CHAPTER IITHE DRESDEN DOLL
Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small headed man, with iron fists, a paving-block jaw and legs like telephone poles. Some of his words weigh seven to the pound and he did not secure them from his Bible, either, if he ever read his Bible.
Mrs. Clementina Gridley, the girl’s mother, claimed she was related on her mother’s side to a duchess. Then to double rivet the exclusive ancestry, on her father’s side she had vague claims to a relative who had crossed on a certain well-known occasion to this stern and rock-bound coast, landing at Plymouth and marking the commencement of the antique furniture business. Mrs. Gridley was short and in upper contour resembled a barrel. She clothed herself and little daughter in purple and fine linen, and both of them toiled not, neither did they spin. She brought the first lorgnette to Paris, hung its first pair of sunfast overdrapes, called old Bill Chew, the colored man-of-all-work, the “coachman”, affected to be shocked when old Caleb blew his tea in a saucer and tried unsuccessfully to start a local aristocracy.
These two—a mother with an ingrowing consciousness of her own grandeur and a father who endured it because he was too engrossed in making money to give his family much attention—were the little Gridley girl’s mental, moral and spiritual handicaps. More than one good woman’s fingers itched to paddle her; more than one good man would have counted it a special dispensation from Providence if he could have spent five minutes alone with her and thoroughly boxed her ears. But Bernie’s extremities were never paddled and Bernie’s ears were never boxed.
At four, little Bernice was told she was made of better clay than the ordinary run of Eve’s daughters and at six she was sure of it. At eight she frequently mentioned the family “blood.” At ten she had queried Mrs. Joseph Fodder if “common children were not terribly coarse and mortifying” and “why did the Creator ever make the lower classes so disgustingly prolific?”
Yet the little snob was pretty, pretty as a Dresden doll. And the Duchess kept her starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed until the tired mothers of the disgustingly prolific lower classes gave up all competition in despair.
For the opposite and lower end of the social seesaw the Forges as a family would have answered as well as any caste exhibit to the county. Living in Foxboro Center was enough. Could any social good come out of Foxboro Center? Certainly not! Mute, inglorious Miltons might infest the place, but the Gridleys—at least, the female Gridleys—aspired to nothing in common with mute, inglorious Miltons.
It was a pleasant July afternoon, after we had moved to the Center, that the head of the House of Gridley hitched his sleek black mare to a neat piano-box buggy and drove twenty miles eastward to call upon the House of Forge. It was not a social call. The head of the House of Gridley left all such nonsense to his Duchess. John Forge owed old Caleb three lapsed payments for harness leather and old Caleb intended “to get his money or bust hell wide open.”
When he drove forth from the Gridley gates to “bust hell wide open” that afternoon beside him was the Dresden doll. She was ironed and starched and curled and furbelowed—as usual—and she kept the sun from her peach-bloom complexion by a tiny, beribboned parasol. They had not ridden a block before old Caleb referred to this parasol. He said, “Keep that trick umbrella away from my hat or I’ll smash it!” Old Caleb was not at all aristocratic like his Duchess.
The Gridleys reached Foxboro Center. John Forge was at home, “getting in” his hay. Arrived there, old Caleb descended, backed the mare around and unhooked her check-rein.He trusted her to remain without hitching, so long as her nose was in the clover growing outside the Forge front fence. Thereupon Caleb went down into the fragrant hayfields in search of Johnathan. The mare spread her front legs and began to enjoy herself.
Little Bernice-Theresa’s first maneuver was to unwind the reins from the whip. Holding them in one hand and the foolish little parasol in the other, she greatly hoped sundry persons would appear and remark upon what a marvelous child was this, who could assume jurisdiction of an untied mare while her elders were flagrantly absent.
It may be recorded that some one did appear; Nathan Forge “materialized” beside the picket fence and the drama, old as the hills eternal, was commenced.
Nathan Forge, living in Foxboro Center, was naturally of the earth, earthy. He was likewise of the soil, soily, very much soiled in comparison with the starched and beribboned daintiness of little Bernice-Theresa. His hair needed cutting; his eyes were vague. His face had grown a few odd-thousand additional freckles with the summer vacation and one great toe was wrapped in a horribly unsanitary rag.
This product of the disgustingly prolific lower classes beheld the smart rig halted before the house and was seized with an exasperating interest.
Now every one who has been a boy, or who owns a boy, appreciates that while sisters are, generally speaking, of no earthly consequence or account whatsoever, there are girls andgirls! This is better explained by studying the behavior of such a boy in propinquity with a feminine stranger who had first been properly starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed, though not conventionally introduced.
The boy does not place his feet upon the surface of the world in a methodical, orderly manner, maintaining himself in a status of physical poise and bodily rectitude. He demonstrates the difference between girls andgirlsby the knots in which he proceeds to tie his spine. No boy ties his spine into knots for his sister. So Nat made his first concessions to The Sex by starting to wind himself in and out through the holes where pickets were missing in his father’s fence.
