AS the spring days lengthened there was forced upon Grace a suspicion,
which soon ripened into a conviction, that the West was very hot. She
had known hot days in the East; for is there in the desert of Sahara
any air hotter than that which overlies the treeless, paved streets,
walled in by high structures of brick, stone, and iron, of the city of
New York? But in New York the wind, on no matter how hot a day, is cool
and refreshing; at Claybanks and vicinity the wind was sometimes like
the back-draught of a furnace, and almost as wilting. To keep the wind
out of the house--not to give it every opportunity to enter, as had
been the summer custom in the East--became Grace's earnest endeavor,
but with little success. At times it seemed to her that the heat was
destroying her vitality; her husband, too, feared for her health
and insisted that she should go East to spend the summer; but Grace
insisted that she would rather shrivel and melt than go away from her
husband, so Philip appealed to Doctor Taggess, who said:--
"Quite womanly, and wifely, and also sensible, physiologically, for no
one can become climate-proof out here if he dodges any single season.
If your wife will follow my directions for a few months, she will be
able to endure next season's heat well enough to laugh at it. Indeed,
it might help her through the coming summer to make excuses to laugh at
it: she's lucky enough to know how to laugh at slight provocation."
But the dust! Grace could remember days when New York was dusty, and
any one who has encountered a cloud of city dust knows that it is
of a quality compared with which the dust of country roads is the
sublimation of purity. Nevertheless, the dust at Claybanks had some
eccentric methods of motion. For it to rise in a heavy, sullen cloud
whenever a wagon passed through a street was bad enough, especially if
the wind were in the direction of the house. Almost daily, however,
and many times a day, it was picked up by little whirlwinds that came
from no one knew where, and an inverted cone of dust, less than a foot
in diameter at the base, but rapidly increasing in width to the height
of fifty or more feet, would dash rapidly along a street, or across
one, picking up all sorts of small objects in its way--leaves, bits
of paper, sometimes even bark and chips. At first Grace thought these
whirlwinds quite picturesque, but when one of them dashed across her
garden, and broke against the side of the house, and deposited much of
itself through the open windows, the lover of the picturesque suddenly
began to extemporize window-nettings.
With the heat and the dust came a plague of insects and one of
reptiles. One day the white sugar on the table seemed strangely
iridescent with amber, which on investigation resolved itself into
myriads of tiny reddish yellow ants. Caleb, who was appealed to, placed
a cup of water under each table leg, which abated the plague, but the
cups did not "compose" with the table and the rug. Bugs of many kinds
visited the house, by way of the windows and doors, until excluded by
screens. At times the garden seemed fuller of toads than of plants, and
not long afterward Grace was frightened almost daily by snakes. That
the reptiles scurried away rapidly, apparently as frightened as she,
did not lessen her fear of them. She expressed her feelings to Doctor
Taggess, who said:--
"Don't let them worry you. They're really wonderfully retiring by
disposition. This country is alive with them, but in my thirty years of
experience I've never been called to a case of snake-bite."
"But, Doctor, isn't there any means of avoiding the torment of--snakes,
toads, bugs, and ants?"
"Only one, that I know of--'tis philosophy. Try to think of them as
illustrations of the marvellous fecundity of the great and glorious
West."
"How consoling!"
"I don't wonder you're sarcastic about it. Still, they'll disappear in
the course of time, as they have from the older states."
"But when?"
"Oh, when the country becomes thoroughly subdued and tilled."
"Again I must say, 'How consoling!'"
Besides the wind, and dust, and insects, and reptiles, there was the
sun, for Jethro Somerton had never planted a tree near his house.
Tree-roots had a way of weakening foundations, he said; besides,
trees would grow tall in the course of time, and perhaps attract the
lightning. Still more, trees shaded roofs, so the spring and autumn
rains remained in the shingles to cause dampness and decay, instead of
drying out quickly.
But her own house seemed cool by comparison with some which she entered
in the village and in the farming districts: houses such as most new
settlers in the West have put up with their own hands and as quickly as
possible; houses innocent of lath and plaster, and with only inch-thick
wooden walls, upon which the sun beat so fiercely that by midday the
inner surface of the wall almost blistered the hand that touched it.
Not to have been obliged to enter such houses would have spared Grace
much discomfort, but it was the hospitable custom of the country to
hail passers-by, in the season of open doors and windows, and Grace,
besides being bound by the penalties peculiar to general favorites
everywhere, was alive to the fear of being thought "stuck up" by any
one.
Quickly she uprooted many delicate, graceful vines which she had
planted to train against the sides of her own house, and replaced them
with seeds of more rampant varieties. For days she made a single room
of the house fairly endurable by keeping in it a large block of ice,
brought from the ice-house by Philip in mid-morning; but the season's
stock of the ice-house had not been estimated with a view to such
drafts, so for the sake of the "truck" in cold storage she felt obliged
to discontinue the practice. Wet linen sheets hung near the windows
and open doors afforded some relief; but when other sufferers heard of
them and learned their cost, and ejaculated "Goodness me!" or something
of similar meaning, Grace was compelled to feel aristocratic and
uncomfortable. She expressed to Caleb and to Doctor Taggess her pity
for sufferers by the heat, and asked whether nothing could be done in
alleviation.
