Jerome Edwards, young as he was, had within him the noblest instinct
of a reformer--that of deducting from all evils a first lesson for
himself. He said to himself: "It is true, what Uncle Ozias says. It
is wrong, the way things are. The rich have everything--all the land,
all the good food, all the money; the poor have nothing. It is
wrong." Then he said, "If ever I am rich I will give to the poor."
This pride of good intentions, in comparison with others' deeds, gave
the boy a certain sense of superiority. Sometimes he felt as if he
could see the top of Doctor Prescott's head when he met him on the
street.
Poor Jerome had few of the natural joys and amusements of boyhood; he
was obliged to resort to his fertile and ardent imagination, or the
fibre of his spirit would have been relaxed with the melancholy of
age. While the other boys played in the present, whooping and
frisking, as free of thought as young animals, Jerome worked and
played in the future. Some air-castles he built so often that he
seemed to fairly dwell in them; some dreams he dreamed so often that
he went about always with them in his eyes. One fancy which specially
commended itself to him was the one that he was rich, that he owned
half the town, that in some manner Doctor Prescott's and Simon
Basset's acres had passed into his possession, and he could give them
away. He established all the town paupers in the doctor's clover. He
recalled old Peter Thomas from the poorhouse, and set him at Doctor
Prescott's front window in a broadcloth coat. An imbecile pauper by
the name of Mindy Toggs he established in undisturbed possession of
Simon Basset's house and lands.
Doctor Seth Prescott little dreamed when he met this small, shabby
lad, and passed him as he might have passed some way-side weed, what
was in his mind. If people, when they meet, could know half the
workings of one another's minds, the recoils from the shocks might
overbalance creation. But Doctor Prescott never saw the phantom
paupers slouching through his clover-fields, and Simon Basset never
jostled Mindy Toggs on his threshold. However, Mindy Toggs had once
lived in Simon Basset's house.
As Jerome advanced through boyhood it seemed as if everything
combined to strengthen, by outside example, the fancies and beliefs
derived from Ozias Lamb's precepts and his own constantly hard and
toilsome life. Jerome, on his very way to the district school,
learned tasks of bitter realism more impressive to his peculiar order
of mind than the tables and columns in the text-books.
There was a short cut across the fields between the school-house and
the Edwards house. Jerome and Elmira usually took it, unless the snow
was deep, as by doing so they lessened the distance considerably.
The Edwards house was situated upon a road crossing the main highway
of the village where the school-house stood. In the triangle of
fields between the path which the Edwards children followed on their
way to school and the two roads was the poorhouse. It was a low,
stone-basemented structure, with tiny windows, a few of them barred
with iron, retreating ignominiously within thick walls; the very
grovelling of mendicancy seemed symbolized in its architecture by
some unpremeditatedness of art. It stood in a hollow, amid slopes of
stony plough ridges, over which the old male paupers swarmed
painfully with spades and shovels when spring advanced. When spring
came, too, old pauper women and wretched, half-witted girls and
children squatted like toads in the green fields outside the ploughed
ones, digging greens in company with grazing cows, and looked up with
unexpected flashes of human life when footsteps drew near. There was
a thrifty Overseer in the poorhouse, and the village paupers, unless
they were actually crippled and past labor, found small repose in the
bosom of the town. They grubbed as hard for their lodging and daily
bread of charity, with its bitterest of sauces, as if they worked for
hire.
Old Peter Thomas, for one, had never toiled harder to keep the roof
of independence over his head than he toiled tilling the town fields.
Old Peter, even in his age and indigence, had an active mind. Only
one panacea was there for its workings, and that was tobacco. When
the old man had--which was seldom--a comfortable quid with which to
busy his jaws, his mind was at rest; otherwise it gnawed constantly
one bitter cud of questioning, which never reached digestion. "Why,"
asked old Peter Thomas, toiling tobaccoless in the town fields--"why
couldn't the town have give me work, an' paid me what I airned, an'
let me keep my house, instead of sendin' of me here?"
Sometimes he propounded the question, his sharp old eyes twinkling
out of a pitiful gloom of bewilderment, to the Overseer: "Say, Mr.
Simms, what ye s'pose the object of it is? Here I be, workin' jest as
hard for what's give as for what I used to airn." But he never got
any satisfaction, and his mind never relaxed to ease, until in some
way he got a bit of tobacco. Old Peter Thomas, none of whose
forebears had ever been on the town, who had had in his youth one of
the prettiest and sweetest girls in the village to wife, toiling hard
with his stiff old muscles for no gain of independence, his mind
burdened with his unanswered question, would almost at times have
sold his soul for tobacco. Nearly all he had was given him by Ozias
Lamb, who sometimes crammed a wedge of tobacco into his hand, with a
hard and furtive thrust and surly glance aloof, when he jostled him
on the road or at the village store. Old Peter used to loaf about the
store, whenever he could steal away from the poorhouse, on the chance
of Ozias and tobacco. Ozias was dearly fond of tobacco himself, but
little enough he got, with this hungry old pensioner lying in wait.
