But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly there in that poor place.
When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.
“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxiouswomen, “a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!—Oh, see how he fights us!”
The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick, women’s hearts.
For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women, loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed,unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.
And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other, crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race. And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so intensely for her oldatmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve, they fought away from everything that might have separated them and struggled out on ground common to them all.
Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang, kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his fingers.
Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their little shining taper of civilization,feeding it from their hearts and minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray, carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy, dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.
Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder, indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature, which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the world which could harm them?
What a race to belong to!
Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a confused, bewildered period ofguesses and half hopes, when nobody, not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces. They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”
They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform, where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden, filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human beings than they had been before. Half-awedby the greatness of their victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.
That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?
But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many times since then.
What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange. The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do, very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun.All the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.
As for Octavie, the last time I saw her, she was on fire with interest over a little green-house she was having built back of the kitchen, so that she might have fresh green vegetables the year around. It was very hard to achieve such a thing, what with the lack of workmen, the scarcity of bricks, and the high price of glass. But Octavie was sure she could manage it.
And so am I. Octavie can always manage anything she tries for.
I must warn you at the outset that unless you or some of your folks came from Vermont, it is hardly worth your while to read about Old Man Warner. You will not be able to see anything in his story except, as we say in Vermont, a “gape and swallow” about nothing. Well, I don’t claim much dramatic action for the story of old man Warner, but I am setting it down on the chance that it may fall into the hands of some one brought up on Vermont stories as I was. I know that for him there will be something in Old Man Warner’s life, something of Vermont, something we feel and cannot express, as we feel the incommunicable aura of a personality.
The old man has been a weight on the collective mind of our town ever since I was a little girl, and that is a long time ago. He was an old man even then. Year after year, as our Board of Selectmen planned the year’s town budget they had this worry about Old Man Warner, and what to do with him. It was not that old Mr. Warner was a dangerouscharacter, or anything but strictly honest and law-abiding. But he had his own way of bothering his fellow citizens.
In his young days he had inherited a farm from his father, back up in Arnold Hollow, where at that time, about 1850, there was a cozy little settlement of five or six farms with big families. He settled there, cultivated the farm, married, and brought up a family of three sons. When the Civil War came, he volunteered together with his oldest boy, and went off to fight in the second year of the war. He came back alone in 1864, the son having fallen in the Battle of the Wilderness. And he went back up to Arnold Hollow to live and there he stayed, although the rest of his world broke up and rearranged itself in a different pattern, mostly centering about the new railroad track in the main valley.
Only the older men returned to the Arnold Hollow settlement to go on cultivating their steep, rocky farms. The younger ones set off for the West, the two remaining Warner boys with the others. Their father and mother stayed, the man hardly ever leaving the farm now even to go to town. His wife said once he seemed to feel as though he never could get caught up on the years he had missed during thewar. She said he always had thought the world of his own home.
The boys did pretty well out in Iowa, had the usual ups and downs of pioneer farmers, and by 1898, when their mother died, leaving their father alone at seventy-one, they were men of forty-eight and forty-six, who had comfortable homes to which to invite him to pass his old age.
Everybody in our town began to lay plans about what they would buy at the auction, when Old Man Warner would sell off his things, as the other Arnold Hollow families had. By this time, for one reason or another, the Warners were the only people left up there. The Selectmen planned to cut out the road up into Arnold Hollow, and put the tidy little sum saved from its upkeep into improvements on the main valley thoroughfare. But old Mr. Warner wrote his sons and told the Selectmen that he saw no reason for leaving his home to go and live in a strange place and be a burden to his children, with whom, having seen them at the rarest intervals during the last thirty years, he did not feel very well acquainted. And he always had liked his own home. Why should he leave it? It was pretty late in the day for him to get used to western ways. He’d just be a bother to his boys. He didn’t want to bea bother to anybody, and he didn’t propose to be!