"My dear woman, they don't suffer as much as you imagine," the Doctor
replied. "In the first place, they are accustomed to the climate, as
you are not; most of them were born in it. Another cooling fact is
that neither men nor women wear as much clothing in hot weather as you
Eastern people. They, or most of them, are always hard at work, and
therefore always perspiring, which is nature's method of keeping people
fairly comfortable in hot weather. I don't doubt that I suffer far more
as I drive about the county, doing no harder work than holding the
reins, than any farmer whom I see ploughing in the fields."
"I'm very glad to hear it, for their sakes, though not for your own.
But how about the sick, and the poor little babies?"
"Ah, this is a sad country for sick folks, and for weaklings of any
kind. Stifle in winter--roast in summer; that is about the usual way.
Imagine, if you can, how an honest physician feels when he's called to
cases of sickness in some houses that you've seen."
"Caleb," Grace said, "was it as hot in the South, during the war, as it
is out here?"
"No," said Caleb, promptly, "though the Eastern men complained a great
deal."
"What did the soldiers do when they became sick in hot weather?"
"They died, generally, unless they was shipped up North, or to some of
the big camps of hospitals, where they could get special attention."
"But until then were there no ways of shielding them from the heat of
the sun?"
"Oh, yes. If the camp hospital was a tent, it had a fly--an extra
thickness of canvas, stretched across it to shade the roof an' sides.
Then, if any woods was near by, and usually there was,--there's more
woodland in old Virginia than in this new state,--some forked sticks
an' poles an' leafy tree-boughs would be fetched in, an' fixed so that
the ground for eight or ten feet around would be shady."
"Do you remember just how it was done?"
"Do I? Well, I reckon I was on details at that sort o' work about as
often as anybody."
"Won't you do me a great favor? Hire a man and wagon to-morrow--or
to-day, if there's time--and go to some of our woodland near town, and
get some of the material, and put up such a shade on the south and west
sides of our house; that is, if you don't object."
"Object? 'Twould be great fun; make me feel like a boy again, I reckon.
But I ought to remind you that the thing won't look a bit pretty, two
or three days later, when the leaves begin to fade. Dead leaves an'
a white house don't 'compose,' as I heard you say one day to a woman
about two calicoes that was contrary to each other. Besides, 'tain't
necessary, for double-width sheetin', or two widths of it side by side,
an' right out of the store here, would make a better awnin', to say
nothin' o' the looks, an' you can afford it easy enough."
"Perhaps, but there are other people who can't, and I want to show off
a tree-bough awning to some who need contrivances like it."
"I--see," said Caleb, departing abruptly, while Doctor Taggess
exclaimed:--
"And here I've been practising in some of those bake-ovens of houses
for thirty years, and never thought of that very simple means of
relief! Good day, Mrs. Somerton; I'll go home and tell my wife what
I've heard, then I think I'll read some of the penitential Psalms and
some choice bits of Proverbs on the mental peculiarities of fools."
The arbor was completed by dark, and on the next day, and for a
fortnight afterward, almost every woman who entered the store was
invited to step into the garden and see how well, and yet cheaply,
the house was shaded from the sun. All were delighted, though some
warned the owner that the shade would kill her vines, whereupon Doctor
Taggess, who spent parts of several hours in studying the structure,
suggested that if the probable copyists were to set their posts and
frameworks securely, they might serve as support for quick-growing
hardy vines that might be "set" in the spring of the following year,
and clamber all over the skeleton roof before the hottest days came.
Thereupon Grace volunteered to write a lot of nursery men to learn what
vines, annual or perennial, grew most rapidly and cost least, and to
leave the replies in the store for general inspection.
"Doctor," Grace asked during one of the physician's visits of
inspection, "where did the settlers of this country come from, that
they never think of certain of their own necessities? Don't scold me,
please; I'm not going to abuse your darling West; besides, 'tis my
West as well as yours, for every interest I have is here. But Eastern
farmers and villagers plant shade trees and vines near their houses,
unless they can afford to build piazzas,--and perhaps in addition to
piazzas. They shade their village streets, too, and many of their
highways. Aren't such things the custom in other parts of the United
States?"
