congregation, and even more generous in contribution to the minister’s
support than is the bean, for the beet yields top and bottom, root and
branch. In summer the beet-top furnishes the first succulent taste of
green, and afterwards the round red root of him is a defense against the
lean and hungry winter months.
But for the most part vegetables are an ill-behaving lot. The cabbage
inflates itself with an appearance of pompous righteousness, the longer
to deceive our hopes and the more largely to conceal its heart of rot.
The radish sends up generous leaves as if it meant to fulfill all the
mendacious promises of the seed-catalogue, and when uprooted exhibits
the pink tenuity of an angle-worm. The cucumber is at first, for all
our ministrations, hesitant and coy of leaf within its box, and then
suddenly bursts into a riot of leafiness whereby it does its best to
conceal from our inquiring eye its swelling green cylinders. Corn,
deceptive like the radish, is prone to put forth a hopeful fountain of
springing green, only to ear out prematurely, and reward us with kernels
blackened and corroded.
In the parochial garden the pea is one to tease us always with its
might-be and might-have-been. If peas are to grow beyond “the kid’s lip,
the stag’s antler,” they require the moral support of brush, and brush
is something a minister’s family, aided only by a decrepit gardener,
cannot always supply. Unsupported by brush, our fair peas lie along the
ground, an ever-present disappointment.
Two vegetables have always haunted my mother’s aspirations, in vain. I
hope they grow in heaven, for it is in the nature of things that celery
and asparagus should be denied to a nomadic earthly clergy, requiring,
as the one does, richness of soil, and as the other, permanence.
Illusory asparagus, it takes three years to grow him! Of course if some
disinterested predecessor had planted him, we might in our turn eat
him. But our too itinerant clergy do not give overmuch thought to their
successors. Barren parochial gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about
letting Apollos water.
But it is not the vegetables alone that strain my mother’s sturdy
optimism. All gardens are subject to invasion by marauding animals,
differing in size and soul and species, all the way from the microscopic
tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and playful puppy, up to the cow,
ruminating our young corn-shoots beneath the white summer moon, on to
my father himself, planting aberrant feet where his holden ministerial
eyes behold no springing seedlings in the blackness of the soil. But our
worst enemies are hens, and as it happens at present, dissenting hens,
sallying forth from the barnyard fastnesses of the Baptist parsonage
upon our helpless Anglican garden, plucking our young peas up out of the
soil, and then later and more brazenly prying them out of the very pod!
Forthwith they fall upon our lettuce-beds, scratching away with fanatic
fervor, as if for all the world they meant to uproot Infant Baptism from
out the land. All this is too much for my mother. On the vantage-ground
of the back doorsill she stands and hurls coal out of the kitchen
scuttle at the sectarian fowls,--coal and anathema, low-voiced and
virulent. Hers is no mere vulgar many-mouthed abuse. There is nothing of
so delicate pungency as the vituperation of a minister’s wife, really
challenged to try the subtleties of English and yet offend no convention
of seemliness. Add to the fact of the challenge, another fact, that she
is of Irish blood, and that her gallery gods are just inside the door,
and it is a pity her audience should be merely the hens and I.
Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly applausive of my mother’s defense
of her garden, secretly appreciative of the devious ways of vegetables,
witnessing--to forgive--the wanderings of my father’s flock. For if
all the flock were abstemious and orthodox instead of being, as some
are, frankly given over to alcoholism and agnosticism and what not; and
if the gardens grew, as gardens should grow, into honest, God-fearing
cabbages and potatoes; if the righteous corn parted green lips from
kernels firm and white as a dentist’s placard, how then should the
parish gardens that dot our hill-strewn countryside bring forth that
fruit of laughter which consoles the dwellers in these our tiny
strongholds of lonely effort?
XX
_My Little Town_
Vividly at times my memory restores to me the sensation of the eternal
Sabbath. Beyond the stained-glass windows, the sunshine is sifted over
daisied graves. Perhaps, for all one knows, the grown-up angels are
letting the little ones sport over those graves at this very minute,
even though it is Sunday, for there are no parishes in heaven to say no
to naughtiness. My mother is held home from the sanctuary that morning.
