There is no need to describe in detail the heroine of this tale, because
she represents a type familiar to all readers of the conventional
New-England-village dialect story. She was for a long time the sole
inhabitant of Hillsboro, who came up to the expectations of our visiting
friends from the city, on the lookout for Mary Wilkins characters. We
always used to take such people directly to see Cousin Tryphena, as
dwellers in an Italian city always take their foreign friends to see their
one bit of ruined city wall or the heap of stones which was once an
Inquisitorial torture chamber, never to see the new water-works or the
modern, sanitary hospital.
On the way to the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny,
two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent,
respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that she
lived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars a
year, and that she had never been further from home than to the next
village. We always drew attention to her one treasure, the fine Sheraton
sideboard that had belonged to her great-grandfather, old Priest Perkins;
and, when we walked away from the orderly and empty house, we were sure
that our friends from the city would always exclaim with great insight
into character, "What a charmingly picturesque life! Isn't she perfectly
delicious!"
Next door to Cousin Tryphena's minute, snow-white house is a forlorn old
building, one of the few places for rent in our village, where nearly
everyone owns his own shelter. It stood desolately idle for some time,
tumbling to pieces almost visibly, until, one day, two years ago, a burly,
white-bearded tramp stopped in front of it, laid down his stick and bundle,
and went to inquire at the neighbor's if the place were for rent, then
moved in with his stick and bundle and sent away for the rest of his
belongings, that is to say, an outfit for cobbling shoes. He cut a big
wooden boot out of the side of an empty box, painted it black with
axle-grease and soot, hung it up over the door, and announced himself as
ready to do all the cobbling and harness-repairing he could get ... and a
fine workman he showed himself to be.
We were all rather glad to have this odd new member of our community
settle down among us ... all, that is, except Cousin Tryphena, who was
sure, for months afterward, that he would cut her throat some night and
steal away her Sheraton sideboard. It was an open secret that Putnam, the
antique-furniture dealer in Troy, had offered her two hundred and fifty
dollars for it. The other women of the village, however, not living alone
in such dangerous proximity to the formidable stranger, felt reassured by
his long, white beard, and by his great liking for little children.
Although, from his name, as from his strong accent, it was evident that
old Jombatiste belonged, by birth, to our French-Canadian colony, he never
associated himself with that easy-going, devoutly Catholic, law-abiding,
and rather unlettered group of our citizens. He allied himself with quite
another class, making no secret of the fact that he was an out-and-out
Socialist, Anti-clerical, Syndicalist, Anarchist, Nihilist. ... We in
Hillsboro are not acute in distinguishing between the different shades of
radicalism, and never have been able exactly to place him, except that,
beside his smashing, loudly-voiced theories, young Arthur Robbins'
Progressivism sounds like old Martin Pelham's continued jubilation over
the Hayes campaign.
The central article of Jombatiste's passionately held creed seemed to be
that everything was exactly wrong, and that, while the Socialist party was
not nearly sweeping enough in its ideas, it was, as yet, the best means
for accomplishing the inevitable, righteous overturning of society.
Accordingly, he worked incessantly, not only at his cobbling, but at any
odd job he could find to do, lived the life of an anchorite, went in rags,
ate mainly crackers and milk, and sent every penny he could save to the
Socialist Headquarters. We knew about this not only through his own
trumpeting of the programme of his life, but because Phil Latimer, the
postmaster, is cousin to us all and often told us about the money-orders,
so large that they must have represented almost all the earnings of the
fanatical old shoemaker.
And yet he was never willing to join in any of our charitable enterprises,
although his ardent old heart was evidently as tender as it was hot.
Nothing threw him into such bellowing fury as cruelty. He became the
terror of all our boys who trapped rabbits, and, indeed, by the sole
influence of his whirlwind descents upon them, and his highly illegal
destruction of their traps, he practically made that boyish pastime a
thing of the past in Hillsboro. Somehow, though the boys talked mightily
about how they'd have the law of dirty, hot-tempered old Jombatiste,
nobody cared really to face him. He had on tap a stream of red-hot
vituperation astonishingly varied for a man of his evident lack of early
education. Perhaps it came from his incessant reading and absorption of
Socialist and incendiary literature.
He took two Socialist newspapers, and nobody knows how many queer little
inflammatory magazines from which he read aloud selections to anyone who
did not run away.
Naturally enough, from his point of view, he began with his neighbor,
fastidious Cousin Tryphena.
What Cousin Tryphena did not know about the way the world outside of
Hillsboro was run would have made a complete treatise on modern
civilization. She never took a newspaper, only borrowing, once in a while,
the local sheet to read the news items from Greenford, where she had some
distant cousins; and, though she occasionally looked at one of the
illustrated magazines, it was only at the pictures.
