But he had read some scareful talk from high quarters about Race Suicide. Some men do git real wrought up about it and want everybody to have all the children they can, jest as fast as they can, though wimmen don’t all feel so.
Aunt Hetty Sidman said, “If men had to born ’em and nuss ’em themselves, she didn’t spoze they would be so enthusiastick about it after they had had a few, ‘specially if they done their own housework themselves,” and Aunt Hetty said that some of the men who wuz exhortin’ wimmen to have big families, had better spend some of their strength and wind in tryin’ to make this world a safer place for children to be born into.
She said they’d be better off in Nonentity than here in this world with saloons on every corner, and war-dogs howlin’ at ’em.
I don’t know exactly what she meant by Nonentity, but guess she meant the world we all stay in, before we are born into this one.
Aunt Hetty has lost five boys, two by battle and three by licensed saloons, that makes her talk real bitter, but to resoom. I told Josiah that men needn’t worry about Race Suicide, for you might as well try to stop a hen from makin’ a nest, as to stop wimmen from wantin’ a baby to love and hold on her heart. But sez I, “Folks ort to be moderate and mejum in babies as well as in everything else.”
But Drusilly’s husband wanted twelve boys he said, to be law-abidin’ citizens as their Pa wuz, and a protection to the Govermunt, and to be ready to man the new warships, if a war broke out. But her babies wuz real pretty and cunning, and she wuz so weak-minded she couldn’t enjoy the thought that if our male statesmen got to scrappin’ with some other nation’s male law-makers and made another war, of havin’ her grown-up babies face the cannons. I spoze it wuz when she wuz so awful tired she felt so.
You see she had to do every mite of her housework, and milk cows, and make butter and cheese, and cook and wash and scour, and take all the care of the children day and night in sickness and health, and make their clothes and keep ’em clean. And when there wuz so many of ’em and she enjoyin’ real poor health, I spoze she sometimes thought more of her own achin’ back than she did of the good of the Govermunt—and she would git kinder discouraged sometimes and be cross to him. And knowin’ his own motives wuz so high and loyal, he felt that he ort to whip her, so he did.
And what shows that Drusilly wuzn’t so bad after all and did have her good streaks and a deep reverence for the law is, that she stood his whippin’s first-rate, and never whipped him. Now she wuz fur bigger than he wuz, weighed eighty pounds the most, and might have whipped him if the law had been such. But they wuz both law-abidin’ and wanted to keep every preamble, so she stood it to be whipped, and never once whipped him in all the seventeen years they lived together. She died when her twelfth child wuz born. There wuz jest ten months difference between that and the one next older. And they said she often spoke out in her last sickness, and said, “Thank fortune, I’ve always kep’ the law!” And they said the same thought wuz a great comfort to him in his last moments. He died about a year after she did, leavin’ his second wife with twins and a good property.
Then there wuz Abagail Pester. She married a sort of a high-headed man, though one that paid his debts, wuz truthful, good lookin’, and played well on the fiddle. Why, it seemed as if he had almost every qualification for makin’ a woman happy, only he had this one little eccentricity, he would lock up Abagail’s clothes every time he got mad at her.
Of course the law give her clothes to him, and knowin’ that it wuz the law in the state where they lived, she wouldn’t have complained only when they had company. But it wuz mortifyin’, nobody could dispute it, to have company come and have nothin’ to put on. Several times she had to withdraw into the woodhouse, and stay most all day there shiverin’, and under the suller stairs and round in clothes presses. But he boasted in prayer meetin’s and on boxes before grocery stores that he wuz a law-abidin’ citizen, and he wuz. Eben Flanders wouldn’t lie for anybody.