The three of us sit a-row in the front pew. Above us our father thunders
forth his sermon, to which we give but scant attention, that roar in
his voice being part of the programme of this one day in seven. Against
my own shoulder drowses my little sister’s head. On my other side, my
little brother conceals his yawns by receiving them into a little brown
paw, and then, as it were, softly sliding them into his pocket, as if
his hand had other business there. But I, I sit erect and unwinking, for
I am the minister’s eldest, and the Parish is at my back.
While the younger ones nodded, while the infant angels played
hide-and-seek out in the graveyard sunshine, of what was I thinking?
This: of the minister’s daughter who had lived in that Parish before me.
A great girl of five she had been when she used, having waited until her
father was engrossed in his sermon, to slip from that very front pew in
which I sat, to steal up into the chancel, and there, all silently but
with impish grimace and antics, would she hold the horrified gaze of the
Parish so fascinated that her father would at length be diverted from
his eloquence, and forthwith, swooping from the pulpit all in a swirl of
wrathful surplice, would bear his small daughter into the vestry room
and lock her there before resuming his sermon. She was very naughty,
but oh, what larks, what larks! So I thought then, and still to-day I
am querying whether that little girl--inevitably though she must, under
steady parochial pressure, have been subdued to a womanhood of decency
and decorum--does not to-day in middle life rejoice that once upon a
time, at five, she had her little fling in her father’s chancel!
But we were children of no such independent pattern; and so on every
Sabbath we presented to the Parish’s criticism unwriggling infant
backs, little ramrods of religion, while our thoughts went flying
off on impish business of their own; and, as the years flowed by, on
and up to man’s estate we tramped, always thrusting forward in sight
of the Parish, fashionable, urban, critical, our shabby best foot,
skittish though that foot might be. Holding well together, on we went,
running the gantlet of many parishes, until at last we trudged us into
Littleville. We supposed my little town would be a parish too, but it is
not.
Cozily remote and forgotten among its blue hills, Littleville has
preserved a primitive hospitality, so that, battered nomads of much
clerical adventuring, we sank gratefully into its little rectory. There
was perhaps a reason for our sincerity of welcome, for if we had had
our parishes, so, too, had Littleville had its parsons. It belongs
to that class of far-away, wee congregations whither they send old
ministers outwearied, to be alone with old age and memories beside the
empty, echoing churches reminiscent of the days when farmers attended
service. And if among these venerable shepherds there have fallen
to Littleville’s lot some whose scholarly old wits had gone a bit
doddering, so that they believed and preached whimsical doctrine, or
could no longer trace without assistance the labyrinth of the liturgy,
or others, younger, who had proved ministerial shipwrecks because they
were burdened by some fatal handicap in child or wife,--if such have
come to Littleville, Littleville has been very kindly. My little town
has accepted its hay-crop as the rain has willed, and its ministers as
the bishop has sent them. Its views on both visitations are produced in
a spirit of comment rather than criticism; its conduct toward both is
that of adaptation rather than argument.
For instance, there was that bachelor-rector who preferred the society
of beasts to that of his parishioners in the rectory, and to that of his
fellow saints in the new Jerusalem. During his incumbency a setting-hen
occupied the fireplace in the spare room, and a dog sat on a chair at
his celibate table, and crouched before the pulpit during service.
Littleville did not protest; rather, of a week-day, the female members
from time to time descended upon the unhappy man in his retirement,
and with broom and mop-pail cleaned him up most thoroughly; and of a
Sunday the whole body of the congregation listened unwinking while their
rector’s brandished fist demanded from their stolid faces eternal
salvation for his Rover,--listened with those inscrutable eyes I have
come to respect: for I know that while Littleville never argued with
their parson the point of kennels in the skies, they will turn this
theological morsel under their tongues down at the hardware store unto
the third and fourth generation.
Then there was the vicar whose poor boy was scarred in a way that
Littleville, sympathetic but always delightedly circumstantial, has
painted upon my imagination. When, during this rectorate, rival
sectarians would point to the goodly ruddiness of some Baptist or
Methodist scion, the Littleville Anglicans would loyally argue that Seth
Lawson over at Hyde’s Crossing had a little girl who had four thumbs,
and Seth was just a plain man, and no minister.
