A TOWN ASLEEP
During this first winter Ruth and I made the most of every opportunity
to get acquainted with our fellow townsmen. We went to church regularly
and attended all the sociables and concerts and fairs and we met
some very fine people. But a large part of them, however, were not so
representative of the new generation in whom I was most interested as
they were of the old generation. I found that most of the comfortable
and well-to-do were among those who had inherited small fortunes, where
the accumulations of several branches of one family had finally settled
in a single individual. Much of this money I also found had been made
outside the village. Then of course there was another prosperous
element consisting of a half dozen local business men who were doing
well; the hardware merchant, the druggist, the grain and hay merchant,
the local lawyers and doctors. I might have seen more of these men if
I had been a member of the fraternal organizations, but somehow I never
took to them. I found that there were a half dozen branches of various
secret societies in this small village and a good many men belonged to
them all.
Another significant fact was that I didn’t meet at any of these
gatherings any of my foreign-born friends. I never saw Dardoni there,
or Tony or any of the other dozen families who as far as enterprise and
worldly success go were important members of the community. One reason
was their difference in religious belief, but another and stronger
was the fact that they were held to be on an inferior social plane.
In many ways they were. There’s no denying this, but they had, to my
mind, enough sterling qualities to offset that. Anyway, I hadn’t looked
to find social lines drawn in a country village, but when I expressed
my views even to Cunningham, the minister, I didn’t receive much
encouragement. It made me mad to see such snobbishness in an American
village and several times I spoke from the shoulder. After I had
visited Dardoni’s farm I felt more strongly than ever.
Signor Dardoni had some forty acres and there wasn’t a square
foot which wasn’t under cultivation. Ten of them were in an apple
orchard--the only orchard in town that produced commercially. He had
taken native trees when they weren’t more than half alive with their
clutter of dead limbs, and trimmed them up, grafted them, and made them
pay. That one accomplishment alone ought to have distinguished him in
the village. It ought to have set an example if nothing else. And yet
I found orchard after orchard going to waste and producing nothing
but cider apples. Even these weren’t picked, and Dardoni made another
neat income every fall buying them on the trees for a song and turning
them into new cider and vinegar. He had done this for five years and
everyone knew that it paid and yet no one thought of following his
example and making the same use of their own waste apples. That’s a
fair illustration of the difference in spirit between the two races.
Another ten or fifteen acres he kept for hay, raising enough for his
own use and sometimes enough to sell. On another strip he raised his
own corn and wheat for fodder, being the only man in town who didn’t
spend his good money at the hay and grain store where corn went at
times way over the dollar mark. Here again the natives had a working
example before their very eyes and yet took no advantage of it.
Another ten acres Dardoni devoted to garden truck for the near-by
market, reaping every spring a handsome profit. There wasn’t a native
in the whole village who tried even to raise more than enough for
himself and many didn’t do that even when they had back door yards big
enough to supply them for the year.
The rest of his land he used for his chicken and egg business, although
he had some fifty pigs which ran loose most everywhere. Of course he
also kept cows--a half dozen of them, selling the cream to the local
creamery (which, incidentally, was not owned by local capital) and
using the buttermilk for his pigs and chickens. The pigs kept his
orchard in good condition and the cows and horses furnished him with
dressing for his other land.
Now I want to make a point here: Dardoni was not a scientific farmer.
He didn’t know anything about the science of farming. He was not
reviving worn-out soil by the use of modern cultivation. He was not
applying laboratory methods; he was applying horse sense. He didn’t
know any more about farming, or as much perhaps, as every mother’s
son of those who had been born and brought up here and their fathers
before them. But he did know enough to work his land and he had learned
to do that in a country where a single acre means something. The only
difference between him and these others was that he got up early in the
morning and worked--worked all day long. The one thing in his favor was
that he also had a business instinct and appreciated the value of his
city market. But principally his success lay in the fact that he used
every single advantage and made the most of it.
He lived in a large old-fashioned Colonial house which had once been
owned by a local politician who had succeeded in being elected to
Congress for a single term in Civil War days, and who had never found
it necessary to do anything afterwards. His son dissipated his fortune
and the place came on the market about the time Dardoni happened
along. Dardoni hadn’t improved its appearance any but he had added a
big barn and several out houses. His family consisted of a wife and
six children, the oldest being Lucia who was eighteen and who had been
educated at the local high school, and the youngest being Joe, now
three years old. The rest of his household included a half dozen young
men, all relatives, to whom he paid an average of ten dollars a week.
They were good workers and seldom remained with him longer than three
years before buying a place of their own. Through him, directly and
indirectly, some forty families had already settled in the village.
Personally I found Dardoni a most interesting and agreeable fellow, and
the more I saw him the better I liked him. He had become thoroughly
Americanized in the sense that he had really made America his home
with the expectation of spending his life here and having his sons
and daughters live here after him. He had been naturalized and was a
heavy taxpayer but he took no interest in the affairs of the town.
For one thing his home was his castle and for another his habit of
thought was to accept conditions as they were and make the best of them
without any attempt to change them. But whenever I suggested any needed
improvement, such as in the matter of better roads, I found him alive
and willing to do his share.
One other incident that winter set me to thinking and made me feel
more than ever the need of some radical revolution in this old town.
Hadley came to me in January and wanted to borrow fifty dollars.
“Show me that you really need it and I’ll let you have it,” I said.
“I’ve got a note comin’ due,” he answered.
“Who holds it?” I asked.
“Dardoni,” he answered.
“What did you borrow from him for?” I asked.
“Well, there was considerable sickness in the family last year and I
got hard up.”
“You own your house all clear?”
“Yes--except that Dardoni took a first mortgage on it for the note.”
“And you have five acres of land?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s only you and your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Then how--”
“Doctors and medicines cost something,” he broke in, rather resenting
my further questioning.
Now here was a concrete example of a man without any bad habits in the
ordinary meaning of the word, who had lived here fifty years in a
house and on land which came to him by inheritance, who had worked with
a fair amount of industry and raised three children, all now away from
home and self supporting, who in a crisis had been forced to borrow
money from an immigrant who hadn’t been in this country ten years and
who started without a cent. On the face of it there was something wrong
here, but what was it? In a nutshell, lack of thrift, lack of industry,
lack of enterprise. Hadley was doing here on a farm exactly what I had
done in the suburbs; he was living and always had lived up to the last
cent he made. Even at this time, when he was earning forty dollars a
month from me, he didn’t save a cent. He bought hay and corn for his
horse; he bought expensive meats for his table; instead of mending old
harnesses, he bought new harnesses; he subscribed for a daily paper
and had a telephone in his house which he didn’t need any more than
he needed a safe deposit vault. In the meanwhile he had five acres of
idle land at his back. He was in a state of lethargy as the whole town
was in a state of lethargy. He was stagnant--half-dead. A dozen things
which had been luxuries to his father had become necessities to him.
The price of everything had increased and he hadn’t kept pace with
it. What was true of him was true of the whole town. I loaned him the
money, but that night I had a talk with Ruth.
“Ruth,” I said, “I’m going to give this old town the biggest shaking up
it’s had since the glacial period.”
“Why, Billy, what’s the matter?” she asked.
“Everything’s the matter,” I said. “This village isn’t sleeping, but
dead. It’s time someone blew the resurrection trumpet. I’m going to
blow it; I’m going to play Gabriel.”
She looked up from her sewing with a laugh, but when she saw I was in
earnest she put aside her work and came over and put her arms around me.