Each verse was commented upon, with a sort of mock literary criticism.
The needs of the poor
For garden manure.
That was bad enough.
The lack of barn litter
Makes poverty bitter.
That was worse.
Let her give us fertilizer
If she wants us not to prize her.
That was intolerable, almost.
Our need of land dressing
Is truly distressing.
That was absolutely and unpardonably intolerable.
For Miss Sisson, poor old thing, who had moved in the committee that
perhaps the more elegant term of "land dressing" might be substituted
for "manure," which seemed coarse, had made herself ridiculous at the
time in the club. And now, when she was mourning her sister, she was
made ridiculous publicly. Well, Johnnie Benton had a great deal to
answer for! All the women said that.
For it had happened some years after Mrs. Benton had bought one whole
freight car full of peony plants at reduced prices and had sold them
off cheap to the women of her county. She had been driving through
the western suburbs of Chicago, and had noticed certain sterile spots
that during the war had been used as allotment gardens. It was
pitiful to her to see those poor hard-working foreigners were still
trying to grow a few vegetables on sandy rubbish heaps. It made her
consider what a lot of manure was piled up in the barnyards around
her town. She laid the matter before the garden committee of the
club at once. If every farmer's wife who had bought a peony would
give one sackful of manure, the committee would see that it was
distributed among the needy allotments of Cook County. The county
adviser had opposed the scheme bitterly. The Farm Bureau had
condemned it. Every ounce of manure was needed at home, the county
bulletin said. But Mrs. Benton asked how farmers working on their
distant forties were going to know how many sacks of manure their
wives gave away. Did they ever count them, wasteful managers that
they were? She would let the women know when the truck would call
for it.
But this generous plan had been balked by Johnnie and his kind. They
said it had been all right enough to get the loan of the family cars
when they were freshmen in high school, and to go driving about
distributing peonies. But they drew the line at manure. Mrs. Benton
said to Emily that she had told Johnnie he was a selfish boy, and
that he had said: "Well, maybe I'm selfish. But I'm certainly
fragrant." Emily had never believed Johnnie capable of that retort.
She thought his mother had made it up for the story. But
now--well--she was beginning to think maybe he had made it.
Johnnie had arrived home from college two days after the headline
appeared, and his mother had been ready to receive him. She said he
had to apologize to the whole club publicly. He refused. And Emily
was trying to arbitrate between them. "Honestly, Mrs. Kenworthy," he
said, "it never entered my mind that you'd ever hear of it in this
town. Mother ought to believe me when I say I wouldn't have done it
for anything if I'd known that man French was ever going to get hold
of it. I was in bad with the dean, sitting there in his office
waiting to get hauled over the coals about my work, as usual, and I
couldn't help hearing what he was saying. He was raving. He told
the class committee that if they couldn't get something better than
the drivel they had submitted, the annual play was off. I was
feeling low when he got through with me, believe me. And I knew what
I'd get at this end if I came home flunking again. And that night
when I was lying in bed it all came to me at once, and I got right up
and wrote it down." Johnnie spoke now without awe of his
inspiration. "There was the chorus of high-brow old maids singing
about the need of the poor for garden manure. It isn't my fault they
rhyme, is it, now? I might have said that, Mrs. Kenworthy, but you
know I never would have poked fun publicly at old Miss Sisson. I'd
never have put in about land dressing. Would I, now?" And Emily,
considering the shyness of the poor elegant old thing, believed that
Johnnie would have had more mercy. "And then," he went on, "I had
that chorus of farmers, regular stage hayseeds, with long gray beards
and pitchforks, resisting them. And the Bolshevists singing."
Johnnie hummed:
"'Tis the lack of horse litter
Makes poverty bitter.
"It just all does rhyme. And I had a hero like me, refusing to drive
a truck, and eloping with a farmer's daughter in a manure spreader.
And every farmer in the chorus was leading a calf or a pig with him
as he danced. I told them not to have those kids as animals. And
when the audience began to applaud, one of the little fiends rose up
on his hind legs and began to dance. And then they all did, of
course. The people nearly went into spasms, they laughed so. Oh,
boy! It was a hot show! I was popular for a while. The skirts just
clung to me at the dance afterwards. And everybody was wondering
what else might be in me. And I was going to strike mother for a new
car the minute I got home. Now, oh, Lordie, what a life I lead!"
