A RAINY DAY
On a rainy day Green Valley is just as interesting as it is in the
sunshine. Somehow though the big trees sag and drip and the wind sighs
about the corners there is nothing mournful about the streets.
The children go to school just as joyously in raincoats and rubber
boots. Their round glad faces, minus a tooth here and there, smile up
at you from under big umbrellas. After the school bell rings the
streets do get quiet but there is nothing depressing about that; for as
you pass along you see at doors and windows the contented faces of busy
women.
Old Mrs. Walley sits at her up-stairs front window sewing carpet rags.
Grandma Dudley at her sitting room window is darning her
grandchildren's stockings and carefully watching the street. Whenever
anybody passes to whom she wants to talk she taps on the window with
her thimble. She is a dear entertaining old soul but hard to get away
from. Women with bread at home waiting to be put into pans and men
hungry for their supper try not to let Grandma Dudley catch sight of
them.
Bessie Williams always makes cinnamon buns or doughnuts on rainy days.
She always leaves her kitchen door open while she is doing this because
she says she likes to hear the rain while she is working--that it
soothes her nerves.
So as you come up from around Bailey's strawberry patch and Tumley's
hedge you get a whiff of such deliciousness as makes your mouth water.
And more than likely Bessie sees you and comes running out with a few
samples of her heavenly work. As you dispose of those cinnamon buns
you forget that Bessie's voice is a trifle too high and too sweet, and
that she is inclined to be at times a bit overly religious and too
watchful of what she calls "vice" in people.
Over in front of the hotel Seth Curtis is standing up in his wagon and
sawing his horses' mouths cruelly. Seth has been so viciously
mistreated in his youth that he now abuses at times the very things
that he loves. He has paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece for
those horses and is mighty proud of them. But Seth's temper is never
good on a rainy day. Rain means no teaming and a money loss. Seth is
a mite too conscious of money. At any rate, the loss of even a dollar
makes him a sullen and at the least provocation an angry man. He isn't
liked much except by his wife and children.
In his home Seth is gentle and kind. Maybe because here he finds the
love and trust that all his life he has craved and been denied. Few of
his neighbors know how he laughs and romps and sings with his children
and what wonderful yarns he tells them, all made up out of his own head.
He is known to come from York State and has a Yankee shrewdness that
some people say can at times be called something else. He is wide and
square-shouldered though short, has a round stubborn head of reddish
hair with a promising bald spot, close-set blue eyes and an annoying,
almost an insulting habit of paying all his bills promptly and asking
odds and favors of nobody.
To-day he was to have taken a load of stones, granite niggerheads of
all sizes, up to Colonel Stratton's place. The Colonel is going to
make a fern bed around his summer house.
Colonel Stratton is a real military colonel. He wears burnsides and
they are very becoming. He has the most beautifully located residence
in Green Valley and like Doc Philipps has some of the most beautiful
trees in town. The great silver-leaf poplar guarding the wide front
lawns and the magnificent hardwood maples are the pride of the
colonel's heart.
The colonel has a cultivated garden that keeps his gardener pretty
busy. But the wild-flower garden along the rambling old north fence
the colonel tends himself. In June it is a hedge of lovely wild roses
followed a little later by masses of purple phlox. Then come the
meadow lilies and the painted cup and so on, until in late October you
can not see the old fence for the goldenrod, asters and gentians.
Today the colonel hoped to work on his fern bed but the weather being
what it is he takes instead from his well-filled book shelves "The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and settles down to a day of
solid joy.
In the big, softly stained house that stands in the solemn shade of
immense pines, just diagonally across from the colonel's house, lives
and labors Joshua Stillman, a man with the most wonderful memory, the
readiest tongue when there is real need of it, a little man brimful of
the most varied information and the sharpest humor.
For forty years and more he has been Green Valley's self-appointed
librarian. He draws no salary except the joy of doing what he loves to
do and he squanders, as his friends truly suspect, much secret money of
his own on it. The library is housed in the old church in a room so
small and dark that it hides the big work of this little man.
Joshua Stillman must be old but nobody ever thinks of what his age
might be, he is so very much alive. He goes to the city every day and
comes back early every afternoon. As he so seldom talks about himself
nobody knows exactly what he does except that it has to do with books
and small print.