He always yielded up his little newly bought morsel of luxury to
Peter, and went home to his shoes without it; however, nobody knew.
"Don't ye speak on't," he charged Peter, and he eschewed fiercely to
himself all kindly motives in his giving, considering rather that he
was himself robbed by the great wrong of the existing order of
things.
Jerome, who had seen his uncle cram tobacco into old Peter's hand,
used sometimes to leave the path on his way to school, when he saw
the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at
a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to
him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous
piece of spruce-gum. The old man always took it, and spat it out when
the boy's back was turned.
Jerome used to be fond of storing up checker-berries and sassafras
root, and doling them out to a strange small creature with wild,
askant eyes and vaguely smiling mouth, with white locks blowing as
straightly and coarsely as dry swamp grass, who was wont to sit,
huddling sharp little elbows and knees together, even in severe
weather, on a stone by the path. She had come into the world and the
poorhouse by the shunned byway of creation. She had no name. The
younger school-children said, gravely, and believed it, that she had
never had a father; as for her mother, she was only a barely admitted
and shameful necessity, who had come from unknown depths, and died of
a decline, at the town's expense, before the child could walk. She
had nothing save this disgraceful shadow of maternity, her feeble
little body, and her little soul, and a certain half-scared delight
in watching for Jerome and his doles of berries and sassafras. One of
Jerome's dearest dreams was the buying this child a doll like Lucina
Merritt's, with a muslin frock and gay sash and morocco shoes. So
much he thought about it that it fairly seemed to him sometimes, as
he drew near the little thing, that she nursed the doll in her arms.
He wanted to tell her what a beautiful doll she was to have when he
was rich, but he was too awkward and embarrassed before his own kind
impulses. He only bade her, in a rough voice, to hold her hands, and
then dropped into the little pink cup so formed his small votive
offering to childhood and poverty, and was off.
Occasionally Elmira had cookies given her by kind women for whom she
did extra work, and then she saved one for the little creature,
emulating her brother's example. There was one point on the way to
school where Elmira liked to have her brother with her, and used
often to wait for him at the risk of being late. Even when she was
one of the oldest girls in school, almost a young woman, she scurried
fast by this point when alone, and even when Jerome was with her did
not linger. As for Jerome, he had no fear; but during his winters at
the district school the peculiar bent of his mind was strengthened by
the influence of this place.
The poorhouse in the hollow had its barn and out-buildings attached
at right angles, with a cart-path leading thereto from the street;
but at the top of the slope, on the other side of the schoolward
path, stood a large, half-ruinous old barn, used only for storing
surplus hay. The door of this great, gray, swaying structure usually
stood open, and in it, on an old wreck of a wheelbarrow, sat Mindy
Toggs, in fair or foul weather.
Mindy Toggs's head, with its thick thatch of light hair reaching to
his shoulders, had the pent effect of some monstrous mushroom cap
over his meagre body, with its loosely hung limbs, which moved
constantly with uncouth sprawls and flings, as if by some terrible
machinery of diseased nerves. Poor Mindy Toggs's great thatched head
also nodded and lopped unceasingly, and his slobbering chin dipped
into his calico shirt-bosom, and he said over and over, in his
strange voice like a parrot's, the only two words he was ever known
to speak, "Simon Basset, Simon Basset."
Mindy Toggs was sixty years old, it was said. His past was as dim as
his intellect. Nobody seemed to know exactly when Mindy Toggs was
born, or just when he had come to the poorhouse. Nobody knew who
either of his parents had been. Nobody knew how he got his name, but
there was a belief that it had a folk-lore-like origin; that
generations of Overseers ago an enterprising wife of one had striven
to set his feeble wits to account in minding the pauper babies, and
gradually, through transmission by weak and childish minds, his task
had become his name. Toggs was held to be merely a reminiscence of
some particularly ludicrous stage of his poorhouse costume.
Mindy Toggs had dwelt in the poorhouse ever since people could
remember, with the exception of one year, when he was boarded out by
the town with Simon Basset, and learned to speak his two words. Simon
Basset had always had an opinion that work could be gotten out of
Mindy Toggs. Nobody ever knew by what means he set himself to prove
it; there had been dark stories; but one day Simon brought Mindy back
to the poorhouse, declaring with a strange emphasis that he never
wanted to set eyes on the blasted fool again, and Mindy had learned
his two words.