And Emily, standing as usual, between mother and son, had maintained
to Mrs. Benton that Johnnie might have been deplorably thoughtless,
but he certainly hadn't been deliberately malicious. How could he
suppose that that man French could get hold of it? It was simply
brutal, as Emily realized, for that horrid person to entitle his
derision "Scholastic Honors." It was rubbing salt into the deep
wound of Cora Benton's soul. For Johnnie most conspicuously lacked
not only scholastic honors, but even mediocre class attainments of
common town children. He had been pulled and shoved along from one
grade to another by the skin of his teeth. He had always been the
most careless boy in every class. Mrs. Benton was right when she
said it was because of his health. When he was nine he had had
infantile paralysis, and, recovering, had been sent South. Mrs.
Benton, a passionate mother, had thrown down her Red Cross work and
taken him to a Southern town in which a cousin of hers was living.
And that choice had changed, she averred, the course of the boy's
life.
For the White Sox had been wintering there. And the weary little
boy, too uninterested in life to turn his thin hand over, was carried
out into the sun and coaxed into watching them. Some of them noticed
the pale child and spoke to him. Presently Johnnie was no longer a
pitiful invalid; he had become an active humble little mortal peeping
up at the great gods who strode about this Parnassus upon which he
had been thrown. Like an eager disciple he watched their ways. He
knew what blessed street cars they took and at what hours. He knew
the hallowed spot they had their hair cut. Lying in his bed at
night, he could identify their manager's car by the sound. In his
dreams he was steadying his arm to send a terrible curve. His
nightmares were missed bases. Books and reading were forbidden him.
But at the end of that year he knew the names and the positions of
practically all the players in the League.
It took a woman like his mother to get him into the schoolhouse the
next year. But even she could not induce his mind to consider
text-books. By the time he was sixteen he was in a class with
thirteen-year-old boys, and he looked small and delicate among them.
And then he began growing. His heart was weak. He got pneumonia.
The doctor said he would never be well unless he was taken out of
school again and let "run wild." The year Bronson came to his Aunt
Emily, Mrs. Benton spent part of the winter in New Mexico and moved
from there because she couldn't endure the sight of her son playing
ball with lazy Mexicans whom he had inspired to the game. She went
to a vineyard in California, and there she had to see him rally
enough young Japs for his nine. She left him that summer on a ranch
in Arizona, safe from a baseball atmosphere, she supposed. He found
a camp of Boy Scouts by riding not too many score of miles, and
played with them till he came back in the autumn, less inclined to
sit at a desk than ever before, and much stronger physically. And if
people said truly that only Mrs. Benton's incorrigible determination
had kept that boy alive to grow into a strong man, they might also
have said the same force finally got him into college. And all he
had ever done there, as she remarked bitterly to Emily, who condoned
his accidental operatic career, was to short-stop for the second
nine, and make his mother ridiculous in that disgusting "opera."
And now, Johnnie, having put in a good word for himself, having
diplomatically repeated every complimentary remark he had heard all
the evening about the extraordinary superiority of the floor,
intended going back to his play. Mrs. Benton kept him standing
there, however. Emily wondered if she had determined to have the
whole town see mother and son chatting pleasantly together. For the
whole town, like Emily Kenworthy, often wondered, too curiously,
exactly what the relationship between the two was. Mrs. Benton kept
her own counsel like the proverbially close-lipped male. People
could only imagine what she thought of Johnnie's dancing every
evening at the country club from which she had withdrawn in rage.
The elders were known to have welcomed her withdrawal like a gift
from heaven. The young fry, it was commonly said, couldn't have a
single dance without Johnnie, who danced "divinely." (Martha
Kenworthy had said once, holding a long-legged columbine swaying in
her hand, that it looked exactly like Johnnie Benton.) He was
hail-fellow-well-met to most of his mother's sworn enemies. Emily
sometimes thought I that must require determination almost equal to
his mother's. He just simply was a "nice boy," the town said. He
had a good disposition, and Bob Kenworthy was not the only one who,
saying that, added, "And the Lord knows he needed it!"
"Whoever could have believed it?" Emily was saying. "Where have they
all come from?" they were thinking together. You could count the
faces you knew. The youth of the town had been pushed aside by the
youth of the whole state, apparently. In a way, the very success was
failure, for the committee had enlarged their plans time after time
to provide against this indecent modern crowding. And now people
were simply wriggling about like fishing worms thick in a can.
Suddenly:
"EMILY!" exclaimed Cora Benton. "WHAT'S MARTHA DOING?" Sharply she
had spoken, commandingly.
"Martha?" exclaimed Emily, shocked. "Where? I don't see her." She
had scarcely seen her all evening.
"Over there. Look!" She pointed with her eye to the farther side of
the crowd, where it was overflowing to the veranda.