Like Madam Howe, Joshua Stillman comes from the Revolutionary War
district and has great family traditions to uphold. He upholds them
with great humor. Not only is he full of old war and family lore, but
he has been mixed up with things literary. He has known men such as
Lowell and tells yarns about Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
He too came West in a prairie schooner and remembers all its wildness,
its uncouthness, its railroadless state. And he tells marvellous
stories about snakes, Indians and the little Chicago town built out on
the mudflats. He remembers very well indeed the steady stream of
ox-teams toiling over the few crude state roads. And he has in his
house rare volumes, valuable editions of famous works. He lets you
examine these if he thinks you are trustworthy and have a gentle way
with books.
There is another rare soul, the Reverend Alexander Campbell, who must
be introduced this rainy spring day. He is a retired Green Valley
minister and is full of humor and wisdom. He is an easily traced
descendant of the Scottish Stuarts. On a rainy day you will always
find him busy writing up the history of his family. Not that he
himself cares a fig for his genealogy. He is writing the book because
it gives him something to do and earns him a little peace from the
women folks.
He is a man whom the Lord has seen fit to try with a host of female
relatives, all family proud. He can fight the Devil and has done so
quite gallantly in four or five volumes of really good old-fashioned
sermons, "books," as he will tell you with a twinkle in his eye, "that
nobody could or would read nowadays." But he can not fight the women
of his family, so with a mournful chuckle he sits down every rainy day
and labors mightily on this great "historical work."
On sunny days he goes about his grounds, petting his trees and his
chickens, and working in his garden. He has several ingenious methods
of fighting weeds and raises the earliest, best and latest sweet corn
in Green Valley.
But men like the Colonel and Joshua Stillman and the Reverend Alexander
Campbell are representatives of Green Valley's leisure class. They
give Green Valley its high peace, its aristocratic flavor. But they
are a little remote from the town's workday life, being given to dreams
and memories and scholarly pursuits. They know little of the doings
and talks that go on in Billy Evans' livery barn, or the hotel. They
do, of course, go to the barber shop, the bank and the postoffice, and
always when abroad give courteous greeting to every townsman. But they
have never sat in the smoky, red-painted blacksmith shop or among the
patriarchs and town wits who in summer keep open-air sessions on the
wide, inviting platform in front of Uncle Tony's hardware store, and in
winter hold profound meetings around the store's big, glowing stove.
Uncle Tony's is the most social spot in town and is from a
news-gathering point of view most ideally situated. Sitting in one of
the smooth-worn old armchairs that Uncle Tony always keeps handy, you
can view the very heart of Green Valley's business life. Without
turning your head scarcely you can keep an eye on Martin's drug store,
keep tab on the comings and goings of the town's two doctors, and the
hotel's arriving and departing guests. If a commotion of any kind
occurs in front of Robert Hill's general store you see all the details
without losing count of the various parties who go in and out of Green
Valley's new bank.
Twice a day the active part of Green Valley dribbles into the
post-office where friends instantly pair off and mere acquaintances
stand idly by and discuss the weather. Besides its mail, Green Valley
usually buys two cents' worth of yeast and a dozen of baker's buns and
then goes down the street and orders its regular groceries at Jessup's.
Jessup's has been the one Green Valley grocery store ever since the
flood or thereabout, so venerable an establishment is it. Green Valley
would as soon think of changing its name as permitting a new grocer to
open up a rival store. And nobody dreams of disloyalty when buying
trifles at the post-office. In fact housewives are openly glad that
Dick, the postmaster, has taken to keeping strictly fresh yeast for
their leisure days and nice bakery things for times of stress and
unexpected company.
Dick Richards is a small, smiling, curly-headed man who looks older
than he should. This is because he wears a big man's mustache and is a
self-made boy. His parents died when he was barely old enough to
realize his loss and since then he has fought the world without a
single weapon unless cheerfulness and a giant patience can be called
weapons. Small, ungifted, he early learned to be content with little.