It was said that the sight of Simon Basset roused the idiot to
terrific paroxysms of rage and fear, and that Basset never
encountered him if he could help it. However, poor Mindy was harmless
enough to ordinary folk, sitting day after day in the barn door,
looking out through the dusty shafts of sunlight, through spraying
mists of rain, and often through the white weave of snow, repeating
his two words, which had been dinned into his feeble brain, the Lord
only knew by what cruelty and terror--"Simon Basset, Simon Basset."
Mindy Toggs was a terrifying object to nervous little Elmira Edwards,
but Jerome used often to bid her run along, and stop himself and look
at him soberly, with nothing of curiosity, but with indignant and
sorrowful reflection. At these times poor Mindy, if he had only known
it, drove his old master, who had illumined his darkness of mind with
one cruel flash of fear, out of house and home, and sat in his stead
by his fireside in warmth and comfort.
Jerome left school finally when he was seventeen; up to that time he
attended all the winter sessions. During the winter, when Jerome was
seventeen, a man came to the neighboring town of Dale, bought out the
old shoe-factory and store there, and set up business on a more
extensive scale, sending out work in large quantities. Many of the
older boys left school on that account, Jerome among them; he had
special inducements to do so, through his uncle Ozias Lamb.
"That man that bought out Bill Dickey, over in Dale, has been talkin'
to me," Lamb told Jerome one evening. "Seems he's goin' to increase
the business; he's laid in an extra lot of stock, and hired two more
cutters, and he says he don't want to fool with so many small
accounts, and he'd rather let some of it out in big lots. Says, if
I'm willin', I can take as much as I can manage, and let it out
myself for bindin' and closin', and he'll pay me considerable more on
a lot than Robinson has, cash down. Now you see, J'rome, I'm gettin'
older, and I can't do much more finishin' than I've been doin' right
along. What I'm comin' at is this: s'pose I set another bench in
here, and take the extra work, and you quit school and go into
business. I can learn you all I know fast enough. You can nigh about
make a shoe now--dun'no' but you can quite."
"I'd have to leave school," Jerome said, soberly.
"How much more book-learnin' do you think you need?" returned Ozias,
with his hard laugh. "Don't you forget that all you came into this
world for was to try not to get out of it through lack of
nourishment, and to labor for life with the sweat of your brow. You
don't need much eddication for that. It ain't with you as it was with
Lawrence Prescott, who was too good to go to the district school, and
had to be sent to Boston to have a minister fit him for college. You
don't come of a liberal eddicated race. You've got to work for the
breath of your nostrils, and not for the breath of your mind or your
soul. You'll find you can't fight your lot in life, J'rome Edwards;
you ain't got standin' room enough outside it."
"I don't want to fight my lot in life," Jerome replied, defiantly,
"but I thought I'd go to school this winter."
"You won't grub a bit better for one more winter of schoolin'," said
his uncle, "and there's another reason--your mother, she's gettin'
older, an' Elmira, she's a good-lookin' girl, but she's gettin' wore
to skin an' bones. They're both on 'em workin' too hard. You'd ought
to try to have 'em let up a little more."
"I wouldn't have either of 'em lift a finger, if I could help it, the
Lord knows!" Jerome cried, bitterly.
Ozias nodded, grimly. "Women wa'n't calculated to work as hard as
men, nohow," he said. "Seems as if a man that's got hands, an' is
willin', might be let to keep the worst of it off 'em, but he ain't.
Seems as if I might have been able to do somethin' for Ann when Abel
quit, but I wa'n't.
"There's one thing I've got to be thankful for, an' that is--a hard
Providence ain't been able to hurt Belindy any more than it would a
feather piller. She dints a little, and cries out when she's hurt,
an' then she settles back again, smooth and comfortable as ever.
"I don't s'pose you'll understand it, J'rome, because you ain't come
to thinking of such things yet, an' showed your sense that you ain't,
but I took that very thing into account when I picked out my wife.
There was another girl that I used to see home some, but, Lord, she
was a high stepper! Handsome as a picture she was; there ain't a girl
in this town to-day that can compare with her; but her head was up,
an' her nose quiverin', an' her eyes shinin'. I knew she liked me
pretty well, but, Lord, it was no use! Might as well have set a
blooded mare to ploughin'. She was one of the sort that wouldn't have
bent under hardship; she'd have broke. I knew well enough what a
dog-life a wife of mine would have to lead--jest enough to keep body
and soul together, an' no extras--an' I wa'n't goin' to drag her into
it, an' I didn't. I knew just how she'd strain, an' work her pretty
fingers to the bone to try to keep up. I made up my mind that if I
married at all I'd marry somebody that wouldn't work more'n she could
possibly help--not if we were poor as Job's off ox.
