In Our Town

by William Allen White

The only person in town who knows all of our kinology—and most of that in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study—is "Aunt" Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has spread from them to the rest of the population.

She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history, and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married, and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of '60.

Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife—as she called it—and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled "Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out, and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.

Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington. Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front room and reads the book-reviews in the Delineator, thinks that she is cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's turkey, which was not to their discredit—everyone was poor in those days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it, until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as 'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say: 'Now why do you suppose papa enjoys it?—We just can't get him to give it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't say anything against her for the world."

Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of bacon—streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down—it is this blessed place. Crowds?—why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds. The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't dance in the same set."

Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:

"Oh, child, you needn't look at me—I did both; it depended on who was looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke. "Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games. It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."

In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it, they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not heard. Aunt Martha continued:

"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots—either go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made up along church lines—except we poor Methodists and Baptists—we have to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going after us."

Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on: "Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick houses, it's all up with them—they are old married folks, and the next step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies in the society of this town."