HOW JIM WAS LINED UP
There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they
were a queer couple. They weren't like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of
a different pattern. To be sure, Jim's clothes were not especially
noteworthy, being just shiny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of
sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the
inability of a New York sweatshop to anticipate the prodigality of Nature
in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints
which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often
enjoyed Jim's presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes
were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their
clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of
the land. Jim's queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his
personality.
On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin's
queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca
looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a
curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white
and red and green--tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the
flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike's Peak. Jennie felt that it
must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs.
Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story--a story in which the
stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize
with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more
like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin
was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with
knowledge that her dress didn't fit, and with the difficulty of behaving
naturally--like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years'
term--that she took on a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the
idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie
had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date
costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old
lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a
hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and
other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so
have blotted out his record as her father's field-hand, he would have
seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course,
but the sort people look after--and follow.
"Come to dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired
girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the
other fixings of a Christmas dinner. "It's good enough, what there is of
it, and there's enough of it such as it is--but the dressing in the turkey
would be better for a little more sage!"
The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family
melted away in a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie.
The colonel, in stiff starched shirt, black tie and frock coat, carved
with much empressement, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of
the value of manner.
"I had bigger turkeys," said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, "but I thought
it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big
gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat."
"One of the hens would 'a' been plenty," replied Mrs. Irwin. "How much did
they weigh?"
"About fifteen pounds apiece," was the answer. "The gobbler would 'a'
weighed thirty, I guess. He's pure Mammoth Bronze."
"I wish," said Jim, "that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild
bronze turkeys from Mexico."
"Why?" asked the colonel.
"They're the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys," said Jim,
"and they're bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even.
They're a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our
common birds originated."
"Where do you learn all these things, Jim?" asked Mrs. Woodruff. "I
declare, I often tell Woodruff that it's as good as a lecture to have Jim
Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here,
Jim."
There came into Jim's eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause--and
the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more
plainly wherein his queerness lay.
"There's an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the
table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their
starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of
Mexico----"
"What's chaparral?" asked Jennie, as a diversion. "It's one of the words I
have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it--but after
all it's just a word, and nothing more."
"Ain't that the trouble with our education, Jim?" queried the colonel,
cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.
"They are not even living words," answered Jim, "unless we have clothed
them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. 'Chaparral'
to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of
inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts
and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can
be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard."
Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new
phase--and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the
conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim's
development was not so rapid, but Jennie's perception of it was. She began
to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical
notions seem so plausible--and who was clearly fired with some sort of
evangelistic fervor--had kissed her, once or twice, on bringing her home
from the spelling school.
"I think we lose so much time in school," Jim went on, "while the children
are eating their dinners."
"Well, Jim," said Mrs. Woodruff, "every one but you is down on the human
level. The poor kids have to eat!"
"But think how much good education there is wrapped up in the school
dinner--if we could only get it out."
Jennie grew grave. Here was this Brown Mouse actually introducing the
subject of the school--and he ought to suspect that she was planning to
line him up on this very thing--if he wasn't a perfect donkey as well as a
dreamer. And he was calmly wading into the subject as if she were the
ex-farm-hand country teacher, and he was the county superintendent-elect!
"Eating a dinner like this, mother," said the colonel gallantly, "is an
education in itself--and eating some others requires one; but just how
'larnin' is wrapped up in the school lunch is a new one on me, Jim."
"Well," said Jim, "in the first place the children ought to cook their
meals as a part of the school work. Prior to that they ought to buy the
materials. And prior to that they ought to keep the accounts of the school
kitchen. They'd like to do these things, and it would help prepare them
for life on an intelligent plane, while they prepared the meals."
"Isn't that looking rather far ahead?" asked the county
superintendent-elect.
"It's like a lot of other things we think far ahead," urged Jim. "The only
reason why they're far off is because we think them so. It's a
thought--and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever
be."
"I guess that's so--to a wild-eyed reformer," said the colonel. "But go
on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing."
"Thanks, I believe I will," said Jim. "And a little more of the cranberry
sauce. No more turkey, please."
"I'd like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner," said
Mrs. Woodruff.
"Why," said Jim, "you'd be there showing them how! They'd get credits in
their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner--and they'd
bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their
classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve.
The setting of the table would come in as a study--flowers, linen and all
that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!"
"I'd take on that class," said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson,
the maid, from somewhere below the salt. "The way I make my knife feed my
face would be a great help to the children."
"And when the food came on the table," Jim went on, with a smile at his
former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the
field conversation, "just think of the things we could study while eating
it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it--well, the
discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a
lecture. This breast-bone, now," said he, referring to the remains on his
plate. "That's physiology. The cranberry-sauce--that's botany, and
commerce, and soil management--do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry
must have an acid soil--which would kill alfalfa or clover?"
"Read something of it," said the colonel, "but it didn't interest me
much."
"And the difference between the types of fowl on the table--that's
breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut--that's geography. And
everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to
our lives by dollars and cents--and they're mathematics."
"We must have something more than dollars and cents in life," said Jennie.
"We must have culture."
"Culture," cried Jim, "is the ability to think in terms of life--isn't
it?"
"Like Jesse James," suggested the hired man, who was a careful student of
the life of that eminent bandit.
There was a storm of laughter at this sally amidst which Jennie wished she
had thought of something like that. Jim joined in the laughter at his own
expense, but was clearly suffering from argumentative shock.
"That's the best answer I've had on that point, Pete," he said, after the
disturbance had subsided. "But if the James boys and the Youngers had had
the sort of culture I'm for, they would have been successful stock men and
farmers, instead of train-robbers. Take Raymond Simms, for instance. He
had all the qualifications of a member of the James gang when he came
here. All he needed was a few exasperated associates of his own sort, and
a convenient railway with undefended trains running over it. But after a
few weeks of real 'culture' under a mighty poor teacher, he's developing
into the most enthusiastic farmer I know. That's real culture."
"It's snowing like everything," said Jennie, who faced the window.
"Don't cut your dinner short," said the colonel to Pete, "but I think
you'll find the cattle ready to come in out of the storm when you get good
and through."
"I think I'll let 'em in now," said Pete, by way of excusing himself. "I
expect to put in most of the day from now on getting ready to quit eating.
Save some of everything for me, Selma,--I'll be right back!"
"All right, Pete," said Selma.