There were a good many protests all round, but of course the Selectmen had not the faintest authority over him, and as quite probably his sons were at heart relieved, nothing was done. The town very grudgingly voted the money to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, but consoled itself by saying freely that the old cuss never had been so very bright and was worse now, evidently had no idea what he was trying to do, and would soon get tired of living alone and “doing for himself.”
That was twenty-two years ago. Selectmen who were then vigorous and middle-aged, grew old, decrepit, died, and were buried. Boys who were learning their letters then, grew up, married, had children, and became Selectmen in their turn. Old Man Warner’s sons grew old and died, and the names of most of his grand-children, scattered all over the West, were unknown to us. And still the old man lived alone in his home and “did for himself.”
Every spring, when road work began, the Selectmen groaned over having to keep up the Arnold Hollow road, and every autumn they tried their best to persuade the old man to come down to a settlement where he could be taken care of. Our town is very poor, and taxes are a heavy item in ourcalculations. It is just all we can do to keep our schools and roads going, and we grudge every penny we are forced to spend on tramps, paupers, or the indigent sick. Selectmen in whose régime town expenses were high, are not only never reëlected to town office, but their name is a by-word and a reproach for years afterwards. We elect them, among other things, to see to it that town expenses are not high, and to lay their plans accordingly.
Decades of Selectmen, heavy with this responsibility, tried to lay their plans accordingly in regard to Old Man Warner, and ran their heads into a stone wall. One Board of Selectmen after another knew exactly what would happen; the old dumb-head would get a stroke of paralysis, or palsy, or softening of the brain, or something, and the town Treasury would bleed at every pore for expensive medical service, maybe an operation at a hospital, and after that, somebody paid to take care of him. If they could only ship him off to his family! One of the granddaughters, now a middle-aged woman, kept up a tenuous connection with the old man, and answered, after long intervals, anxious communications from the Selectmen. Or if not that, if only they could get him down out of there in the winter,so they would not be saddled with the perpetual worry about what was happening to him, with the perpetual need to break out the snow in the road and go up there to see that he was all right.
But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and he didn’t owe any that he knew of.
That was the fact, too. He paid spot cash for what he bought in his semi-yearly trips to the village to “do trading,” as our phrase goes. He bought very little, a couple of pairs of overalls a year, a bag apiece of sugar, and coffee, and rice, and salt, and flour, some raisins, and pepper. And once or twice during the long period of his hermit life, an overcoat and a new pair of trousers. What he brought down from his farm was more than enough to pay for such purchases, for he continued to cultivate his land, less and less of it, of course, each year,but still enough to feed his horse and cow and pig and hens, and to provide him with corn and potatoes and onions. He salted down and smoked a hog every fall and ate his hens when they got too old to lay.
And, of course, as long as he was actually economically independent, the town, groaning with apprehension over the danger to its treasury though it was, could not lay a finger on the cranky old codger. And yet, of course, his economic independence couldn’t last! From one day to the next, something was bound to happen to him, something that would cost the town money.
Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing; and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something. Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world.
All during my childhood and youth he was a legendary figure of “sot” obstinacy and queerness.We children used to be sent up once in a while, to take our turn in seeing that the old man was all right. It was an expedition like no other. You turned off the main road and went up the steep, stony winding mountain road, dense with the shade of sugar-maples and oaks. At the top, when your blown horse stopped to rest, you saw before you the grassy lane leading across the little upland plateau where the Arnold Hollow settlement had been. The older people said they could almost hear faint echoes of whetting scythes, and barking dogs, and cheerful homely noises, as there had been in the old days. But for us children there was nothing but a breathlessly hushed, sunny glade of lush meadows, oppressively silent and spooky, with a few eyeless old wrecks of abandoned farm houses, drooping and gray. You went past the creepy place as fast as your horse could gallop, and clattered into the thicket of shivering white birches which grew close to the road like a screen; and then—there was no sensation in my childhood quite like the coming out into the ordered, inhabited, humanized little clearing, in front of Old Man Warner’s home. There were portly hens crooning around on the close-cropped grass, and a pig grunting sociably from his pen at you, and shining milk-pans lying in the suntilted against the white birch sticks of the wood-pile, and Old Man Warner, himself, infinitely aged and stooped, in his faded, clean overalls, emerging from the barn-door to peer at you out of his bright old eyes and to give you a hearty, “Well, you’re quite a long ways from home, don’t you know it? Git off your horse, can’t ye? I’ve got a new calf in here.” Or perhaps if it were a Sunday, he sat in the sun on the front porch, with a clean shirt on, reading the weekly edition of theNew York Tribune. He drove two miles every Saturday afternoon, down to his R. F. D. mail-box on the main road, to get this.
