unexpected--a small untenanted house. He gave vent to a little cry of
joy, which had in it something child-like and pathetic, and pushed open
the door and entered. It was nothing but a tiny, unfinished shack, with
one room and a small one opening from it. There was no ceiling; overhead
was the tent-like slant of the roof, but it was tight. The dusty floor
was quite dry. There was one rickety chair. Stebbins, after looking into
the other room to make sure that the place was empty, sat down, and a
wonderful wave of content and self-respect came over him. The poor human
snail had found his shell; he had a habitation, a roof of shelter. The
little dim place immediately assumed an aspect of home. The rain
came down in torrents, the thunder crashed, the place was filled with
blinding blue lights. Stebbins filled his pipe more lavishly this time,
tilted his chair against the wall, smoked, and gazed about him with
pitiful content. It was really so little, but to him it was so much.
He nodded with satisfaction at the discovery of a fireplace and a rusty
cooking-stove.
He sat and smoked until the storm passed over. The rainfall had been
very heavy, there had been hail, but the poor little house had not
failed of perfect shelter. A fairly cold wind from the northwest blew
through the door. The hail had brought about a change of atmosphere. The
burning heat was gone. The night would be cool, even chilly.
Stebbins got up and examined the stove and the pipe. They were rusty,
but appeared trustworthy. He went out and presently returned with some
fuel which he had found unwet in a thick growth of wood. He laid a
fire handily and lit it. The little stove burned well, with no smoke.
Stebbins looked at it, and was perfectly happy. He had found other
treasures outside--a small vegetable-garden in which were potatoes and
some corn. A man had squatted in this little shack for years, and had
raised his own garden-truck. He had died only a few weeks ago, and
his furniture had been pre-empted with the exception of the stove, the
chair, a tilting lounge in the small room, and a few old iron pots and
fryingpans. Stebbins gathered corn, dug potatoes, and put them on the
stove to cook, then he hurried out to the village store and bought a few
slices of bacon, half a dozen eggs, a quarter of a pound of cheap tea,
and some salt. When he re-entered the house he looked as he had not for
years. He was beaming. “Come, this is a palace,” he said to himself,
and chuckled with pure joy. He had come out of the awful empty spaces of
homeless life into home. He was a man who had naturally strong domestic
instincts. If he had spent the best years of his life in a home instead
of a prison, the finest in him would have been developed. As it was,
this was not even now too late. When he had cooked his bacon and eggs
and brewed his tea, when the vegetables were done and he was seated upon
the rickety chair, with his supper spread before him on an old board
propped on sticks, he was supremely happy. He ate with a relish which
seemed to reach his soul. He was at home, and eating, literally, at his
own board. As he ate he glanced from time to time at the two windows,
with broken panes of glass and curtainless. He was not afraid--that
was nonsense; he had never been a cowardly man, but he felt the need of
curtains or something before his windows to shut out the broad vast face
of nature, or perhaps prying human eyes. Somebody might espy the light
in the house and wonder. He had a candle stuck in an old bottle by
way of illumination. Still, although he would have preferred to have
curtains before those windows full of the blank stare of night, he WAS
supremely happy.
After he had finished his supper he looked longingly at his pipe. He
hesitated for a second, for he realized the necessity of saving his
precious tobacco; then he became reckless: such enormous good fortune
as a home must mean more to follow; it must be the first of a series of
happy things. He filled his pipe and smoked. Then he went to bed on the
old couch in the other room, and slept like a child until the sun shone
through the trees in flickering lines. Then he rose, went out to the
brook which ran near the house, splashed himself with water, returned
to the house, cooked the remnant of the eggs and bacon, and ate his
breakfast with the same exultant peace with which he had eaten his
supper the night before. Then he sat down in the doorway upon the sunken
sill and fell again to considering his main problem. He did not smoke.
His tobacco was nearly exhausted and he was no longer reckless. His head
was not turned now by the feeling that he was at home. He considered
soberly as to the probable owner of the house and whether he would be
allowed to remain its tenant. Very soon, however, his doubt concerning
that was set at rest. He saw a disturbance of the shadows cast by the
thick boughs over the cart path by a long outreach of darker shadow
which he knew at once for that of a man. He sat upright, and his face
at first assumed a defiant, then a pleading expression, like that of
a child who desires to retain possession of some dear thing. His heart
beat hard as he watched the advance of the shadow. It was slow, as
if cast by an old man. The man was old and very stout, supporting
one lopping side by a stick, who presently followed the herald of his
shadow. He looked like a farmer. Stebbins rose as he approached; the two
men stood staring at each other.
