CHAPTER I_New lives for old

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

WILLIAM CARLETON

AUTHOR OF “ONE WAY OUT”

[Illustration]

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

BY SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

(INCORPORATED)

_Entered at Stationers’ Hall_

HOLT

TO WHOM WE IN OUR TOWN OWE

MUCH OF OUR SUCCESS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A NEW BEGINNING 1

II MY NEIGHBORS 21

III COLD FACTS 40

IV A TOWN ASLEEP 55

V STIRRING THINGS UP 64

VI A GAME WORTH PLAYING 72

VII THE PIONEERS 84

VIII THE NEW WAY 100

IX SPRING 117

X RESULTS 133

XI A GREAT DAY 149

XII NEW VENTURES 164

XIII GETTING TOGETHER 179

XIV FINDING OURSELVES 194

XV THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH 208

NEW LIVES FOR OLD

CHAPTER I

A NEW BEGINNING

The first thing I did when I was fairly on my feet was to buy a farm.

It was a matter of sentiment with me. All my family with the exception

of my father had been farmers and even he, in his latter years, had

talked wistfully of the independence of country life. His father had

owned a fairly prosperous farm in New Hampshire and on his few acres

had lived and died. He had raised there wheat for his flour, wool for

his clothing, hides for his shoes, cream for his butter, and meat and

vegetables for his table. He even made a fairly good imitation tea and

coffee and sweetened the drink with maple sugar from his own trees.

Grandfather Carleton, according to father, could have built a Chinese

wall about his fields and lived within its boundaries, asking favor

of no man. I suppose it was the feeling of independence coming of this

that made such men as he good Americans; the first to shoulder muskets

for their country, the first to shoulder axes and blaze a trail through

the wilderness.

Ruth’s folks, too, had all been farmers. She herself was born and bred

on a farm and I think it was that which gave her such good health and

good courage. Though in the years of our struggle in the city I never

heard her complain, I knew that always in her heart she had a great

yearning for the fields and open sky. She never spoke of this, but

sometimes Ruth says a great deal when she doesn’t speak. I know when I

first told her of my plan she had to swallow hard to keep from crying.

One thing alone disturbed Ruth and that was the thought that with

success we were running away from our new-found friends.

“Somehow it seems as though we ought to stay right on here where we’ve

made good and share our success with the others,” she said.

“You talk as though we’d made our fortune and were going back to the

fatherland,” I said.

“I feel that way,” she admitted.

“Well,” I said, “the gang is part of me now and I wouldn’t quit if I

were worth a million. But we’re in a position where we can afford more

elbow room now. Of course we can move back into the suburbs again, if

we want to.”

She shuddered a little at that.

“Not back there,” she answered.

“Then the only other thing is a farm,” I said. “And if you want, you

can think of it as a farm for the whole gang. What a place it will be

for the kiddies; your own and the others!”

That was all the cue Ruth needed. On the spot she hatched plans enough

to keep her busy all her life. It looked to me as though we’d need

a Carnegie endowment to carry out all her schemes, but I didn’t say

anything. I’d felt that way before about her projects and seen her end

by putting them through on a few dollars. If Ruth had put into business

the same amount of thought and brains and energy that she put into her

philanthropies she would have made a fortune.

I went to a real estate dealer and there I received my first surprise.

It wasn’t my last, however. Before I was through with this business I

discovered that I had as much to learn as I had during those first

years as an emigrant. And I may as well say right here that my

experience wasn’t the kind I’ve read about in the “Simple Life” and

“Back to the Farm” stories. And because it was different is the reason

I’m writing this. There’s been just as much nonsense written about

the farm as about the slums. One man makes it out a hell on earth and

another man makes it out a paradise on earth, and both of them are

wrong and both of them are right, but neither of them seems to me to

have got at the heart of the matter.

In “One Way Out” I learned to my own satisfaction that if an emigrant

succeeds where an American fails it proves there’s something wrong with

the American. And there is. True as you’re living, there is. Something

is lacking in him that his ancestors had; something lacking that the

emigrant has to-day. I thought that I had learned this once for all

but when I got back into the country I had to learn it over again. The

conditions were different, but the same facts held good.

I received a surprise, I said, at the very beginning. It came when the

real estate man handed me a list of almost a hundred places for rent

and for sale--all within easy reach of the city. I had my choice of

anything from one acre to a hundred acres. Not only this but they were

offered me almost at my own figure and my own terms. I found I could

buy a farm as easily as a set of books. I don’t think the agents would

have refused a dollar down and a dollar a week.

I didn’t know anything about real estate values then, but judging from

the prices suburban property was bringing I had an idea that a fairly

decent place with buildings would cost me around ten thousand dollars.