It is therefore plain that old Jombatiste could not have found a worse
listener for his bellowed statements that ninety per cent. of the money of
this country was in the hands of two per cent. of the population; that the
franchise was a farce because the government was controlled by a Wall
Street clique; and that any man who could not earn a good living for his
family had a moral right to shoot a millionaire. For the most part, Cousin
Tryphena counted her tatting stitches and paid not the least attention to
her malcontent neighbor. When she did listen, she did not believe a word
he said. She had lived in Hillsboro for fifty-five years and she knew what
made people poor. It was shiftlessness. There was always plenty of work to
be had at the brush-back factory for any man who had the sense and
backbone to keep at it. If they _would_ stop work in deer-week to go
hunting, or go on a spree Town-meeting day, or run away to fish, she'd
like to know what business they had blaming millionaires because they lost
their jobs. She did not expound her opinions of these points to Jombatiste
because, in the first place, she despised him for a dirty Canuck, and,
secondly, because opinions seemed shadowy and unsubstantial things to her.
The important matters were to make your starch clear and not to be late to
church.
It is proverbial that people who are mostly silent often keep for some
time a reputation for more wisdom than is theirs. Cousin Tryphena
unconsciously profited in the estimation of her neighbor by this fact of
psychology. Old Jombatiste had thundered his per cents. of the
distribution of capital for many months before he discovered that he was
on the wrong track.
Then, one winter day, as Cousin Tryphena was hanging out her washing, he
ran over to her, waving his favorite magazine. He read her a paragraph
from it, striking the paper occasionally for emphasis with his horny,
blackened, shoemaker's hand, and following her as she moved along the
clothes-lines----
"And it is thus definitely _proved,_" he shouted in conclusion, "that
Senator Burlingame was in the pay of J.D. Darby, when he held up the Rouse
Workingman's Bill in the Senate Committee...." He stopped and glared
triumphantly at his neighbor. A rare impulse of perversity rose in Cousin
Tryphena's unawakened heart. She took a clothes-pin out of her mouth and
asked with some exasperation, "Well, what _of_ it!" a comment on his
information which sent the old man reeling back as though she had struck
him.
In the conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at last
Cousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance of
political economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet after
another into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakily
back to his own house, silenced for once.
But, although for the first time he neglected work to do it, he returned
to the attack the next day with a new weapon. He made no more remarks
about industrial slavery, nor did he begin, as was his wont, with the
solemnly enunciated axiom, "Wealth comes from labor alone!" He laid down,
on the Sheraton sideboard, an armful of his little magazines, and settled
himself in a chair, observing with a new comprehension how instinctively
Cousin Tryphena reached for her tatting as he began to read aloud. He read
the story of a man who was burned to death in molten steel because his
employers did not install a rather expensive safety device, and who left
a young widow and three children. These tried to earn their livings by
making artificial flowers. They could earn, all of them working together,
three cents an hour. When the last dollar of the dead father's savings was
used up, and there was talk of separating the family so that the children
could be put in an asylum, the mother drowned the three little ones and
herself after them. Cousin Tryphena dropped her tatting, her country-bred
mind reeling. "Didn't she have any _folks_ to help her out?"
Jombatiste explained that she came from East Poland, so that her folks, if
indeed she had any, were too far away to be of use. He struck one fist
inside his palm with a fierce gesture, such as he used when he caught a
boy trapping, and cried, "... and that in a country that produces three
times the food it consumes." For the first time, a statistical statement
awoke an echo in Cousin Tryphena's atrophied brain.
Old Jombatiste read on, this time about a girl of seventeen, left by her
parents' death in charge of a small brother. She had been paid twenty
cents for making crocheted lace which sold for a dollar and a half. By
working twelve hours a day, she had been able to make forty-seven cents.
Seeing her little brother grow pale from lack of food, she had, in
desperation, taken the first, the awfully decisive first step downward,
and had almost at once thereafter vanished, drawn down by the maelstrom of
vice. The little brother, wild with grief over his sister's disappearance,
had been taken to an orphan asylum where he had since twice tried to
commit suicide.
Cousin Tryphena sat rigid, her tatting fallen to the floor, her breath
coming with difficulty. It is impossible for the average modern mind,
calloused by promiscuous reading, to conceive the effect upon her
primitive organism of this attack from the printed page. She not only did
not dream that these stories might not be true, they seemed as real to her
as though she had seen the people. There was not a particle of blood in
her haggard face.
Jombatiste read on--the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in a
sweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from the
foul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to the
very depths of misery, a wife and two children. He was now dead, and his
wife was living in a corner of a moldy, damp basement, a pile of rags the
only bed for her and her children, their only heat what fire the mother
could make out of paper and rubbish picked up on the streets.
Cousin Tryphena's horrified eyes fell on her well-blacked stove, sending
out the aromatic breath of burning white-birch sticks. She recoiled from
it with a shudder.
Jombatiste read on, the story of the woman who, when her three sons died
in an accident due to negligence on their employer's part ... he read no
more that day, for Cousin Tryphena put her gray head down on the
center-table and wept as she never had done in her life. Jombatiste rose
softly and tiptoed out of the room.