You heard so much talk about him down in the valley, so much fussing and stewing about his being so “sot,” and so queer, that it always surprised you when you saw him, to find he was just like anybody else. You saw his calf, and had a drink of milk in his clean, well-scrubbed kitchen, and played with the latest kitten, and then you said good-by for that time, and got on your horse and went back through the birch thicket into the ghostly decay of the abandoned farms, back down the long, stony road to the valley where everybody was so cross with the unreasonable old man for causing them so much worry.
“Howcouldhe expect to go along like that, whenother old folks, so much younger than he, gave up and acted like other people, and settled down where you could take care of them! The house might burn down over his head, and he with it; or he might fall and break his hip and be there for days, yelling and fainting away till somebody happened to go by; or a cow might get ugly and hook him, and nobody to send for help.” All these frightening possibilities and many others had been repeatedly presented to the old man himself with the elaborations and detail which came from heart-felt alarm about him. But he continued to say mildly that he guessed he’d go on living the way he was for a while yet.
“Awhile!” He was ninety years old.
And then he was ninety-one, and then ninety-two; and we were surer and surer he would “come on the town,” before each fiscal year was over. At the beginning of last winter our Selectmen went up in a body to try to bully or coax the shrunken, wizened old man, now only half his former size, to go down to the valley. He remarked that he “guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont” and so forth, just as he had to their fathers. He was so old, that he could no longer straighten up as he said it, for his back was helplessly bent with rheumatism, and for lackof teeth he whistled and clucked and lisped a good deal as he pronounced his formula. But his meaning was as clear as it had been thirty years ago. They came sulkily away without him, knowing that they would both be laughed at and blamed, in the valley, because the cussed old crab had got the best of them, again.
Last February, a couple of men, crossing over to a lumber-job on Hemlock Mountain, by way of the Arnold Hollow road, saw no smoke coming out of the chimney, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it and stepped in. There lay Old Man Warner, dead on his kitchen floor in front of his well-blacked cook-stove. The tiny, crooked, old body was fully dressed, even to a fur cap and mittens, and in one hand was his sharp, well-ground ax. One stove-lid was off, and a charred stick of wood lay half in and half out of the fire box. Evidently the old man had stepped to the fire to put in a stick of wood before he went out to split some more, and had been stricken instantly, before he could move a step. His cold, white old face was composed and quiet, just as it had always been in life.
The two lumbermen fed the half-starved pig and hens and turned back to the valley with the news,driving the old man’s cow and horse in front of them; and in a couple of hours we all knew that Old Man Warner had died, all alone, in his own kitchen.
Well, what do you think! We were as stirred up about it—! We turned out and gave him one of the best funerals the town ever saw. And we put up a good marble tombstone that told all about how he had lived. We found we were proud of him, as proud as could be, the darned old bull-dog, who had stuck it out all alone, in spite of us. We brag now about his single-handed victory over old age and loneliness, and we keep talking about him to the children, just as we brag about our grandfather’s victories in the Civil War, and talk to the children about the doings of the Green Mountain Boys. Old Man Warner has become history. We take as much satisfaction in the old fellow’s spunk, as though he had been our own grandfather, and we spare our listeners no detail of his story: “... And there he stuck year after year, with the whole town plaguing at him to quit. And he earned his own living, and chopped his own wood, and kept himself and the house just as decent, and never got queer and frowzy and half-cracked, but stayed just like anybody, as nice an old man as ever you saw—all alone,all stark alone—beholden to nobody—asking no odds of anybody—yes, sir, and died with his boots on, at ninety-three, on a kitchen floor you could have et off of, ’twas so clean.”
