JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY
The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the
lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken
off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as
the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there
is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having
received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of
high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square
miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Being
sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little
sense of increased importance as she drove her father's little
one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December
weather, just before Christmas.
The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in
the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her
for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come
under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed
in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of
teachers.
Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an
agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk
with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion
whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.
"Don't you think father is lovely?" said she. "He is going to let me use
the runabout when I visit the schools."
"That will be good," said Haakon. "It will save you lots of time. I hope
you make the county pay for the gasoline."
"I haven't thought about that," said Jennie. "Everybody's been so nice to
me--I want to give as well as receive."
"Why," said Haakon, "you will yust begin to receive when your salary
begins in Yanuary."
"Oh, no!" said Jennie. "I've received much more than that now! You don't
know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my
old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls,
just as if I amounted to something."
"And you don't know how proud I feel," said Haakon, "to have in county
office a little girl I used to hold on my lap."
In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned
the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired
man on Colonel Woodruff's farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the
colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a
mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, and
possessed of that aptitude for local politics which makes so good a
citizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fifty
to sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good party
man and conscious of being entitled to his voice in party matters. This
seemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.
"Yennie," said he, "this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up."
"Lined up! What do you mean?"
"The way he is doing in the school," said Haakon, "is all wrong. If you
can't line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybody
has his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble with
him, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for a
second term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention without
your home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, every
piece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him up
and have him do right."
"But he is so funny," said Jennie.
"He likes you," said Haakon. "You can line him up."
Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarrassment, got out for the
purpose of cranking her machine.
"But if I can not line him up?" said she.
"I tank," said Haakon, "if you can't line him up, you will have a chance
to rewoke his certificate when you take office."
So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of
the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of
it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson's suggestion as to
"lining up" Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a good
deal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentment
at Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent the
necessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. The
idea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning of
the old and tried school methods under which both he and she had been
educated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored
"more practical education," and Jim's farm arithmetic, farm physiology,
farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed analysis, corn clubs
and the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the
next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact that
they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her
official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionary
and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth
always comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.
"Father," said she that night, "let's have a little Christmas party."
"All right," said the colonel. "Whom shall we invite?"
"Don't laugh," said she. "I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and
nobody else."
"All right," reiterated the colonel. "But why?"
"Oh," said Jennie, "I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of
his foolishness."
"You want to line him up, do you?" said the colonel. "Well, that's good
politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim."
"Rather unlikely," said Jennie.
"I don't know about that," said the colonel, smiling. "I begin to think
that Jim's a Brown Mouse. I've told you about the Brown Mouse, haven't
I?"
"Yes," said Jennie. "You've told me. But Professor Darbishire's brown mice
were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to
emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn't prove that the
Brown Mouse is any good."
"Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "And he founded the
greatest breed of horses in the world."
"You say that," said Jennie, "because you're a lover of the Morgan
horse."
"Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "So was George
Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he
changes things in a little way or a big way."
"For the better, always?" asked Jennie.
"No," said the colonel. "The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed
savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian
segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You
may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas,
by all means."
In due time Jennie's invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an
explosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling--quite
upsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait for
social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as
quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period,
she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings,
scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of
all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by
the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At
such times she sat at the family table and participated in the
neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other
female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and
always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited
guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school
could give him in the way of education, found his first job at "making a
hand," Mrs. Irwin, at her son's urgent request, ceased going out to work
for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never
succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a
single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.
"I can't go, James," said she; "I can't possibly go."
"Oh, yes, you can! Why not?" said Jim. "Why not?"
"You know I don't go anywhere," urged Mrs. Irwin.
"That's no reason," said her son.
"I haven't a thing to wear," said Mrs. Irwin.
"Nothing to wear!"
I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim
Irwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty,
and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his
mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure--but his
mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the
house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which
made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues,
neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made.
Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the
rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned
back--but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought
further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder
where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his
mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garments
in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who
lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companionship with Carlyle,
Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H.
Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the
experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are
derived in a transcendental manner from _Sartor Resartus_ and the
agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and
Feeding.
"Why, mother," said he, "I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the
Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in
the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!"
* * * * *
Was a woman ever quite without a costume?
Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From
the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress--a dress which
Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the
combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed
out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body,
once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart--under the arms,
and at some of the seams--and she handled it as one deals with something
very precious.
"I never thought I'd wear it again," said she, "but once. I've been saving
it for my last dress. But I guess it won't hurt to wear it once for the
benefit of the living."
Jim kissed his mother--a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by
the established custom between them.
"Don't think of that, mother," said he, "for years and years yet!"