Tradition tells also of a parson who trod the mazes of the ritual so
uncertainly that he was just as likely to jump backwards as forwards in
the psalter. With inimitable delicacy Littleville would stand holding
its prayer-books at attention, ready to jump with him, whichever way he
went. However, certain women have confided to me how fearful they were,
on their wedding-day, lest this retrograde movement might occur during
the solemnization of matrimony.
Thus it came about, I fancy, that Littleville received us with relief
as well as warmth, for our theology was so simple and sound that hardly
could the agnostic barber find fault with it; a family studiously
normal, we showed
“Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious;”--
and we proved able to conduct service with sonorous equilibrium.
Here we have been accepted and courteously entreated. Here we have not
had to live up to any parochial pretensions, for my little town does
not play bridge or give dinner-parties. Here in my little town we need
not rise betimes to perform miracles of domestic service on the sly in
order to be free to attend on the lordly city parishioner possessed of
maidservants and manservants. Rather we may wear our gingham pinafores
on the front porch, and pop our peas under the very nose of the senior
warden, and very probably with his assistance, if he perchance slouch
down beside us, blue-overalled and genial.
Littleville, always leisurely, took its time about getting acquainted
with us. It hurtled us through no round of teas, it did not put us
through the paces of a parish reception. Rather it came and hammered
together our broken furniture, decayed by much moving, it stole in at
the back door to help us when we were sick, it let us know it missed
us when we went worldward, visiting. Of such as it had, it made us
gifts,--a yellow pumpkin vaulting our back fence, potatoes rattling into
our cellar-bins unannounced while we were still abed, golden maple syrup
flowing for us at the time when tin pails gleam all up and down the
street, and the sap-vats bubble and steam pungently; or perhaps the gift
is the reward of the gunning season, as when a vestryman-huntsman, as we
stand about the social door after church, darts aside into the coalbin
and thence presents a newspaper package streaked with pink; peeped at to
please his beaming eye, it exhibits a brace of skinned squirrels, which
we bear oozily homeward from divine service.
There is in the mere aspect of Littleville a latent friendliness
perceptible to all eyes that give more than a touring-car glance. Over
our hilly streets slumbers eternal leisure. Whatever it is, Littleville
always has time to talk about it. When anything happens we all go
running out of our front doors to discuss it, but otherwise our streets
are very still: rows of farmhouses planted side by side for sociability,
while behind each stretch its acres of stony pasture and half-shorn
woodland. At night, silence and darkness settle upon us early. By nine
even the hotel has gone to bed, so that it would with difficulty be
summoned forth in protesting pajamas if a late traveler should clamor
at the door. Of a starless night you may look forth at eight and see
no glimmer of light or life all up and down the street. When we come
to church of a winter evening, we carry lanterns as we plod a drifted
path in high-girt skirts and generous goloshes. One’s sleep is sometimes
startled by a flare of light that streams from wall to wall and passes,
as some mysterious late lantern-bearer goes by, leaving the night again
all blackness, pierced sometimes by the crazy laughter of an owl, or
beaten upon by the insistent clamor of frogs.
Those who live by Littleville’s quiet streets have had time to
have their little ways. For example, they still have “comp’ny” in
Littleville. In other places they no longer have comp’ny, no longer
sacrifice for unprotesting hours and days and weeks all domestic
peace and privacy to the exigencies of an intrusive guest. Comp’ny,
imminent, instant, or past, is discussed in bated whispers at back
doors. Assistance and sympathy are proffered as in a run of fever. As
for the comp’ny itself, it knows its privileges and never resigns its
prerogatives. However efficient at home, when a-visiting, it can sit
on the barnyard bars in its best store suit and without an emotion of
conscience watch its host milk twenty cows, or within doors it can fold
its house-wifely hands upon its waistline, regard without compunction a
lap for once apronless, and rock and chatter hour after hour while its
hostess pants and perspires to feed it. But Littleville has one revenge:
one day, it, too, can put on its best and drive off, and itself be
somebody’s comp’ny.