During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners, carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old man, light and dry as a cork.
His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend,recover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,”—here we saluted the Sous-Directrice—“advance again” (I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), “one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.
That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.
The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as we stood there, watchingthe elegant gestures and still more elegant immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the day.
One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied, not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely—quietly—with dignity.”
I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet—dignified—” I would never have lived through it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.
Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly thecenter of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?
Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any pretensions to wealth or social standing—they said very little of any sort about their home life.
Two years later I spent my Christmas vacationwith them, and at once I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was—fourteen at the time—it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer, that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in the region.
As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that arevolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me. I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University, that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn hisandher own living—everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about America in his furiously convinced style.
Of course he was the champion of the working classes as against the bourgeoisie, adored by the first and hated by the second. It was an adventure to walk with him along the narrow, cobbled streets of the musty little town. Everywhere the lean, sinewy men in working clothes and the thin women in aprons and without hats, had a quick, flashinglook of pleasure to see his great frame come striding vigorously along. Everywhere the artisans stopped their work to call a hearty greeting to him, or to step quickly to meet him, full of some grievance, sure of his sympathy, and comforted by the quick flame of his indignation. And everywhere the very sight of him put a taste of green apples into the mouths of all the well-dressed people. You could see that by the sour expression of their broad, florid faces. The prosperous merchant at the door of his shop frowned, cleared his throat, and turned hastily within doors, as he saw M. Brodard come marching along, humming a tune, his hat cocked light-heartedly over one ear. The lawyer in his black broadcloth coat passed us hurriedly; the women in expensive furs stepped high, drew their long skirts about them, and looked him straight in the eye, with an expression half fear, half horror. This last made him break out into the hearty, full-throated laugh, always close to the surface with him—the laugh that was as characteristic a part of him as the shape of his nose.
I understood now why Mme. Brodard sent the girls away to school. They would have been outcasts in any bourgeoise school in their own town. Yet M. Brodard was a great champion of thepublic schools and never lost an opportunity of defending against their bitter critics the public lycées for girls, then just struggling into being in France. I wondered a little that he should allow his daughters to go to such a boarding-school as ours. But it seemed that the angry resistance of the moneyed and pious families of Morvilliers had up to that time prevented the establishment of a public lycée for girls there. This enabled Mme. Brodard to steer past another dangerous headland in the complicated course of her life. Perhaps, also, warm-hearted M. Brodard was not inclined to be too hard on his girls, whom he fondly loved, after the adoring manner of French fathers, nor to expect too much from his devoted wife in the way of conforming to his ideas.
Even at that time, poor Mme. Brodard’s life was all one miracle of adroit achievement in reconciling irreconcilable elements and effecting impossible compromises. She had married her husband when they were both young (he must have been an irresistible suitor), and before his hot-headed sympathies for the under-dog had absorbed him. Like a good and devoted French wife, she never admitted that anything her Bernard did was other than what she would wish. But she remained exactly what shehad been at the time of her marriage, and although she was deeply attached to her kind and faithful husband and made the best of homes for him, she had not the slightest intention of changing a hair or becoming anything but a good bourgeoise, a devoted believer in social distinctions, in the Church, in the laboring classesas such and in their places, and above all in the excellence of owning property and inheriting money.