The tap-tap-tap of his hammer rang loud and fast the rest of that day. He
was exulting over having aroused another bourgeois from the sleep of
greasy complacency. He had made a convert. To his dire and utter
pennilessness, Cousin Tryphena's tiny income seemed a fortune. He had a
happy dream of persuading her to join him in his weekly contributions to
the sacred funds! As he stood at midnight, in the open door, for the long
draught of fresh air he always took before turning in on his pile of hay,
he heard in the wood on the hill back of the house the shrill shriek of a
trapped rabbit. He plowed furiously out through the deep snow to find it,
gave the tortured animal a merciful death, carried the trap back to the
river and threw it in with a furious splash. He strode home under the
frosty stars, his dirty shirt open over his corded, old neck, his burning
heart almost content. He had done a good day's work.
Early the next morning, his neighbor came to his door, very white, very
hollow-eyed, evidently with a sleepless night back of her, and asked him
for the papers he had read from. Jombatiste gave them to her in a tactful
silence. She took them in one shaking hand, drawing her shawl around her
wrinkled face with the other, and went back through the snow to her own
house.
By noon that day, everyone in the village was thrilling with wild surmise.
Cousin Tryphena had gone over to Graham and Sanders', asked to use their
long-distance telephone and had telephoned to Putnam to come and get her
sideboard. After this strange act, she had passed Albert Graham, then by
chance alone in the store, with so wild a mien that he had not ventured to
make any inquiries. But he took pains to mention the matter, to everyone
who happened to come in, that morning; and, by dinner-time, every family
in Hillsboro was discussing over its pie the possibility that the
well-known _queer streak_, which had sent several of Cousin Tryphena's
ancestors to the asylum, was suddenly making its appearance in her.
I was detained, that afternoon, and did not reach her house until nearly
four; and I was almost the last to arrive. I found Cousin Tryphena very
silent, her usually pale face very red, the center of a group of neighbors
who all at once began to tell me what had happened. I could make nothing
out of their incoherent explanations. ... "Trypheny was crazy ... she'd
ought to have a guardeen ... that Canuck shoemaker had addled her
brains ... there'd ought to be a law against that kind of
newspaper. ... Trypheny was goin' like her great-aunt, Lucilly, that died
in the asylum. ..." I appealed directly to Cousin Tryphena for information
as to what the trouble was.
"There ain't any trouble 's I know of," she answered in a shaking voice.
"I've just heard of a widow-woman, down in the city, who's bringin' up her
two children in the corner of a basement where the green mold stands out
on the wall, and I'm goin' down to fetch her an' the children up here to
live with me ... them an' a little orphan boy as don't like the 'sylum
where they've put him----"
Somebody broke in on her to cry, "Why, Trypheny, you simple old critter,
that's four people! Where you goin' to put 'em in this little tucked-up
place?"
Cousin Tryphena answered doggedly and pointedly, "Your own grandmother,
Rebecca Mason, brought up a family of seven in a house no bigger than
this, and no cellar."
"But how, ..." another voice exclaimed, "air you goin' to get enough for
'em to eat? You ain't got but barely enough for yourself!"
Cousin Tryphena paled a little, "I'm a good sewer, I could make money
sewing ... and I could do washings for city-folks, summer-times...." Her
set mouth told what a price she paid for this voluntary abandonment of the
social standing that had been hers by virtue of her idleness. She went on
with sudden spirit, "You all act as though I was doin' it to spite you and
to amuse myself! I don't _want_ to! When I think of my things I've kept so
nice always, I'm _wild_ ... but how can I help it, now I know about 'em! I
didn't sleep a wink last night. I'll go clean crazy if I don't do
something! I saw those three children strugglin' in the water and their
mother a-holdin' on 'em down, and then jumpin' in herself----Why, I give
enough milk to the _cat_ to keep a baby ... what else can I do?"
I was touched, as I think we all were, by her helpless simplicity and
ignorance, and by her defenselessness against this first vision of life,
the vision which had been spared her so long, only to burst upon her like
a forest-fire. I hid an odd fancy that she had just awakened after a sleep
of half a century.
"Dear Cousin Tryphena," I said as gently as I could, "you haven't had a
very wide experience of modern industrial or city conditions and there are
some phases of this matter which you don't take into consideration." Then
I brought out the old, wordy, eminently reasonable arguments we all use to
stifle the thrust of self-questioning: I told her that it was very likely
that the editor of that newspaper had invented, or at least greatly
exaggerated those stories, and that she would find on investigation that
no such family existed.
"I don't see how that lets me out of _lookin'_ for them," said Cousin
Tryphena.
"Well, at least," I urged, "don't be in such a hurry about it. Take time
to think it over! Wait till--"
"Wait!" cried Cousin Tryphena. "Why, another one may be jumpin' in the
river this minute! If I'd ha' had the money, I'd ha' gone on the noon
train!"
At this point, the man from Putnam's came with a team from our livery to
carry away the Sheraton sideboard. Cousin Tryphena bore herself like a
martyr at the stake, watching, with dry eyes, the departure of her one
certificate to dear gentility and receiving with proud indifference the
crisp bills of a denomination most of us had never seen before.
"You won't need all that just to go down to the city," I remonstrated.
She stopped watching the men load her shining old treasure into the wagon
and turned her anguished eyes to me. "They'll likely be needing clothes
and things."