“Who be you, neighbor?” inquired the newcomer.
The voice essayed a roughness, but only achieved a tentative
friendliness. Stebbins hesitated for a second; a suspicious look came
into the farmer's misty blue eyes. Then Stebbins, mindful of his prison
record and fiercely covetous of his new home, gave another name. The
name of his maternal grandfather seemed suddenly to loom up in printed
characters before his eyes, and he gave it glibly. “David Anderson,” he
said, and he did not realize a lie. Suddenly the name seemed his own.
Surely old David Anderson, who had been a good man, would not grudge the
gift of his unstained name to replace the stained one of his grandson.
“David Anderson,” he replied, and looked the other man in the face
unflinchingly.
“Where do ye hail from?” inquired the farmer; and the new David Anderson
gave unhesitatingly the name of the old David Anderson's birth and life
and death place--that of a little village in New Hampshire.
“What do you do for your living?” was the next question, and the new
David Anderson had an inspiration. His eyes had lit upon the umbrella
which he had found the night before.
“Umbrellas,” he replied, laconically, and the other man nodded. Men
with sheaves of umbrellas, mended or in need of mending, had always been
familiar features for him.
Then David assumed the initiative; possessed of an honorable business
as well as home, he grew bold. “Any objection to my staying here?” he
asked.
The other man eyed him sharply. “Smoke much?” he inquired.
“Smoke a pipe sometimes.”
“Careful with your matches?”
David nodded.
“That's all I think about,” said the farmer. “These woods is apt to
catch fire jest when I'm about ready to cut. The man that squatted here
before--he died about a month ago--didn't smoke. He was careful, he
was.”
“I'll be real careful,” said David, humbly and anxiously.
“I dun'no' as I have any objections to your staying, then,” said the
farmer. “Somebody has always squat here. A man built this shack about
twenty year ago, and he lived here till he died. Then t'other feller
he came along. Reckon he must have had a little money; didn't work at
nothin'! Raised some garden-truck and kept a few chickens. I took them
home after he died. You can have them now if you want to take care of
them. He rigged up that little chicken-coop back there.”
“I'll take care of them,” answered David, fervently.
“Well, you can come over by and by and get 'em. There's nine hens and a
rooster. They lay pretty well. I ain't no use for 'em. I've got all the
hens of my own I want to bother with.”
“All right,” said David. He looked blissful.
The farmer stared past him into the house. He spied the solitary
umbrella. He grew facetious. “Guess the umbrellas was all mended up
where you come from if you've got down to one,” said he.
David nodded. It was tragically true, that guess.
“Well, our umbrella got turned last week,” said the farmer. “I'll give
you a job to start on. You can stay here as long as you want if you're
careful about your matches.” Again he looked into the house. “Guess
some boys have been helpin' themselves to the furniture, most of it,” he
observed. “Guess my wife can spare ye another chair, and there's an old
table out in the corn-house better than that one you've rigged up, and I
guess she'll give ye some old bedding so you can be comfortable.
“Got any money?”
“A little.”
“I don't want any pay for things, and my wife won't; didn't mean that;
was wonderin' whether ye had anything to buy vittles with.”
“Reckon I can manage till I get some work,” replied David, a trifle
stiffly. He was a man who had never lived at another than the state's
expense.
“Don't want ye to be too short, that's all,” said the other, a little
apologetically.
“I shall be all right. There are corn and potatoes in the garden,
anyway.”
“So there be, and one of them hens had better be eat. She don't lay.
She'll need a good deal of b'ilin'. You can have all the wood you want
to pick up, but I don't want any cut. You mind that or there'll be
trouble.”
“I won't cut a stick.”
“Mind ye don't. Folks call me an easy mark, and I guess myself I am easy
up to a certain point, and cuttin' my wood is one of them points. Roof
didn't leak in that shower last night, did it?”
“Not a bit.”
