“The trouble is,” he said, “that we organize for political parties, for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don’t organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight of numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club. It would be for the town, not for a party.”
He carried out his idea, too, and the Bentford Town Club was the result. It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hitherto scattered and ineffectual minority.
It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I remarked one day that the town didn’t get more than 60 cents’ worth of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: “Well, if we didn’t pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or to break out the snowdrifts in winter, we’d have to pay for their keep in some other way. They would be ’on the town.’”
“On the town!” The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent balls, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece, past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn, the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a pleasant land, be “on the town?” Why should some of us own acres upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once stood in her ancestor’s name. Why had the acres slipped away in the intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities–to make New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle with fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till something perilously close to degeneracy resulted.
“On the town!” The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers, all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, all independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves “poor worms” on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century with a new problem on our hands.
And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when I see the road work being done by “town labour,” I think of what that means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which floats in the blue above our dwelling.
Chapter XXV
HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS
But this story is, after all, an idyl, and the idyl is drawing to its close. Even as the Old Three Decker carried tired people to the Islands of the Blest, my little tale can only end with “and they lived happy ever after.” Into the sweet monotony of such happy years what reader wants to follow? The reader sees his fellow passengers, the characters, disembark, waves them good-bye–and turns to sail for other isles! So please consider that the hawsers are being loosed, the farewells being spoken.
That second summer at Twin Fires, of course, showed us many things yet to be done. Neither Rome nor the humblest garden was ever built in a day. Our ramblers did their duty well, but the grape arbour and the pergola would not be covered properly in a season. There were holes in the flower beds to be filled by annuals, and mistakes made in succession, so that July found us with many patches destitute of any bloom. Out in the vegetable area there were first cutworms and then drought and potato blight to be contended with. In our ignorance we neglected to watch the hollyhocks for red rust till suddenly whole plants began to die, and we had to spray madly with Bordeaux and pull off a great heap of infected leaves, to save any blooms at all. There were clearings to be made in the pines for ferny spots, and constant work to be done about the pool to keep the wild bushes from coming back. There were chickens to be looked after now, also, and new responsibilities in the village for both of us. We had neither attempted nor desired to avoid our full share of civic work. We lived a busy life, with not an hour in the day idle, and few hours in the evening. We lived so full a life, indeed, that it was only by preserving an absolute routine for my own bread-winning labours, from nine a.m. till one, that I was able to resist the siren call of farm and garden, and get my daily stint accomplished.