet people, and, while we had a little distance to go, our serious talk went no further.