But side by side with this cheerful content is always the giant hope of
great things to come. And so though Green Valley buys only its yeast
and buns over his little counter he is happy and wraps each purchase up
carefully. And all the time he is thoughtfully, carefully setting out
other handy things and aids to the harassed housewife. For with his
giant patience Dick is waiting,--waiting and planning for a time that
is coming, that he knows must come. He talks these matters over with
no one except Joe Baldwin. He and Joe are great friends. Joe's little
shop is such a restful, hopeful place and Joe himself a gentle rather
than a loud and swearing man. One can talk things over joyfully with
Joe and feel sure of having one's confidence understood and kept. Like
Joe, Dick shrinks a little from the noisy, wholly earthy atmosphere of
the livery barn and blacksmith shop. He and Joe often go together of a
Saturday to the barber shop. They usually stay after closing hours for
the barber is their mutual friend.
This barber, John Gans, is a talker, a somewhat fierce and vehement
little man who lectures on many subjects but mostly on human rights and
politics. Joe and Dick, both silent men, look with awe at John's great
mental and discoursive powers. And because his views are theirs they
listen with something like joyful gratitude to hear their own thoughts
so clearly and fearlessly expressed.
The fiery little barber is thought by some to be a German anarchist and
by others a Russian socialist. Joe and Dick have been repeatedly
warned against him. But they are his loyal friends at all times. This
three-cornered friendship is little understood by the town and
ridiculed as a childish thing by the great minds that foregather at
Uncle Tony's.
But Grandma Wentworth remarked one Saturday afternoon, right in the
heart of town too, when Main Street was so crowded that everything that
was said aloud would be told and retold at church the next moraine and
repeated through the countryside the week following,--pointing to Joe,
Dick and John who all three happened to be going to the bank for
change,--"There go Green Valley's three good little men. And that
makes me think. I have another letter from Nanny Ainslee from Italy
enclosing foreign stamps for John."
Now until then nobody knew that John Gans was collecting stamps. But
that's Grandma Wentworth. She always knows things about people that
nobody else knows. And when any Green Valley folks go a-traveling they
sooner or later write to Grandma Wentworth. Sooner or later they get
homesick for Green Valley and they write for news to the one person
who, they know, will not fail to answer.
Of course some of them, like Jamie Danby, get into trouble. Jamie ran
away from home with a third-rate show. The show got stranded somewhere
in the western desert and Jamie wanted to come home. He knew that his
mother would be glad to see him but he wasn't at all sure of his
father. So he wrote to Grandma Wentworth, begging her to fix things
up. And she did.
And there was Tommy Dudley who went away home-steading somewhere out
West and who writes regularly to Grandma Wentworth in this fashion:
". . . for heaven's sake send me your baking-powder biscuit recipe and
how do you make buckwheat pancakes, and send me all kinds of vegetable
seeds and what's good for chicken lice and a sore throat, and tell
Carrie Bailey I ain't forgot her and that as soon as I've got things
going half-way straight here I'll come back and get her. Just now the
dog, the mules and chickens and a family of mice and I are all living
peacefully together in the one room but we're awful healthy if a good
appetite is any kind of a sign. I can't write to Carrie because her
folks open all her letters and they'd nag her into marrying that old
knock-kneed, squint-eyed, fat-necked son-of-a-gun of an Andrew Langly,
if they thought she was having anything to do with a worthless heathen
cuss like me. And say, Grandma, throw in some of your flower seeds,
those right out of your own garden, you know, the tall ones along the
fence and the little ones with the blue eyes and the still white ones
that smell so sweet. You don't know how lonesome I get off here. I've
got that picture of you in the sunbonnet right where it's handy, but
how I wish I had a picture of you without the sunbonnet so's I could
see your face, and say, Grandma, since I've been alone out here I've
come to see the sense in praying now and then, and tell Freddy Williams
I'll knock the stuffin's out of him when I hit town which will be in
about two years at the latest. He knows what for. Is Hank Lolly still
talking his way into three square meals a day and drinks, and is all
the news still ground over at Uncle Tony's gossip factory and is Mert
Hagley as big a tightwad as ever and is it true that Billy Evans
married a red-headed girl from Bloomingdale and started a livery barn,
and has Green Valley got a minister yet that's suitable to you and
Uncle Roger Allan? I'll have to stop and run out to the mail box with
this. The nearest one is twenty-five miles away but that's near in
this country and now for pity's sake, Grandma, don't forget . . ."
