over a little green-house she was having built back of the kitchen,
so that she might have fresh green vegetables the year around. It was
very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the lack of workmen, the
scarcity of bricks, and the high price of glass. But Octavie was sure
she could manage it.
And so am I. Octavie can always manage anything she tries for.
OLD MAN WARNER
I must warn you at the outset that unless you or some of your folks
came from Vermont, it is hardly worth your while to read about Old Man
Warner. You will not be able to see anything in his story except, as we
say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” about nothing. Well, I don’t claim
much dramatic action for the story of old man Warner, but I am setting
it down on the chance that it may fall into the hands of some one
brought up on Vermont stories as I was. I know that for him there will
be something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of Vermont, something
we feel and cannot express, as we feel the incommunicable aura of a
personality.
The old man has been a weight on the collective mind of our town ever
since I was a little girl, and that is a long time ago. He was an old
man even then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen planned
the year’s town budget they had this worry about Old Man Warner, and
what to do with him. It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerous
character, or anything but strictly honest and law-abiding. But he had
his own way of bothering his fellow citizens.
In his young days he had inherited a farm from his father, back up in
Arnold Hollow, where at that time, about 1850, there was a cozy little
settlement of five or six farms with big families. He settled there,
cultivated the farm, married, and brought up a family of three sons.
When the Civil War came, he volunteered together with his oldest boy,
and went off to fight in the second year of the war. He came back alone
in 1864, the son having fallen in the Battle of the Wilderness. And he
went back up to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, although
the rest of his world broke up and rearranged itself in a different
pattern, mostly centering about the new railroad track in the main
valley.
Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hollow settlement to go on
cultivating their steep, rocky farms. The younger ones set off for the
West, the two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their father and
mother stayed, the man hardly ever leaving the farm now even to go to
town. His wife said once he seemed to feel as though he never could
get caught up on the years he had missed during the war. She said he
always had thought the world of his own home.
The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the usual ups and downs
of pioneer farmers, and by 1898, when their mother died, leaving
their father alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight and
forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which to invite him to pass his
old age.
Everybody in our town began to lay plans about what they would buy at
the auction, when Old Man Warner would sell off his things, as the
other Arnold Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason or
another, the Warners were the only people left up there. The Selectmen
planned to cut out the road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy
little sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on the main valley
thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner wrote his sons and told the Selectmen
that he saw no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a strange
place and be a burden to his children, with whom, having seen them at
the rarest intervals during the last thirty years, he did not feel very
well acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. Why should he
leave it? It was pretty late in the day for him to get used to western
ways. He’d just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to be a bother
to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be!
There were a good many protests all round, but of course the Selectmen
had not the faintest authority over him, and as quite probably his sons
were at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very grudgingly
voted the money to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, but consoled itself
by saying freely that the old cuss never had been so very bright and
was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was trying to do, and
would soon get tired of living alone and “doing for himself.”
That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who were then vigorous and
middle-aged, grew old, decrepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were
learning their letters then, grew up, married, had children, and became
Selectmen in their turn. Old Man Warner’s sons grew old and died, and
the names of most of his grand-children, scattered all over the West,
were unknown to us. And still the old man lived alone in his home and
“did for himself.”
Every spring, when road work began, the Selectmen groaned over having
to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their
best to persuade the old man to come down to a settlement where he
could be taken care of. Our town is very poor, and taxes are a heavy
item in our calculations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools
and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are forced to spend on
tramps, paupers, or the indigent sick. Selectmen in whose régime town
expenses were high, are not only never reëlected to town office, but
their name is a by-word and a reproach for years afterwards. We elect
them, among other things, to see to it that town expenses are not high,
and to lay their plans accordingly.
Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsibility, tried to lay
their plans accordingly in regard to Old Man Warner, and ran their
heads into a stone wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew
exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head would get a stroke of
paralysis, or palsy, or softening of the brain, or something, and the
town Treasury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical service,
maybe an operation at a hospital, and after that, somebody paid to
take care of him. If they could only ship him off to his family! One
of the granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept up a tenuous
connection with the old man, and answered, after long intervals,
anxious communications from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only they
could get him down out of there in the winter, so they would not be
saddled with the perpetual worry about what was happening to him, with
the perpetual need to break out the snow in the road and go up there to
see that he was all right.
But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why
he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his
own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered
mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a
while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked
the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in
Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and
he didn’t owe any that he knew of.
That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for what he bought in his
semi-yearly trips to the village to “do trading,” as our phrase goes.
He bought very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a bag
apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, and flour, some
raisins, and pepper. And once or twice during the long period of his
hermit life, an overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he brought
down from his farm was more than enough to pay for such purchases, for
he continued to cultivate his land, less and less of it, of course,
each year, but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig and
hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes and onions. He salted
down and smoked a hog every fall and ate his hens when they got too old
to lay.
And, of course, as long as he was actually economically independent,
the town, groaning with apprehension over the danger to its treasury
though it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old codger. And
yet, of course, his economic independence couldn’t last! From one day
to the next, something was bound to happen to him, something that would
cost the town money.
Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the
concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental
glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps
this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road
or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing;
and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the
tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something.
Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world.