“Didn't s'pose it would. The other feller was handy, and he kept
tinkerin' all the time. Well, I'll be goin'; you can stay here and
welcome if you're careful about matches and don't cut my wood. Come over
for them hens any time you want to. I'll let my hired man drive you back
in the wagon.”
“Much obliged,” said David, with an inflection that was almost tearful.
“You're welcome,” said the other, and ambled away.
The new David Anderson, the good old grandfather revived in his
unfortunate, perhaps graceless grandson, reseated himself on the
door-step and watched the bulky, receding figure of his visitor through
a pleasant blur of tears, which made the broad, rounded shoulders
and the halting columns of legs dance. This David Anderson had almost
forgotten that there was unpaid kindness in the whole world, and it
seemed to him as if he had seen angels walking up and down. He sat for a
while doing nothing except realizing happiness of the present and of
the future. He gazed at the green spread of forest boughs, and saw in
pleased anticipation their red and gold tints of autumn; also in pleased
anticipation their snowy and icy mail of winter, and himself, the
unmailed, defenseless human creature, housed and sheltered, sitting
before his own fire. This last happy outlook aroused him. If all this
was to be, he must be up and doing. He got up, entered the house, and
examined the broken umbrella which was his sole stock in trade. David
was a handy man. He at once knew that he was capable of putting it in
perfect repair. Strangely enough, for his sense of right and wrong was
not blunted, he had no compunction whatever in keeping this umbrella,
although he was reasonably certain that it belonged to one of the two
young girls who had been so terrified by him. He had a conviction that
this monstrous terror of theirs, which had hurt him more than many
apparently crueler things, made them quits.
After he had washed his dishes in the brook, and left them in the sun
to dry, he went to the village store and purchased a few simple things
necessary for umbrella-mending. Both on his way to the store and back he
kept his eyes open. He realized that his capital depended largely upon
chance and good luck. He considered that he had extraordinary good
luck when he returned with three more umbrellas. He had discovered one
propped against the counter of the store, turned inside out. He had
inquired to whom it belonged, and had been answered to anybody who
wanted it. David had seized upon it with secret glee. Then, unheard-of
good fortune, he had found two more umbrellas on his way home; one was
in an ash-can, the other blowing along like a belated bat beside the
trolley track. It began to seem to David as if the earth might be
strewn with abandoned umbrellas. Before he began his work he went to
the farmer's and returned in triumph, driven in the farm-wagon, with
his cackling hens and quite a load of household furniture, besides some
bread and pies. The farmer's wife was one of those who are able to give,
and make receiving greater than giving. She had looked at David, who
was older than she, with the eyes of a mother, and his pride had melted
away, and he had held out his hands for her benefits, like a child who
has no compunctions about receiving gifts because he knows that they are
his right of childhood.
Henceforth David prospered--in a humble way, it is true, still he
prospered. He journeyed about the country, umbrellas over his shoulder,
little bag of tools in hand, and reaped an income more than sufficient
for his simple wants. His hair had grown, and also his beard. Nobody
suspected his history. He met the young girls whom he had terrified
on the road often, and they did not know him. He did not, during the
winter, travel very far afield. Night always found him at home, warm,
well fed, content, and at peace. Sometimes the old farmer on whose land
he lived dropped in of an evening and they had a game of checkers. The
old man was a checker expert. He played with unusual skill, but David
made for himself a little code of honor. He would never beat the old
man, even if he were able, oftener than once out of three evenings. He
made coffee on these convivial occasions. He made very good coffee, and
they sipped as they moved the men and kings, and the old man chuckled,
and David beamed with peaceful happiness.
But the next spring, when he began to realize that he had mended for a
while all the umbrellas in the vicinity and that his trade was flagging,
he set his precious little home in order, barricaded door and windows,
and set forth for farther fields. He was lucky, as he had been from the
start. He found plenty of employment, and slept comfortably enough in
barns, and now and then in the open. He had traveled by slow stages for
several weeks before he entered a village whose familiar look gave him
a shock. It was not his native village, but near it. In his younger life
he had often journeyed there. It was a little shopping emporium, almost
a city. He recognized building after building. Now and then he thought
he saw a face which he had once known, and he was thankful that there
was hardly any possibility of any one recognizing him. He had grown
gaunt and thin since those far-off days; he wore a beard, grizzled, as
was his hair. In those days he had not been an umbrella man. Sometimes
the humor of the situation struck him. What would he have said, he the
spruce, plump, head-in-the-air young man, if anybody had told him that
it would come to pass that he would be an umbrella man lurking humbly in
search of a job around the back doors of houses? He would laugh softly
to himself as he trudged along, and the laugh would be without the
slightest bitterness. His lot had been so infinitely worse, and he had
such a happy nature, yielding sweetly to the inevitable, that he saw now
only cause for amusement.