She didn't forget a thing. The messages were all delivered, the seeds
sent off and every question fully answered. Grandma did more than
that. She had Nanny Ainslee take pictures of the various Green Valley
institutions while going full blast. How Tommy laughed at the familiar
faces in Uncle Tony's armchairs and at Hank Lolly leaning up against
the livery barn, and how homesick he grew as he looked at the crowd
getting off at the station, and the school children playing in the old
school yard where he used to play. The picture of Grandma Wentworth
and Carrie standing on Grandma's front porch hurt his throat and shook
him strangely. That was Tommy Dudley.
And there was Susie Melton. Grandma saved and remade Susie that time
she went to New York to see the world. Susie had taught a country
school for twenty years, ever since she was sixteen, and that trip to
New York was her first vacation. Susie was an innocent soul and the
very second day in the great city some heartless thief took everything
out of her purse but a two-cent stamp. Susie was panic-stricken and
the only thing she could think of was Grandma Wentworth's face. So she
took that stamp and sent a letter to Green Valley and it was Grandma
Wentworth who really managed that vacation though to this day nobody
but she herself knows how and she won't tell. Susie came back so
rejuvenated, with such color in her cheeks, such brightness in her
eyes, and so much snap and spunk in her system that Jake Tuttle up and
married her two months after she came home. And he's been happy ever
since for in spite of her school-teaching handicap Susie has turned out
to be a born cook and housewife. And as if to make up to her those
twenty colorless years Providence sent Susie twin boys at the end of
her first year and twin girls at the end of the third.
This blossoming out of little drab Susie Melton was a shock to Green
Valley. But Grandma Wentworth wasn't a mite surprised and said she
knew that Susie would come into her own some day. As for Jake, he is
so in love with his rosy little wife and his four good-looking children
that he just goes on raising bumper crops without hardly knowing how he
does it. And he says he doesn't hanker much after heaven; that home is
plenty good enough for him. And when he goes to town Jake takes care
to tie his team in front of Billy Evans' place instead of the hotel.
"Not that I can't take a drink or two and stop," he explained to Billy,
"but I have good cider and buttermilk and Susie's grape juice to home
and the smartest of us ain't any too wise while we stand beside a bar.
And I'd ruther go home dead than go back to Susie and the children the
least bit silly with liquor. When the Almighty sends a man like me a
family like mine He's got something in His mind and I ain't agoing to
spoil things just for a drink or two of slops."
So on rainy days Billy's office is the gathering place for such men as
find the atmosphere in the hotel and blacksmith shop a little too
fragrantly spirited for their eventual domestic happiness.
Not that Billy is a teetotaler. No, indeed. He has his drink whenever
he wants it. And he good-naturedly permits such staggering wretches as
the hotel refuses to accommodate to sleep it off in his barns. And he
is the only man in Green Valley who ever seriously hired Hank Lolly and
kept him sober twelve hours at a stretch. The other business men make
considerable fun of Billy's hired help; the trifling boys he hires,
boys that everybody else has tried and sent packing. Billy says
nothing though he did explain fully to Grandma Wentworth once.
"You see it's like this, Grandma. I ain't fixed to pay fancy wages
just yet and those kids that everybody runs down ought to be off the
streets doing something. Of course some of them _are_ trifling. But I
ain't such a stickler for sharp-edged goodness myself nor in any way at
all virtuous. I'm terrible easy-going myself and I know just how kids
like Charlie Pinley feel working for a man, a careful, exact man like
Mr. James D. Austin. By gosh! if I had to work a whole week for Mr.
Austin I'd kill myself. Never could stand too much neatness and
worrying about time being money and human nature too full of meanness.
No, sir,--I can't live like that. I guess maybe it's because I'm kind
of no-account myself that I understand these kids and they understand
me. They all like horses same as me and I pay them all I can afford
and will do more for them when things pick up and grow.
"Now there's people as laugh about me hiring Hank Lolly. I guess it's
the first time Hank has ever held a job longer than a week. But I tell
you, Grandma, I like Hank and I understand him. And I don't ever think
I'm fit enough myself to be forever preaching at him about reforming.
