My Prize Beet
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I had been seven years old for so long that I alluded to myself
habitually as "almost eight." We had our governess now, Miss Davidson, a
handsome, amiable, and somewhat sentimental Bostonian recommended by a
Richmond friend of my father. Four other girls studied with us. Two of
them, Paulina and Sarah Hobson, were our second cousins. They stayed at
our house from Monday morning until Friday evening, going home for
Sunday, unless the weather were bad. Madeline and Rosa Pemberton were
day scholars, the Pemberton plantation adjoining ours.
I was the youngest of the six, and while I fancy that I was rather a
favorite with Miss Davidson, I endured much from the girls on account of
my inferiority in age, as well as because of my "old-fashioned,
conceited ways." That was one reason I spoke of being almost eight. I
was trying to grow up to what they complained of as "getting above"
myself.
The frank brutality of school children of both sexes, as contrasted with
the unselfish forbearance (or the show of it) and the suave courtesy of
well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of
ethics. The youngest boy or girl in class or college is the weakest wolf
in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's
natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's passion for more
material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was
ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehearsed conversations, with the
cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or
sub-human, had they come up to one tithe of my requirements.
In plain and very homely fact, they were four commonplace, provincial
girls of average natural intelligence, in age varying from twelve to
fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and
recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be
derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the
four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the
rattle of grasshoppers in the summer grass.
Mary 'Liza towered above them in scholastic attainments, although the
junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with
unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin
seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper
was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would
have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was
ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior
was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness
and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce what was
a surprise to me at the time. She never joined in the persecutions of me
that were the labor and the pastime of the other girls. It would have
been asking too much to expect her to champion me openly. I was
affectionately grateful to her for holding herself aloof when baiting me
was the amusement of the hour.
My mother had lamented that I took life so much to heart. It took itself
to my heart now, uninvited. I was headstrong and headlong, hot in love,
and honest in hatred; with a brain full of absurd fancies, all of which
were beloved by their author. I had browsed at will in my father's
library, poring by the hour over books twenty years too old for me, yet,
by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and assimilating much that
contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of
language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent
references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and
vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were
unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and
Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of
Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and Christiana and her
children.
Not one of the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's
scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and
inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was
talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They set themselves
systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done
deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young
and raw as I was, I was too wise to tell tales on them. By the time I
was four years old that lesson was rubbed into my consciousness by the
gruesome rhyme:--
"Tell-tale tit!
Your tongue shall be slit,
And every dog in our town
Shall have a little bit!"
This apparently tedious preamble yet leads by an air-line to the first
Agricultural Fair ever held at Powhatan Court House. The date was
October fifteenth, and all the gentlemen and ladies in the county were
entreated to send exhibits of plantation products and feminine
handiwork. Enthusiasm ran from homestead to homestead with the speed and
heat of a March fire in pine woods. Cattle, tobacco, grain, vegetables,
fruit, flowers, bedquilts, poultry, bees, knitting,
embroideries,--nothing was talked of but the finest specimens of these
that would be "in strong and beauteous order ranged," upon the important
day.
Madeline Pemberton had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her
mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the
third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork
stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a
dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a
linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing
and embroidery were taught by governesses then. Sarah Hobson had pieced
a crib quilt containing one thousand and twelve tiny squares. I was
supposed to be left out in the cold. I would not knit, and to sew I was
ashamed because I did it so badly. Nobody paid any attention to me when
comparing notes and queries touching the great show.
Yet I nursed an ambition of my own to which no one was privy except
Spotswoode, a gray-headed, and proverbially taciturn field-hand, without
whose knowledge and cooperation the purpose could not have been carried
out.
Wandering, one July afternoon, on the outskirts of a corn-field--the
same in which I once lost Musidora--I happened upon a "volunteer"
mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of a
mile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the
translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing
between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif,
then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it,
Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the
wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I
cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day
passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was
allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh
mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my
kind field-hand. He knew that it was to be sent to the Fair in the
fulness of time, and believed with me that "not another beet there could
hold a candle to it."
As the air thickened and heated with rumors of the prodigies to be
revealed on the fifteenth to the lasting honor of Old Powhatan, it was
harder and harder to keep what I knew to myself. I had purposed not to
reveal the secret until my father's wagons were in loading with other
mammoth esculents and his finest corn and tobacco. Then--so ran the
programme--I would march up, bearing my beet with me. It was to be dug
up and cleaned by Spotswoode on the evening of the fourteenth, and kept
safely in hiding for me. I could depend upon his literal obedience,
albeit he never had an original idea.
Temptation befell, and overcame me, on the afternoon of October
thirteenth, a date I was not likely, thenceforward, to forget. All six
of us girls were gathered in the porch, listening to, and relating,
stories of what this one had raised, and that one had made. Mr.
Pemberton had a seven-hundred-pound pig, and Mr. Hobson a rooster more
beautiful than a bird of Paradise. The syrup of Mrs. Hobson's preserves
was as clear as spring water, and Mrs. Pemberton's water melon-rind
sweetmeats had as good as taken the prize.
Paulina Hobson sat on the top step of the porch. She was very fair, and
her hair was nearly as white as her skin. She was fourteen years old,
and wore a grass-green lawn frock. Her eyes were of a paler green, she
had a nasty laugh, and her teeth were not good.
"Isn't it nice that all five of us are going to send something?" she
said complacently. "You know that nobody but exhibitors can go into the
tent for the first hour--from eleven to twelve--so's they can see
everything before the crowd gets in. Who'll you stay with, Miss Molly
Mumchance, when we all leave you?"
I had not spoken while the talk went on, for fear something might slip
out and betray me, prematurely, but I took fire at this.
"I'm going in, myself!" I snapped out.