He had been in that vicinity about three weeks when one day he met the
woman. He knew her at once, although she was greatly changed. She had
grown stout, although, poor soul! it seemed as if there had been no
reason for it. She was not unwieldy, but she was stout, and all the
contours of earlier life had disappeared beneath layers of flesh. Her
hair was not gray, but the bright brown had faded, and she wore it
tightly strained back from her seamed forehead, although it was thin.
One had only to look at her hair to realize that she was a woman who
had given up, who no longer cared. She was humbly clad in a blue-cotton
wrapper, she wore a dingy black hat, and she carried a tin pail half
full of raspberries. When the man and woman met they stopped with a sort
of shock, and each changed face grew like the other in its pallor. She
recognized him and he her, but along with that recognition was awakened
a fierce desire to keep it secret. His prison record loomed up before
the man, the woman's past loomed up before her. She had possibly not
been guilty of much, but her life was nothing to waken pride in her.
She felt shamed before this man whom she had loved, and who felt shamed
before her. However, after a second the silence was broken. The man
recovered his self-possession first.
He spoke casually.
“Nice day,” said he.
The woman nodded.
“Been berrying?” inquired David. The woman nodded again.
David looked scrutinizingly at her pail. “I saw better berries real
thick a piece back,” said he.
The woman murmured something. In spite of herself, a tear trickled over
her fat, weather-beaten cheek. David saw the tear, and something warm
and glorious like sunlight seemed to waken within him. He felt such
tenderness and pity for this poor feminine thing who had not the
strength to keep the tears back, and was so pitiably shorn of youth and
grace, that he himself expanded. He had heard in the town something of
her history. She had made a dreadful marriage, tragedy and suspicion had
entered her life, and the direst poverty. However, he had not known that
she was in the vicinity. Somebody had told him she was out West.
“Living here?” he inquired.
“Working for my board at a house back there,” she muttered. She did not
tell him that she had come as a female “hobo” in a freight-car from the
Western town where she had been finally stranded. “Mrs. White sent me
out for berries,” she added. “She keeps boarders, and there were no
berries in the market this morning.”
“Come back with me and I will show you where I saw the berries real
thick,” said David.
He turned himself about, and she followed a little behind, the female
failure in the dust cast by the male. Neither spoke until David stopped
and pointed to some bushes where the fruit hung thick on bending,
slender branches.
“Here,” said David. Both fell to work. David picked handfuls of berries
and cast them gaily into the pail. “What is your name?” he asked, in an
undertone.
“Jane Waters,” she replied, readily. Her husband's name had been Waters,
or the man who had called himself her husband, and her own middle name
was Jane. The first was Sara. David remembered at once. “She is taking
her own middle name and the name of the man she married,” he thought.
Then he asked, plucking berries, with his eyes averted:
“Married?”
“No,” said the woman, flushing deeply.
David's next question betrayed him. “Husband dead?”
“I haven't any husband,” she replied, like the Samaritan woman.
She had married a man already provided with another wife, although
she had not known it. The man was not dead, but she spoke the entire
miserable truth when she replied as she did. David assumed that he was
dead. He felt a throb of relief, of which he was ashamed, but he
could not down it. He did not know what it was that was so alive and
triumphant within him: love, or pity, or the natural instinct of the
decent male to shelter and protect. Whatever it was, it was dominant.
“Do you have to work hard?” he asked.
“Pretty hard, I guess. I expect to.”
“And you don't get any pay?”
“That's all right; I don't expect to get any,” said she, and there was
bitterness in her voice.