I figure that what a man eats and drinks is none of my business in a
way. But I did explain to Hank that if he would come and work for me
I'd furnish him with so many drinks every day and meals and a
comfortable place to sleep. I showed him that it was better to be sure
of a few drinks every day than to get blind drunk on a week's wages and
then go weeks maybe without a decent spree, without decent meals, maybe
without underwear and an overcoat. And Hank saw the sense of that. He
gets his meals up at the house. My old woman (Billy's wife was a
pretty girl of twenty-three and still a bride) sides in with what I'm
doing and she sets Hank down every day to three square meals. And a
man just can't hold so much liquor on a comfortably filled stomach.
Anyhow, Hank is doing fine and I'm putting a few dollars in the bank
unbeknownst for him. I can't trust him just yet with any noticeable
amount of cash. But I'm never down on him for his drinking. No, sir!
Every time he feels that he must get drunk or die why he just comes up
and tells me and I get him whatever he thinks he needs for his jag and
let him get full right here where I can watch him. Why--Grandma, Hank
has an easier life than I have. He doesn't need to worry about
anything and he knows it. And I'll be goshed if I don't think he's
improving. He don't need a jag near so often as he used to and I can
trust him now with any kind of work. Why, only last week I gave him a
moving job, a big one, and sent him off twenty miles with my two best
teams. And he brought those loads of furniture back O. K., dry and
without a scratch, though I couldn't sleep all night listening to the
buckets of rain dashing against the house and thinking of Hank drunk
out there in it with the furniture and wagons in splinters and the
horses dead maybe. And honest, when I saw him pull up into the barns,
I just hauled him off that seat and--well--I just said things, told him
what I thought of him and how I appreciated what he'd done. 'And now,
Hank,' I says, 'you can have the greatest old jag you've ever planned
on for this.'
"And I'm goshed if he didn't laugh out kind of funny and says he,
'Billy, I'm so goldarned wet right now that I couldn't stand another
drop of wetness anywhere. But all these five hours that the rain was
a-sloshing me I kept thinking of them there apple dumplings with cream
that Mrs. Evans makes (Hank always calls the old woman Mrs. Evans).
So, Billy, if it's all the same to you and I could get full on them
there apple dumplings, why, them's my choice.'
"Well--say, I just jumped to the telephone and I guess the old woman
was making apple dumplings before I got through talking. Anyway, Hank
filled up so that he said he felt like a flour barrel with an apple
tree a-sprouting out of it. And Doc Philipps says it's a good sign,
Hank liking sweet things that way, because a man soaked in alcohol
can't abide sweets.
"And so that's Hank. Now this week I hired that little spindle-legged
Barney boy. I hired him to keep this dumbed office clean so's my old
woman wouldn't raise such hell every time she steps in here. I'm
goshed if this here stove don't get fuller of ashes quicker than any
other stove in Green Valley. And you know the boys who come in here do
spit about careless like and that dumbed screen door is always open and
the calendars do get specked up considerable. And the old woman is
just where I don't want her being upset about anything.
"Well, I hired that Barney boy to keep the place clean. You know that
So-and-So (we won't mention any names) fired him because he said the
kid stole money. Well, now--Grandma, you know that's a hard thing to
start out a boy in life with in a town of this size, especially a
little spindle-legged one at that. I felt real sorry for the young one
so I calls him in here day before yisterday and I says:
"'Look here, Barney, could you keep this place clean?'
"'Sure,' he says.
"'All right, then sail in now. The broom's right behind the door
somewheres and scarcely used and there's sawdust and rags somewheres in
the barn. Ask Hank about them. And Barney,' I says, 'here's the money
in this right-hand drawer. Sometimes people come in when everybody's
out and you might have to make change.'
"The boy kind of flushed but I didn't let on I noticed. I only said,
'You know, Barney, I'm just beginning this business and I'm poor so you
keep a sharp eye on the change and help me get this business going
lickety-split so's we'll all be rich together. For when the profits go
up here the wages are going up. It isn't just my livery barn, Barney,
but yours, too, so just you go to it and if ever you want anything or
make a mistake just you come and tell me and it'll be all right.'
"Now, Grandma, that's all I said to that young one and I'll be goshed
if I don't think that kid's turning out to be the best bet I've made.