"Oh, you are? What are you going to exhibit, may we ask?" with her nasty
laugh.
"The biggest beet in the world! It measures a yard around."
"Hoo! hoo! hoo!" squealed Paulina so loudly that my father, who was
coming in the gate with my mother, Miss Davidson, Uncle Carter, and Aunt
Eliza, said pleasantly:--
"What is the joke, young ladies? Mayn't we laugh, too?"
Madeline Pemberton answered. Miss Davidson had to reprove her every day
for forwardness.
"Why, Mr. Burwell,"--laughing with affected violence,--"Molly says she
is going to send some beets to the Fair that measure ever so many yards
around."
"I didn't!" cried I, in a passion. "You know that isn't true!"
My father moved toward me.
"What _did_ you say, daughter?"
I hung my head. If I told, where would be the surprise and the visioned
triumph?
"What did you say, Molly?" repeated my father, in quiet gravity.
"I said _one_ beet, and that it measured one yard," stammered I,
reluctantly.
"That was bad enough. When so many older people are trying to see who
can tell the biggest story, little girls ought to be especially
careful."
His eyes did not go to Madeline, but his emphasis did. The thought of
being classed with her lent me coherence and courage. I looked up.
"I have one beet, father, that is a yard 'round. I raised it myself. If
you don't believe me, you can ask Spotswoode."
"I don't ask my servants if my daughter is telling the truth. Where is
your beet?"
I pointed.
"Away over yonder--the other side of the corn-field."
Paulina and Rosa tittered, Madeline giggled,--then all three pretended
to smother the demonstration with their handkerchiefs and behind their
hands. Mary 'Liza looked scared and sorry. My father took hold of my
hand.
"Take me to see it!"
The others fell into Indian file behind us, as we marched outside of
the garden fence and past the Old Orchard where the rays of the sinking
sun shot horizontal shafts under the trees to our very feet, and so to
the corn-field. I did not glance behind to see who entered it after us,
but pushed right ahead between the stalks, the stiff blades switching my
cheeks. When we neared the "garden," I ran forward, flushed and
impatient, not to display my prize, but to clear myself by proving my
words. An envious, jagged blade slashed my forehead as I tore by. I did
not feel it at the moment, or for half an hour after it began to bleed.
For--_the beet was gone!_
The cleared space was there to show where something had been cultivated;
the bare earth was raked level. Not so much as the hole from which my
beet had been ravished remained in circumstantial evidence. The rest of
the party arrived while I stood transfixed, the picture of detected
guilt. To the rustle of the corn, and the shuffle of feet over the
furrows succeeded a horrible hush. Then, a chorus of mocking girlish
cackles, led by Paulina Hobson's discordant screech, smote the sunset
air and covered me with a pall of infamy. Paulina caught at the fence
for support as she laughed; Madeline bent double and reeled sideways.
I clutched my father's hand, drowning and suffocating in the waves of
despairing agony; I shook my tight fist at the insulting quartette.
"They--_they_--took it! It was here this morning. It was here just after
dinner to-day!"
"Be quiet, girls!" ordered my judge-advocate. "Molly! I want the exact
truth. If you accuse them, you must prove what you say. Things have gone
too far to stop here. Didn't you say that Spotswoode knew something
about the affair?"
"He knows all about it. He helped me, ever so many times, and he saw how
big it was," I ejaculated vehemently.
"We shall probably find him at the stables, feeding the horses."
Back we trudged by my air-line, well-worn but narrow. I fancy that my
father took note of my familiarity with the path, but he did not speak
of it. I marched in front of him, gloomy and desperate. Some of the
others talked low as they straggled along. The girls kept up a hissing
whispering, for which I hated them with my whole soul. I think that my
mother and Miss Davidson shed some furtive tears, for my case was black,
and they were tender-hearted.
Spotswoode was looking after his plough-horses, as my father had
conjectured. At his master's shout, he emerged from the stalls and
presented himself in the stable door. Ungainly, dirty, bare-footed, his
ragged wool hat on the back of his unkempt woolly poll, his jaw dropping
in idiotic amazement at sight of the party--he was a ludicrous figure in
the bath of late sunshine that brought out every uncomely item of the
picture. Preoccupied and distraught as I was, I saw how the dust from
the stable floor floated in golden clouds to the cobwebbed rafters, as
the sun struck past the man in the doorway and glorified the murky
interior.
I rushed through the yard, heedless of manure heaps, and young pigs and
calves scattered by my impetuous approach.
"Oh, Spotswoode!" in a voice that cracked and went to pieces as I ran,
"somebody has stolen my beet! You can tell father--"
A hot valve closed in my windpipe and shut out the rest.
Spotswoode's jaw hung more loosely; his eyes were utterly vacant.
"Ya-as, little Mistis!" he drawled, and slunk back into the stable.
"What do you mean, sir? Come back here, this minute!" called his master.
When he reappeared, he carried in both hands, extended, after the
similitude of a pre-historic monkey making a votive offering--something
dark-red and pot-bellied, and more immense than I had dreamed it could
look. A cluster of cropped leaves crowned it, a taper root, a foot
long, depended from the bottom.
"I done been dig it up fo' you an' wash it, dis ebenin', 'stid o'
termorrer," drawled my vindicator. "So's ter hab it all ready fur the
Fyar."
Mute and triumphant, I received it in a rapturous embrace, set it on a
bench by the stable door, and passed the hem of my muslin apron about
it. The ends just met.
"That's how I knew how big it was," I said simply. "Mother told me that
my apron was a yard wide. I measured it while it was in the ground."
The beet--and its history--went to the Fair, and a prize was awarded to
"_Miss Mary Hobson Burwell, For best specimen of Mangel Wurzel, raised
by Herself._"
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