In spite of her stoutness she was not as strong as the man. She was not
at all strong, and, moreover, the constant presence of a sense of injury
at the hands of life filled her very soul with a subtle poison, to her
weakening vitality. She was a child hurt and worried and bewildered,
although she was to the average eye a stout, able-bodied, middle-aged
woman; but David had not the average eye, and he saw her as she really
was, not as she seemed. There had always been about her a little
weakness and dependency which had appealed to him. Now they seemed
fairly to cry out to him like the despairing voices of the children whom
he had never had, and he knew he loved her as he had never loved her
before, with a love which had budded and flowered and fruited and
survived absence and starvation. He spoke abruptly.
“I've about got my business done in these parts,” said he. “I've got
quite a little money, and I've got a little house, not much, but mighty
snug, back where I come from. There's a garden. It's in the woods. Not
much passing nor going on.”
The woman was looking at him with incredulous, pitiful eyes like a
dog's. “I hate much goin' on,” she whispered.
“Suppose,” said David, “you take those berries home and pack up your
things. Got much?”
“All I've got will go in my bag.”
“Well, pack up; tell the madam where you live that you're sorry, but
you're worn out--”
“God knows I am,” cried the woman, with sudden force, “worn out!”
“Well, you tell her that, and say you've got another chance, and--”
“What do you mean?” cried the woman, and she hung upon his words like a
drowning thing.
“Mean? Why, what I mean is this. You pack your bag and come to the
parson's back there, that white house.”
“I know--”
“In the mean time I'll see about getting a license, and--”
Suddenly the woman set her pail down and clutched him by both hands.
“Say you are not married,” she demanded; “say it, swear it!”
“Yes, I do swear it,” said David. “You are the only woman I ever asked
to marry me. I can support you. We sha'n't be rolling in riches, but we
can be comfortable, and--I rather guess I can make you happy.”
“You didn't say what your name was,” said the woman.
“David Anderson.”
The woman looked at him with a strange expression, the expression of
one who loves and respects, even reveres, the isolation and secrecy
of another soul. She understood, down to the depths of her being she
understood. She had lived a hard life, she had her faults, but she was
fine enough to comprehend and hold sacred another personality. She was
very pale, but she smiled. Then she turned to go.
“How long will it take you?” asked David.
“About an hour.”
“All right. I will meet you in front of the parson's house in an hour.
We will go back by train. I have money enough.”
“I'd just as soon walk.” The woman spoke with the utmost humility of
love and trust. She had not even asked where the man lived. All her life
she had followed him with her soul, and it would go hard if her poor
feet could not keep pace with her soul.
“No, it is too far; we will take the train. One goes at half past four.”
At half past four the couple, made man and wife, were on the train
speeding toward the little home in the woods. The woman had frizzled her
thin hair pathetically and ridiculously over her temples; on her left
hand gleamed a white diamond. She had kept it hidden; she had almost
starved rather than part with it. She gazed out of the window at the
flying landscape, and her thin lips were curved in a charming smile. The
man sat beside her, staring straight ahead as if at happy visions.
They lived together afterward in the little house in the woods, and were
happy with a strange crystallized happiness at which they would have
mocked in their youth, but which they now recognized as the essential of
all happiness upon earth. And always the woman knew what she knew about
her husband, and the man knew about his wife, and each recognized the
other as old lover and sweetheart come together at last, but always
each kept the knowledge from the other with an infinite tenderness
of delicacy which was as a perfumed garment veiling the innermost
sacredness of love.
THE BALKING OF CHRISTOPHER
THE spring was early that year. It was only the last of March, but the
trees were filmed with green and paling with promise of bloom; the front
yards were showing new grass pricking through the old. It was high
time to plow the south field and the garden, but Christopher sat in his
rocking-chair beside the kitchen window and gazed out, and did absolutely
nothing about it.
Myrtle Dodd, Christopher's wife, washed the breakfast dishes, and later
kneaded the bread, all the time glancing furtively at her husband. She
had a most old-fashioned deference with regard to Christopher. She was
always a little afraid of him. Sometimes Christopher's mother, Mrs.
Cyrus Dodd, and his sister Abby, who had never married, reproached her
for this attitude of mind. “You are entirely too much cowed down by
Christopher,” Mrs. Dodd said.
“I would never be under the thumb of any man,” Abby said.
“Have you ever seen Christopher in one of his spells?” Myrtle would ask.
Then Mrs. Cyrus Dodd and Abby would look at each other. “It is all your
fault, mother,” Abby would say. “You really ought not to have allowed
your son to have his own head so much.”