All during my childhood and youth he was a legendary figure of “sot”
obstinacy and queerness. We children used to be sent up once in a
while, to take our turn in seeing that the old man was all right. It
was an expedition like no other. You turned off the main road and
went up the steep, stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade
of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your blown horse stopped
to rest, you saw before you the grassy lane leading across the little
upland plateau where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The older
people said they could almost hear faint echoes of whetting scythes,
and barking dogs, and cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the
old days. But for us children there was nothing but a breathlessly
hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, oppressively silent and spooky,
with a few eyeless old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and
gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as your horse could
gallop, and clattered into the thicket of shivering white birches which
grew close to the road like a screen; and then--there was no sensation
in my childhood quite like the coming out into the ordered, inhabited,
humanized little clearing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. There
were portly hens crooning around on the close-cropped grass, and a pig
grunting sociably from his pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in
the sun tilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, and
Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and stooped, in his faded,
clean overalls, emerging from the barn-door to peer at you out of his
bright old eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a long
ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off your horse, can’t ye? I’ve
got a new calf in here.” Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in
the sun on the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the weekly
edition of the _New York Tribune_. He drove two miles every Saturday
afternoon, down to his R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this.
You heard so much talk about him down in the valley, so much fussing
and stewing about his being so “sot,” and so queer, that it always
surprised you when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody else.
You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in his clean, well-scrubbed
kitchen, and played with the latest kitten, and then you said good-by
for that time, and got on your horse and went back through the birch
thicket into the ghostly decay of the abandoned farms, back down the
long, stony road to the valley where everybody was so cross with the
unreasonable old man for causing them so much worry.
“How _could_ he expect to go along like that, when other old folks, so
much younger than he, gave up and acted like other people, and settled
down where you could take care of them! The house might burn down over
his head, and he with it; or he might fall and break his hip and be
there for days, yelling and fainting away till somebody happened to go
by; or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody to send for help.”
All these frightening possibilities and many others had been repeatedly
presented to the old man himself with the elaborations and detail which
came from heart-felt alarm about him. But he continued to say mildly
that he guessed he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet.
“A _while_!” He was ninety years old.
And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; and we were surer and
surer he would “come on the town,” before each fiscal year was over.
At the beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in a body to
try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened old man, now only half his
former size, to go down to the valley. He remarked that he “guessed
there wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he had to their
fathers. He was so old, that he could no longer straighten up as he
said it, for his back was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for
lack of teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good deal as he
pronounced his formula. But his meaning was as clear as it had been
thirty years ago. They came sulkily away without him, knowing that they
would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, because the cussed
old crab had got the best of them, again.
Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to a lumber-job on
Hemlock Mountain, by way of the Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming
out of the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened
it and stepped in. There lay Old Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor
in front of his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old body
was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mittens, and in one hand was
his sharp, well-ground ax. One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick
of wood lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently the old man
had stepped to the fire to put in a stick of wood before he went out to
split some more, and had been stricken instantly, before he could move
a step. His cold, white old face was composed and quiet, just as it had
always been in life.
The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and hens and turned back to
the valley with the news, driving the old man’s cow and horse in front
of them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old Man Warner had
died, all alone, in his own kitchen.
Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up about it--! We turned
out and gave him one of the best funerals the town ever saw. And we
put up a good marble tombstone that told all about how he had lived.
We found we were proud of him, as proud as could be, the darned old
bull-dog, who had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag
now about his single-handed victory over old age and loneliness, and
we keep talking about him to the children, just as we brag about our
grandfather’s victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children
about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old Man Warner has become
history. We take as much satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as
though he had been our own grandfather, and we spare our listeners no
detail of his story: “... And there he stuck year after year, with the
whole town plaguing at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and
chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the house just as decent,
and never got queer and frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like
anybody, as nice an old man as ever you saw--all alone, all stark
alone--beholden to nobody--asking no odds of anybody--yes, sir, and
died with his boots on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could
have et off of, ’twas so clean.”
THE IDEAS OF M. BRODARD
During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de
Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not
that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we
were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons
are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be
in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our
school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners,
carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old
man, light and dry as a cork.
His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was
heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what
he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were
obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big
salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining
desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one,
two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to
the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend,
recover, glide,”--here we saluted the Sous-Directrice--“advance again”
(I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole
business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour),
“one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my
attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go
back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.
That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on
either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance
and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of
the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a
correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.
The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had
engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor
himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of
his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The
insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid
of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as
we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant
immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the
day.
One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in
church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent
smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he
would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little
girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied,
not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely--quietly--with
dignity.”
I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled
terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to
be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but
quiet--dignified--” I would never have lived through it if I had not
been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.
Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage
and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the
eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators,
“graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious,
entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly
the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary
sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all
unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose
for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our
High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte,
applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?
Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the
class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all
the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of
Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they
were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an
impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother,
a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school
at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome
trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must
have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint
instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any
pretensions to wealth or social standing--they said very little of any
sort about their home life.
Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once
I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was--fourteen at
the time--it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer,
that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because
society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things
lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and
so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a
small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother
had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility,
their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping
red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of
France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in
the region.
As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen
years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called
ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most
of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just
what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that
every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social
position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that
a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people
would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that
women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of
their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions
found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of
his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me.
I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience
as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University,
that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his
_and_ her own living--everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly
as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him
in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on
the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about
America in his furiously convinced style.
Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the
bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an
adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the
musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes
and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashing
look of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along.
Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting
to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure
of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation.
And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into
the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the
sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant
at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily
within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a
tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his
black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive
furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him
straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This
last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always
close to the surface with him--the laugh that was as characteristic a
part of him as the shape of his nose.