"They certainly are in my native state, which is Pennsylvania," the
Doctor replied, "and some of the handsomest villages and farm-houses
I've seen are in Ohio and Kentucky. But I imagine the work was done by
the second or third or fourth generation; I don't believe the original
settlers could find the time and strength for such effort. As to our
people, they came from a dozen or more states--East, West, and Middle,
with a few from the South. I honestly believe they're quite as good as
the average of settlers of any state, but I shouldn't wonder if you've
failed to comprehend at short acquaintance the settler or the farmer
class in general. In a new country one usually finds only people who've
been elbowed out of older ones, either by misfortune or bad management,
or through families having become too large to get a living out of
their old homesteads, and with no land near by that was within reach
of their pockets. There are as many causes in farming as in any other
business for men trying to make a start somewhere else, but a starter
in the farming line is always very poor. Almost any family you might
name in this county brought itself and all its goods and implements
in a single two-horse wagon. Your things, Caleb told me, filled the
greater part of a railway car. Quite a difference, eh?"
"Yet most of the things were ours, when we thought ourselves very poor."
"Just so. So you can't imagine the poverty of these people. They lived
in their wagons until they had some sort of roof over their heads;
a man who could spend a hundred dollars for lumber and nails and
window-sash passed for one of the well-to-do class. Some of them had no
money whatever; their nearest neighbors would help them put up a log
house, but afterward they had to work pretty hard to keep the wolf from
the door until they could grow something to eat and to sell. They had
hard times, of so many varieties, that now when they are sure of three
meals a day, some cows, pigs, and chickens, credit at a store, and a
crop in the ground, they think themselves well off, no matter how many
discomforts they may have to endure."
"But, Doctor, they're human; they have hearts and feelings."
"Yes, but they have more endurance than anything else. It has become
second nature to them; so some of them would long endure a pain or
discomfort rather than relieve it. Doubt it, if you like, but I am
speaking from a great mass of experience. I've heard much of the
endurance of the North American Indian, but the Indian is a baby to
these farmer-settlers. Endurance is in their every muscle, bone, and
nerve, and they pass it down to their children. Eastern babies would
scream unceasingly at maladies that some of our youngsters bear without
a whimper. Many of the Presidents of the United States were born of
just such stock; of course they were examples of the survival of the
fittest, for any who are weak in such a country must go to the wall in
a hurry, if they chance to escape the grave--and the graveyards are
appallingly full."
"And 'tis the women and children that fill them!" Grace said.
"Yes," assented the Doctor. "If I could have my way, no women and
children would be allowed in a new section until the men had made
decent, comfortable homes, with crops ready for harvest, all of which
shows what an impracticable old fool a man of experience may become."
"But a little work, by the men of some of these places, would make the
women and children so much more comfortable!"
"Yes, but the women and children don't think to ask it, and the men
don't notice the deficiency."
"But why shouldn't they? Many men elsewhere are perpetually contriving
to make their families more comfortable."
"Yes, but seldom unless the necessity of doing so is forced to
their attention in some way. Besides, to do so, they must have the
contriving, inventive faculty, which is one of the scarcest in human
nature!"
"Oh, Doctor! I've often heard that we Americans are the most inventive
people in the world."
"So we are, according to the Patent Office reports, though the patents
don't average one to a hundred people, and not more than one in ten of
them is worth developing. I am right in saying that invention--except,
perhaps, of lies--is among the rarest of human qualities. It requires
quick perception and a knack at construction, as well as no end of
adaptiveness and energy, all of which are themselves rare qualities.
Countless generations ached seven or eight hours of every twenty-four,
until a few years ago, when some one invented springy bottoms for beds.
Countless generations of men had to cut four times as much wood as
now, and innumerable women smoked their eyes out, cooking over open
fires, before any one thought of making stoves of stone or of iron
plates. Almost every labor-saving contrivance you've seen might have
been perfected before it was, if the inventive faculty hadn't been so
rare. Why, half of the newest contrivances of the day are so simple and
obvious, that smart men, when they see them, want to shoot themselves
for not having themselves invented them."
"So, to come back to what we were talking of--the prospect of country
women and children being made more comfortable is extremely dismal."
"Not necessarily; country people have their special virtues, though
many of them have about as little inventive capacity as so many cows.
Still, they're great as copyists. For instance, my wife told me that
every girl in the county wanted a dress exactly like one you made of
two bits of dead-stock calico. They're already copying, I'm glad to
say, your brushwood shade for the sides of the house. So, if you'll go
right on inventing--"
"But I didn't invent the brushwood shade; you yourself heard Caleb tell
me of it."
"Oh, yes, after you'd dragged it out of his memory, where it had been
doing nothing for almost a quarter of a century."
"I'm sure I didn't design the combination of calicoes; the idea was far
older than the calicoes themselves."
"Perhaps, but you adapted it, as you did Caleb's army hospital shade.
Don't ever forget that most so-called inventors, including the very
greatest, are principally adapters. 'Tis plain to see that you have the
faculty, so don't waste any time in pitying those who haven't; just go
on, perceiving and inventing--or adapting, if you prefer to call it so.
Try it on everything, from clothes and cookery to religion, and you may
depend on most of the people hereabouts to copy you to the full measure
of their ability. There! I don't think you'll want to hear the sound of
my voice again in a month. Caleb isn't the only man who finds it hard
to get off of a hobby."