"So I looked 'round an' got Belindy. I spelled her out right the
first time I see her. She 'ain't had nothin', but I dun'no' but she's
been jest as happy as if she had. I 'ain't let her work hard; she
'ain't never bound shoes nor done anythin' to earn a dollar since I
married her. Couldn't have kept the other one from doin' it."
"What became of her?" asked Jerome.
"Dead," replied Ozias.
Jerome asked nothing further. It ended in his leaving school and
going to work. This course met with some opposition from his mother,
who had madly ambitious plans for him. She had influenced Elmira to
leave school the year before, that she might earn more, and thereby
enable her brother to study longer, but he knew nothing of that.
However, a plan which Jerome formed for some evening lessons with the
school-master appeased her. It savored of a private tutor like
Lawrence Prescott's. Nobody knew how Ann Edwards had resented Doctor
Prescott's sending his son to Boston to be fitted for college, while
hers could have nothing better than a few terms at the district
school. Her jealous bitterness was enhanced twofold because her poor
husband was gone, and the memory of his ambition for his son stung
her to sharper effort. Often the imagined disappointments of the
dead, when they are still loved and unforgotten, weigh more heavily
upon the living than their own. "I dun'no' what your father would
have said if he'd thought Jerome had got to leave school so young,"
she told Elmira; and her lost husband's grievance in the matter was
nearer her heart than her own.
Jerome's plan for evening lessons did not work long. The
school-master to whom he applied professed his entire readiness, even
enthusiasm, to further such a laudable pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties; but he was young himself, scarcely out of college, and
the pretty girls in his school swayed his impressionable nature into
many side issues, even when his mind was set upon the main track.
Soon Jerome found himself of an evening in the midst of a class of
tittering girls, who also had been fired with zeal for improvement
and classical learning, who conjugated _amo_ with foolish blushes and
glances of sugared sweetness at himself and the teacher. Then he
left.
Jerome at that time felt absolutely no need of the feminine element
in creation, holding himself aloof from it with a patient, because
measureless, superiority. Sometimes in growth the mental strides into
life ahead of the physical; sometimes it is the other way. At
seventeen Jerome's mind took the lead of his body, and the
imaginations thereof, though he was well grown and well favored, and
young girls placed themselves innocently in his way and looked back
for him to follow.
Jerome's cold, bright glances met theirs, full of the artless appeal
of love and passion, shameless because as yet unrecognized, and then
he turned away with disdain.
"I came here to learn Latin and higher algebra, not to fool with a
pack of girls," he told the school-master, bluntly. The young man
laughed and colored. He was honest and good; passion played over him
like wildfire, not with any heat for injury, but with a dazzle to
blind and charm.
He did not intend to marry until he had well established himself in
life, and would not; but in the meantime he gave his resolution as
loose a rein as possible, and conjugated _amo_ with shades of meaning
with every girl in the class.
"I don't see what I can do, Edwards," he said. "I cannot turn the
girls out, and I could not refuse them an equal privilege with you,
when they asked it."
Jerome gave the school-master a look of such entire comprehension and
consequent scorn that he fairly cast down his eyes before him; then
he went out with his books under his arm.
He paid for his few lessons with the first money he could save, in
spite of the school-master's remonstrances.
After that Jerome went on doggedly with his studies by himself, and
asked assistance from nobody. In the silent night, after his mother
and sister were in bed, he wrestled all alone with the angel of
knowledge, and half the time knew not whether he was smitten hip and
thigh or was himself the victor. Many a problem in his higher algebra
Jerome was never sure of having solved rightly; renderings of many
lines in his battered old Virgil, bought for a sixpence of a past
collegian in Dale, might, and might not, have been correct.
However, if he got nothing else from his studies, he got the
discipline of mental toil, and did not spend his whole strength in
the labor of his hands.
Jerome pegged and closed shoes with an open book on the bench beside
him; he measured his steps with conjugations of Latin verbs when he
walked to Dale with his finished work over shoulder; he studied every
spare moment, when his daily task was done, and kept this up, from a
youthful and unreasoning thirst for knowledge and defiance of
obstacles, until he was twenty-one. Then one day he packed away all
his old school-books, and never studied them again regularly; for
something happened which gave his energy the force of reason, and set
him firmly in a new track with a definite end in view.