I found that for this sum I could get a fourteen room Colonial house

with land enough for a park. After living where the same amount of land

would almost make a ward, I was staggered. I thought there must be

something crooked in the proposition. But I went to the other agencies

and found the same bargains open to me. It seemed that farms were a

drug on the market.

And this was in a section of the country which had been settled for

over two hundred and fifty years! There’s something to think about in

that. It was within a ten cent car fare of a region which was absorbing

emigrants by the hundred thousand. It was on the very outskirts of a

city which was howling about congestion and moaning over the high cost

of living. Land was actually lying idle almost within sight of a market

pleading for more produce. It certainly looked queer.

These facts, however, didn’t concern me at the time. As soon as I made

sure the facts were actually as represented, I set about making a

selection. To Ruth and me this was like living our honeymoon all over

again. Perhaps it was more like living our youth again, for we hadn’t

ever passed our honeymoon. I’d go over the lists with her in the

evening and we’d check off the places that sounded good to us, and then

on the first fair morning we’d start to hunt them up. She’d leave the

baby at home with some of our good neighbors and we’d go as far as we

could on the electric cars and then walk. I wanted to have a carriage

but she wouldn’t hear of it because she wanted to feel free. Some days

she pretended we were gypsies and other days that we were two Indians

hunting a spot to camp. I didn’t mind, because Dick was looking after

most of the business now so I could take my time without worrying about

that. In this way we squandered whole days along the country roads

going through one old house after another and eating our lunch by the

side of a brook or in a bit of woods.

I think there must have been something in our blood inherited from our

ancestors, for we took to the open road as though we’d been born by its

side. Oh, but those were good days--those days when we wandered about

at our will in search of a home. It was June and the fields were full

of flowers and the air full of birds. Ruth knew them every one and

greeted them like old friends, pointing them out to me. I could tell a

crow from a robin and a daisy from a buttercup, but that was about all,

and yet to me also these wild things were like old friends. I had never

missed them, but after the first day I knew I could never do without

them again. It was just as I had felt about Ruth from the first time I

saw her.

I suppose too that the contrast with our narrow quarters of the

last few years had something to do with our joy in the broader

prospect. Not that we had ever felt crowded. We had in our tenement

all the room we needed and our lives had been so full that we didn’t

notice our quarters anyway. Our lives were still full but with more

leisure and less strain we wanted more than we needed. We were like

pioneers--content at the start with a log cabin or even a tent, but

with prosperity desiring larger and better quarters more as a matter of

comfort than necessity. We were now ready for a few of the luxuries of

life but we recognized frankly the fact that our new inclinations were

luxuries. If success had been longer in coming than it was, we would

have remained where we were in perfect contentment.

It was hard for us to decide on any of the many old houses we explored

because to us they all looked attractive. The thing we both liked about

them in spite of signs of decay was that they all seemed so firmly

established. There was nothing flimsy about them. They looked as though

they had become rooted in the soil like the big elms which grew before

so many of them. It was as though the winds and the sun and the rain

had tested them and found them honest. As Ruth said, in going into them

you wouldn’t feel as though you were beginning life again as you might

in a brand new house, but were only starting where the last owner left

off.

After our experiences during the last few years we appreciated such

details as those. There had been times in the emigrant days when way

down deep in our hearts we had felt a little bit like people without a

country. We were pioneers and we gloried in that, but we were pioneers

without a fatherland. We had no sunny Italy, no emerald isle, no gay

France, not even a grim Russia to talk about over a pipe at the end of

the day as our neighbors had. We had to go back a century or more to

get home, and vivid as that past seemed at times it was distinctly a

past in which we had played no part. Now out here in the country where

we saw stone walls built by our forefathers, where the land had been

tilled by them, where trees planted by them were still growing, where

if not direct descendants of our own, descendants of the old stock

still lived, we felt closer to that history. So we thought that if we

went into one of the old houses built by our forefathers, it would

bring us still nearer home.

We spent almost a month this way, anxious to draw out the pleasure as

long as possible.

“I’ll know our home as soon as I see it,” said Ruth; “I’ll recognize it

like an old friend.”

And so she did. One day toward nightfall--when in the country all the

world seems to get mellow--we came upon a little story and a half

house connected by a shed with a ramshackly looking barn. It was half

hidden behind trees and lilac bushes on the top of a knoll which sloped

to a small lake some fifty rods distant. There wasn’t another house

within sight of it--just woodland and pasture and fields. Standing

there on the old granite doorstep, you wouldn’t have believed there was

a city within a long day’s journey.

