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.