On this last point M. Brodard went much further than anything I had heard discussed at home, and poured out incessantly in brilliant editorials a torrent of scorn, laughter, hatred, and denunciation, upon the sacred institution of inheritance, the very keystone of the French social edifice. “How ridiculous,” he used to write on mornings when no other forlorn hope stood in special need of a harebrained charge, “that the mere chance of birth, or a personal caprice, should put vast sums of unearned wealth into the hands of a man who has not had the slightest connection with its production. Property, the amassing of wealth by a man who has had the acumen and force to produce it ... we may have two opinions about that, about whether he should be allowed to keep for himself all he can lay his hands on. But there can be no two opinions about thehilarious idiocy of the theory that his grown-up son has any inherent right to possess that wealth, his son who has no more to do with it than the Emperor of China, save by a physiological accident. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.”
Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touchourlives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. She herself had been an orphan and all the Brodard elders were dead, having left nothing to the family of such an enemy to society as they considered Bernard to be.
She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did; but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and as the oldest began to approach the marriageable ageMme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she looked white and anxious.
But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow, waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory. Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!
Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy, electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Biggirls as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word, “ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.
M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!
And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case, in which a workingman had been defrauded of hisrights. Apparently there was always some such windmill against which he thought it necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls always said, imitating their mother’s accent.
To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.
When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa, by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his great voice, had obtained a re-trial andacquittal of that tiresome workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air, and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems to thrive on all that!”
Well,hemight thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.” Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves, Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more, Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the house. What could they do to rise to that crisis?When Madeleine left school... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps gosouth, to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!
I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it—“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.
Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. OldM. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked the existence of such a village near him.
His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answeredby the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé one day in the street, and asked him—as if the priest had anything to do with what was happening!—whether the laws of France did or did not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to be aware of the existence of Fressy.
Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended (they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst, the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and godless life.
But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity for making a noise. Hestormed out to Fressy to see the old man, thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms, as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his scared old eyes.
Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open, and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.
Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office ordersto “see to that matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been to do his duty as he saw it.
By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own life.
After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatenedrookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice, and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque imprisonment were known.
The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his feet.
* * * * * * *
The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.
Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?
He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.
* * * * * * *
Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....
Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he loved so dearly....
Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas....Ideas!
What do you suppose he could do but accept it?
* * * * * * *
I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a glimpse, just oneglimpse which I had later, I think the less I know about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard, giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it; for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?
You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange! M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter,trying hard to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good faith.
Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which, returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point, commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.
The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps to the great door I could feel the house thrillingrhythmically to excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.
A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me, but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed her life, it was plain to see. She was giving athé dansantfor the younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M. Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had gone.
“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see you. He always liked you so much.”
As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve,although we have a resident physician for him, andeverythingis done for him, poor dear Bernard!”
The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast, his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me, I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!
He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.
I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not collect myself, and stood there stupidly.
A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence. A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.
M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You see how it is with me.”
His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible eyes dared me to answer.
I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness, about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....
At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to have heard.
“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.
Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands over my ears.
As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”
The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, and work around enough for his board.”
There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send him away.
I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. Hehad nothing with him except the ragged clothes on his back.
When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro—“You could tell that from his name, of course”—who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, etc.... But there’s something about him....”
Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....
Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.
The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate. At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.
He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes. The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,” called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back, watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as though he were getting well.
Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.
There is very little caste feeling in our valley,and not a bit of color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.
He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time; had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always presentable.
As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings, like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd. We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”
I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.
“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.
“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added, glancing at the clock.
“Who,me?” said Fairfax, with a little start.
“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted us all to go?”
Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”
“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”
Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”
I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes, they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions. Come on.”
“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.
I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.
“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”
After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be sofoolish. Wewantyou to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the Ladies Aid.”
He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager, with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety. But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now don’t fail to come.”
It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement, with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles, Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he did not appear.
After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of thechurch, go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.
When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter and cold meat.
I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any more comment.
As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work, and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door, peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, anddart across the road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.
He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m” with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.
The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south. When he went out for a stroll in the evening, theywould call to him, from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.
Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man, used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window, thelittle red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.
When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.” But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality which ended by silencing me.
The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea of what this meant to him.