We had the key and went inside. The rooms were low studded and the

windows came down to within two feet of the floor. The ceilings were

discolored and the paper was off in great patches where the roof had

leaked. But in spite of this the place somehow was like home. Ruth took

my arm with a tight squeeze and looked up at me.

“This is it, Billy,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure as she was until all excited she began to tell me what

she was going to do. With the birds singing outside and the lazy sun

streaming through the windows slantwise, she led me through every room,

selecting her papers, making her changes, and placing her furniture.

“We don’t want a single new thing in this house,” she exclaimed. “We

want to keep it just as it was and don’t you see how it was?”

I hadn’t ever lived in the country and so I didn’t, but she made it so

vivid to me before we left that evening that I felt as though I had

been born here.

“We must visit all the houses in the neighborhood and buy what

furniture we can right here,” she said. “Maybe there’ll be an auction.

Country people are always selling off their old stuff so we must keep

our eyes open.”

“I should think it would be a lot simpler to buy what we want in town

and be done with it,” I said.

“But we don’t want to be done with it, Billy,” she answered. “We can’t

come slam bang into an old house like this. We must grow into it.”

She was so happy that I didn’t say anything more. I knew that she

was right, whatever I thought. I’d trust Ruth’s instinct against my

judgment any time.

I found that I could secure some fifty acres around the house and this

was what pleased me. The lot included woodland, pasture and field, but

mostly pasture grown up to alders and scrub pine. But however poor the

land was, it was land, and that was what I was hungry for. I wanted to

look out the windows and see land and walk over it and feel it beneath

my feet, knowing I owned it. I wanted to feel that I had a certain

section of these United States of America which belonged to me and my

heirs forever and ever. To have this would seem like being taken into

the firm.

When I came to look up the deeds I felt this more keenly than ever. I

was able to trace the title back to an old Indian grant, for it had

been held in one family over two hundred years and had changed title

only twice since then. This in itself brought history mighty close.

I bought the land and house for twenty-eight hundred dollars--the house

being practically thrown in. Because it was lop-sided and old and in

need of repair it had no market value whatever. A flimsily built modern

bungalow would have brought more. And yet when I examined the timbers

I found them of oak, handhewn, and sound as a nut. The underpinning

was made of great granite slabs and was as good as the day it was put

in, though it had worked askew from the frost. Even the floors, though

uneven and needing propping, were sound. The roof boards and shingles

had of course rotted, but here again the timbers supporting them had

with time only become seasoned. When our great grandfathers built

houses they didn’t build for decades but for centuries. They didn’t

reckon the cost of the lumber. In a cottage they used beams big enough

to support a church, matched them true and fastened them with hand-made

spikes a foot long. I couldn’t have bought the lumber alone for what

I paid for the house. I couldn’t have bought it anyway. You can’t buy

such timber as that any more.

I started work upon it at once, because we wanted to get in as soon

as possible. From the moment I paid the first installment--I bought

it on time as a matter of convenience--we felt this to be our home. I

couldn’t spare any of my own men just then and felt anyway that as far

as possible I ought to use local labor, so after considerable effort I

rounded up three men to help me.

I came to know these fellows better later on, but at the start they

were almost as foreign to me as though they had come from another

country. One of them was a man of fifty, another a man of forty and

the third was a young chap not more than twenty-two or three. I’ll

call the oldest one Hadley--though that wasn’t his name. The last name

doesn’t count for much anyway, because at the end of the week I was

calling him Jim and he was calling me Bill. In less than two weeks the

children who used to come over to watch us were calling me Bill.

Seth Sprague and Josh Chase will do as names for the other two and

come pretty close to what their names really were. Josh was the young

fellow--a tall, bony lad with shoulders already well rounded, and in

many other ways looking as old as Seth, who might have been his father.

All three of them had been born in the neighborhood and had lived here

ever since. All three of them came from old New England stock and had

inherited small farms from their fathers. And I must say that their

personal appearance was no great credit to that stock. This impressed

me right off. Not only were their bodies undersized and spare but their

faces were thin and sallow. They didn’t look healthy. They didn’t look

as healthy as the average emigrant. And yet they had been living in

the country all their lives with out-of-door work in this fine air

for a tonic and with country food to nourish them. They didn’t look

dissipated--just scrawny and underfed. If I had met one of them in the

slums I would have said he was a case for the associated charities. I

doubt if Seth could have got past the emigration officials. The first

time they opened their dinner pails, however, I saw that I had missed my

guess about their being starved. I never saw any three human beings get

outside of as much food as they did. Three or four eggs, half a loaf

of bread, a big slab of pie and two or three doughnuts to a pail, was

their average lunch. They saw my surprise and Jim told a story fixing

it on Seth, though I suspect it was an old one round the neighborhood.