Comp’ny by definition comes from abroad, invading our peaceful citadel
from some hillside farm or neighboring village; within our own bulwarks
we are all too neighborly for any such alien stiffness. Our streets are
cheery with greeting. Among the younger fry, “Hello” is the universal
term of accost. “Hello!” some youngster yodels to me from across the
street, “hello,” supplemented by the frank employment of my baptismal
name, sign and seal of my adoption. We are careless of the little
formalities of Miss and Mr. here, just as our gentlemen are careless of
their hat-raising. Why should Littleville man endanger head and health
from false deference to his hearty, workaday comrade, woman? From the
older men, surely, twinkle and grin are greeting enough without any
up-quirking of rheumatic elbows; and as for the younger men, I have
a fondness for their method of raising the right index finger to the
hat-brim, with a smile that points in the same direction.
Although we are without formality, certain conventions always belong
to a call. The popular hours are two and six, with the tacit exemption
of Saturday evening, for then we might inconsiderately intercept the
gentleman of the house en route from his steaming wash-tub in the
kitchen to his ice-bound bedroom. We have our set forms of greeting and
departure. A hostess must always meet a caller with a hearty, “Well,
you’re quite a stranger.” A caller must always remain a cordial two
hours, and rising to leave must invariably say, “Well, I’m making a
visit, not a call”; to which the hostess responds, “Why, what’s your
hurry?” Conversation must hold itself subject to interruption, must be
prepared to arrest itself in the midst of the most lurid recital in
order that all may fly to the window if man or beast or both pass by.
As to that conversation itself, we really do not care for feverish
animation. We allow ourselves long pauses while we creak our rockers,
pleasantly torpid. Should our emptiness become too acute, there is
always one subject that can fill it. We always have the sick. We report
to each other anxiously that So-and-So is having “a poor spell,” a
condition that, if obstinate, will result in the poor man or woman’s
“doctoring,” a perilous substitute for home treatment. We have our
hereditary nostrums of combinations quainter than Shakespeare’s
cauldron, and home-made brews of herbs that sound almost Chaucerian.
There is suggestion still more remote in “hemlock tea.” I am not certain
of its ingredients, but its effect is to produce a state of affairs
known as a “hemlock sweat.” A “hemlock sweat” is the last resort before
sending for the doctor, and it generally brings him.
If our interest in our diseases should ever flag, we have, of course,
always, our neighbors. In Littleville, gossip has become an art, in so
far as it possesses the perfection of pungency without taint of malice,
like the chat of an inquisitive Good Samaritan. When Littleville talks
about its neighbors, I listen in reverence before a penetration I have
never seen anywhere else. Littleville has not gone abroad to study
human nature; it has stayed at home, and watched every flicker of its
neighbor’s eyelash, has marked each step taken from toddling infancy
to toddling old age, has listened to every word uttered from babyhood
to senility. Oh, Littleville knows its own; and knowing its own, knows
other folk too. New-comer though I am, I should venture no pretense in
the face of that slumbering twinkle in Littleville’s eyes,--Littleville,
sharp of tongue and genial in deeds.
This grace of Littleville charity, charity, keen-eyed yet tender, can
be, I suppose, the possession of stationary people only; of people who
have been babies together, have wedded and worked, been born and been
buried together, whose parents and grandparents also are unforgotten,
whose dead lie on white-dotted hillsides in every one’s knowledge. The
thought of this bond of permanence, of memories, has its wistfulness for
us others. You can never be very hard on the woman, however fallen, who
was once the little Sallie to share her cooky with you at recess; and,
however his poor grizzled head be addled now with drink and failure, a
man is still the little Joey whose bare feet trod with yours the stubble
of forbidden midnight orchards.
All the world looks askance at a gypsy, and we are gypsies, we
clericals; yet never gypsies more involuntary, more home-loving at
heart. We are pilgrims, never dropping, as we sojourn in parish after
parish, the pilgrim cloak of an affable reserve. Back to the edges of
my memory, we ourselves have been always the Ministry. Sundays in that
straight front pew, week-days in that well-watched rectory, always the
Ministry, never ourselves. But here at last in my little town, is that
straight cloak of ministerial decorum slipping from us? May we set down
our scrip and staff? At last do we dare to be ourselves, neighbors with
neighbors? Do we dare to be part of a place? Perhaps.