But, of course, I always think that about every one of them. But,
honestly, Grandma, Barney has brought in five new customers and last
week he kept chinning and holding on to a sixth man that come in here
until I came in and made the deal. Never let go of him a minute and
just entertained him to kill time and give me a chance to get here.
And I'm going to buy some books to learn myself and Barney bookkeeping.
We can't none of us keep books here and that dumbed account book is
lost every time you want it and I've got the poorest memory. Of
course, now and then a party comes in and tries to get out of paying
but the boys usually settle him and so I don't lose much that way. But
the old woman wants me to do this slick and proper and her word goes.
So Barney and I are going to study.
"I'm telling you all this, Grandma, because you always did understand
my crazy way of doing things ever since that time when you sent me to
the store for that can of molasses and I give the money to the tramp
instead. Remember?"
Billy laughed heartily at the memory and Grandma Wentworth laughed,
too, laughed so hard that she had to wipe her eyes. And she smiled all
the way home.
"Some day," said Grandma Wentworth to her old friend and neighbor,
Roger Allan, "I'll ask some minister to preach a sermon on 'God's
Humor.' I suppose that the Almighty gets so tired running things just
so and listening to petitions for sunshine and petitions for rain and
to prayers for automobiles and diamonds and interest on mortgages and
silk stockings, death and babies that some days he just gets tired of
being a serious God and shuffles things up for a joke. And, mark me,
Roger, that boy, Billy Evans, is just one of God's tender jokes. If
only people would see that and laugh.
"Now, Billy has no money sense, no business ability. That's what the
real business men like George Hoskins and all the old blessed Solomons
at Uncle Tony's say. Yet Billy is making money. His business is
growing just because without knowing it Billy has got hold of the
biggest force in the world to run his business. He's just using
love,--plain, old-fashioned love,--and love is making money for Billy.
He's picked out of the very gutters all the human waste and rubbish
that the others, the wise business men, threw there and with the town's
worst drunkard and half a dozen mistreated, misborn, misunderstood boys
he's playing the business game and winning. He's got the knack of
making his help feel like partners and he's so square and sensible in
his dealings with them that they are all ready to die for him. Now if
that isn't the greatest kind of a business gift I want to know.
"And every time I think of smiling, untidy Billy Evans with a pretty
wife as neat as wax, living in a house that she has made as sweet and
pretty as a picture--well--I just laugh. Nobody but God could have
arranged things and balanced them up like that. Talk about any of us
improving things in this world! If we'd only learn to mind our own
business as well as God minds His."
But very few besides Grandma Wentworth understood Billy and his livery
barn. Even Joe Baldwin failed to see just what Billy was doing in his
droll, unconscious, warm-hearted way. Still Joe liked Billy. In fact,
everybody liked Billy. And he was welcomed everywhere and nowhere more
than in George Hoskins' blacksmith shop.
Next to the bank building George Hoskins was considered the most solid
thing in town. He was the brawny blacksmith and people said a very
rich man. He was big in every way. Big in body, big in temper, big in
his friendships, big in his drinks. He was indeed so big a man that he
did not know how to be mean or little in any way. He did not know his
own great strength nor think much of the weakness of his fellows. His
grand proportions and great simplicity were what attracted men to him.
Women did not know and so could not like him.
To them George Hoskins was a great, grimy ogre. George, big in all
things, was big in his love for the tiny woman who was his wife. Other
women George did not see though he spoke to them on the street. He had
pleaded on bended knees for the love of his tiny woman and when he got
her all other women became just strange shadows. So only his wife and
Doc Philipps knew how tender a heart was his.
Green Valley housewives caught glimpses of this man's great figure
towering above the roaring forge and saw the crowd of lesser men, their
husbands, gathered about him. They went home and told each other that
George Hoskins was a big, rude brute, that he drank like a fish and
would bring the town to ruin, for he was the village president.
And while they were saying these things about George Hoskins he was
perhaps throwing out of his shop some smug traveling man who had
stepped into it to get in out of the rain and had mistakenly tried to
make himself at home there by telling a filthy yarn that sullied all
womanhood.
These then are a few of the many human attractions of Green Valley.
They are listed here to give the right sort of setting and the proper
feel to this story of Green Valley life.