He said that Seth happened into the grocery one day just after a

drummer had opened a large tin of canned beef. The drummer took off a

slice which he ate with some crackers, and then shoved the can along to

Seth with the invitation to join him. Seth took out his pocket knife

and began. He finished that pound can with the rest of the crackers and

allowing that this sort of whetted his appetite ordered a second can.

When he finished this the drummer who had been watching in amazement

said, “Don’t quit now; have another.” Seth replied that he didn’t mind

if he did and ate the contents of the third can. Then closing his knife

and running the back of his hand across his mouth, he gave a sigh of

satisfaction. “My,” he said, “but that was a juicy morsel.”

This started a yarn from Seth and he fixed his on Jim. They were full

of these stories and would stop work a dozen times a day to drawl them

out. Seth said that a man who lived on the edge of the town had a wife

who was a mighty good cook. One spring she planned to go away for a

week and visit some relatives but before going she cooked up enough

food to last her husband a week. He was a hearty eater, so she spent

three or four days at the task. When it came time for supper, the

first day she left, the man felt so lonesome that he went out of the

house and looked for someone to join him. He met Jim and asked him in.

Jim said that he had just had supper and wasn’t feeling particularly

hungry, but that he would join in a cup of tea just to be sociable. He

sat down at the table and ate up a two quart pot of beans and the man

brought on a second pot. Jim ate that too. Then the man brought out a

pie and Jim ate that. A second one followed, and to cut a long story

short, Jim before he finished ate up every single thing there was in

the house. His host didn’t say anything until Jim rose from the table.

“Well,” said his host, “I’m glad you didn’t come along when you were

hungry.”

I had more trouble handling those three men than I’ve ever had with a

gang of a hundred foreign laborers. They didn’t know enough to do the

work properly by themselves and they knew too much to obey orders. When

it came to straightening up the underpinning I let them go ahead for a

while on their own responsibility. This was a simple task which three

men with crow bars ought to have done in half a day. At the end of the

first half day they had succeeded in harmonizing their various opinions

as to how it ought to be done to the point where they determined they

needed a jack screw. One of them went off to borrow this and when he

returned it was lunch time. Then I took hold and it was only by doing

most of the work myself that we finished this job in two days. I used

them to help only where I needed more muscle and at that the three

together couldn’t lift as much as one of my stocky, close-knit Italian

laborers.

I found it impossible either to lead or drive them. My attempts

resulted in nothing but longwinded arguments or sulky threats of

leaving. And I was paying them a dollar and seventy-five cents a day

for unskilled labor. They were both lazy and incompetent. That’s the

frank truth.

I kept them along until the fourth day, which was cloudy with at times

a light drizzling rain. I had got up at four o’clock in order to be

at the house on time, for I was anxious to get this outside work done

as soon as possible. At seven o’clock not one of the men had put in

an appearance. I waited until half past eight and then went off to

see what the trouble was. I found Seth at home smoking a pipe by the

side of the kitchen stove. His wife was a pleasant faced woman and

the inside of the house was as neat as wax--in marked contrast to the

clutter around the outside.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“Dunno of any trouble,” he answered as though surprised by my question.

“I’ve been down to the house over an hour waiting for you,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“Aren’t you going to work any more?”

“Don’t expect a man to work in the rain, do you?” he answered.

“I guess it’s too much to expect work of you in any sort of weather,” I

said.

I paid him for his four days and left him growling uncomplimentary

remarks about me to his wife. I received the same reply from Jim. I

paid him off too and went on in search of young Chase. I thought the

boy and I together might be able to clear up some of the odd jobs. He

wasn’t at home. His mother thought he might be at the grocery store. I

went down there and found him lolling against the counter.

“You aren’t afraid of rain too, are you?” I demanded. There were three

other men there and he looked ashamed.

“It’s my rheumatiz,” he answered, feeling of his leg. “It’s botherin’

me a powerful lot to-day.”

“Then you refuse to come to work?”

“I’d like to accommodate ye,” he answered. “But honest--”

“I don’t want you to accommodate me,” I said. “I want you to work for

me.”

He straightened up a little at this and answered back. “I won’t work in

the rain for no man.”

He glanced toward the others and I saw them nod their approval. This

stand was more than I had expected of him. It showed that he had some

spirit of a certain kind after all.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s your money.”

When I was leaving, he roused himself once more. “I reckon what you

want mister ain’t a man--it’s a Dago.”

“You’re partly right,” I said; “I reckon what I want is a Dago.”