Already in brief years I have acquired a little of that admitted
intimacy with a community that comes only through knowing some bit of
its history for one’s self and not on hearsay; for I have observed the
course of several of our thrifty Littleville courtships whereby our
youngsters in their later teens set themselves sturdily beneath the yoke
of matrimony, promptly bringing forth a procession of babes, as promptly
led to baptism. Also I have stood with the rest in our little graveyard
when some old neighbor has been laid to rest. I share with the rest the
memory of kind old hands grown motionless, and chirrupy old voices now
stilled; so that some of these graves, turning slowly from raw soil to
kindlier green, are mine, the stranger’s.
Because those newer graves are mine, I may linger in more assured
friendliness among the older ones, for to me these brief white-portaled
streets of this other Littleville are kindly too; so that I like to go
a-calling here also, letting my fancy knock at these low green mounds
beneath the mat of periwinkle, above which sometimes flash the blue
wings of birds or of sailing butterfly, while just beyond the fence the
bobolinks go singing above the clover-fields. Country graveyards are
pleasant places; at least ours has no gloom of tangled undergrowth and
dank cypress shadow, for we are a house-wifely company, and we like all
things well swept and shipshape, even cemeteries.
Even the tragedies the marbles tell are softened now. There are many
little gravestones in our cemetery, recording little lives long ago
cut short. Many of them belong to that winter I have heard about, a
winter long before antitoxin or even disinfectants, when one Sunday in
Littleville twenty children lay dead. It was sad then, but to-day to the
tune of soaring bobolinks I must be thinking how gayly the little ones
put on their winglets all together, and, a white flock, went trooping
off, shepherded by angels. In a village graveyard where the dead lie so
cozily close to home, in a graveyard so blue above and green below, one
has to remember how many things are sadder than death.
I come back from reverie as the ’bus bell goes tinkling by, beyond the
white-arched gate, and I rise to gaze to see who has come to us from the
world, for the ’bus comes from the train, and the train comes from far
away, where the world runs its whirligig, far from Littleville.
The ’bus connects us with life. When one arrives at home, usually at
nightfall, there always is the old ’bus man at the train step, peering
up and stretching out both welcoming arms to receive our packages and
bags. When he has stowed all away, in he climbs rheumatically, and off
we trundle, rattling and wheezing along, for driver and horses and ’bus
are all in the last stages of decrepitude. The lantern hung between the
shafts plays out its straight jet of light, but within it is so dark
that I cannot guess our whereabouts until we draw up at the hotel. The
hotelkeeper comes out in his shirt-sleeves to receive the fat agents
we have brought him, and, peering hospitably into the dark recesses,
gives me welcome too. Off and on we rumble, and as we draw rein at the
post-office, the post-master, shouldering the mail-bag, spies me and
extends his hearty handshake; from the newspaper office near by, where
the editor is working, comes a hazarded greeting, to which I respond
cheerily from my dark hole, and become forthwith one of to-morrow’s
items.
On and up the hill. I can just discern the white belfry against the
blue-black sky. Beyond the church is the rectory, and there a lantern
on the step and a ruddy door flung wide. I have drawn up, returning,
to rectory doors before, but somehow in Littleville it is different;
to-morrow, on Sunday, Littleville will be glad I have come back, and
will say so, at church, for in Littleville Sunday is different, too.
Here there is never the Sabbath stiffness of my childhood. Here the
front pew does not straighten my spine intolerably. Rather I turn half
about, run a careless arm along the pewrail, and chat huskily with
my rear neighbor until church begins, and even in service I may nod
encouragement to the choir if they happen to be brought to confusion in
the Te Deum, or in the very sermon I may peep under some little flowered
straw hat and get a delighted grin in response. When service is over I
shall be a long time getting to the door, having so many hands I want to
shake, for we do not call my little town, Parish; we call it home.
XXI
_Genus Clericum_