I forego a record of the twistings and turnings, the writhings and contortions, which ensued to attract the attention of the Fayre Ladye and bind her to his chariot forever. He did not neglect to rub his backbone on the gatepost four times, whirl about without upsetting himself three, hit the trunk of an adjacent tree with stones twice, and balance a stick on his nose once. Then he climbed the gate and swung head downward in horrible danger of dashing out his brains.
“Lo!” he greeted. And he grinned.
The crass effrontery, thelèse-majesté, of daring to address Her Royal Highness was bad enough. But that grin!
Bernice-Theresa Gridley sat stunned. She could conjure up no phase of etiquette for meeting the situation but a posture of frigid silence and staring stiffly ahead. He was less than the dust beneath her carriage wheel. True, he wasn’t yet beneath her carriage wheel but he might land there in a moment if he didn’t stop trying to twist himself into a human interrogation point. Why didn’t her father come? Oh, the mortification of it!
“Say, what’s yer name?” persisted this awful progeny of the lower classes.
A numbing silence.
Then, though embarrassed with his daring, Nathan announced:
“That ain’t the way to drive a horse. Girls don’t know nothin’ bout animals, anyhow. I know how to drive a horse better’n that! I’ll climb up there and show yer!”
Bernice-Theresa jumped.
“You horrid boy!” she shrieked. “If you as much as touch one of these buggy wheels, I’ll have my father put you in jail where the rats will runright over your face!” It was the most hideous fate that Bernice-Theresa’s nine years could conceive.
“Huh! I ain’t afraid o’ rats! We caught a big one in our trap last night. You stay here and I’ll fetch him! You could take him home and stuff him and trim up a room with him.”
Acting on this generous impulse, Nathan quitted the gate and ran to get the rigor-mortis exhibit. And in the ensuing moments, confronted by the horror of his return, little Bernice-Theresa suffered all the tortures of the damned.A filthy, intimate boy from the disgustingly productive lower classes had gone to bring her a rat! Dead! He would handle it. He might even drop it in the buggy. She must fly while flying was possible.
But she could not climb down from the vehicle and fly with legs. That would be common and crude; beside, where in the vicinity would she fly? No, it was far more consistent for the daughter of a Duchess to fly with a horse and buggy. Therefore, ere the unspeakable vulgarian could return, Bernice-Theresa got into action.
She shut her parasol and separated the reins. She nearly pulled herself from the slippery seat, straining to raise the mare’s unwilling head from the clover. The animal’s flank was slapped sharply. When Nathan returned to the gate, the road in front of the house was empty.
Nathan headed for the lower mowing. He approached old Caleb without introduction.
“You gotta walk home, mister!” was his way of announcing the news. “Or else you better chase your buggy. Yer horse has runned off with it hitched behind him!”
Old Caleb came up through the Forge yard in four-foot jumps. He stopped for a speechless instant at the gate.
“If you’re goin’ right home, you might tell her I didn’t mean to scare her,” explained Nathan. “We caught this rat yesterday and I was going to let her have it——”
“You little blatherskite! Scared her, did you? So she took the lines and drove off home!” Caleb shook his knotty fist under John Forge’s nose. “If my girl’s hurt, I’ll sue you for this! I’ll sue you anyhow, for the leather.”
Thereupon old Caleb started after the rig in ludicrous hops.
Hours later he reached Paris. His paving-block jaw was still adamant but he had discovered no traces of buggy, daughter or wreckage en route. By a miracle Bernice-Theresa had reached home without mishap. The tragedy was this: Finding at length that she had arrived at her destination in safety, all parental solicitude vanished. Caleb Gridley took the progeny of a Duchess across his kneeand spanked her!
As a result of that spanking, his wife made his life so miserable that he sued Johnathan Forge at law. He hadto vent his spleen somewhere. And a week later, being served with papers by the sheriff, Johnathan Forge also had to vent his spleen somewhere and went in search of a freckled-faced little boy.
Without explanation, simply desiring something weak on which to wreak his temper, stifling his conscience with the argument that the boy’s misbehavior had frightened the Dresden doll and precipitated the whole calamity, “Brother” Forge of the local church belabored a contorting little body with a harness tug until screams and howls brought his mother.
Nat left his father and his mother “having it out.” He limped painfully, still sobbing, up the road to my house. We climbed to our haymow together and Nathan finished his weeping down beside me in the hay.
That was the first time Nathan and I seriously discussed The Sex,—when the boy’s grief was spent and in its wake came philosophy.
“Gee, but she was pretty, Billy,” he confided. “She was different, too, than girls here ’round Foxboro. I sort of felt funny in my insides when I seen her. Mabel Turner now—she’s fat and red-faced and her clothes is always coming apart somewheres. Mary Anderson, she’s always laughin’ and makin’ fun of my freckles, and Alice Blake’s got freckles worse’n me, and warts besides. But this girl—gee, Billy, she was swell. I wonder why was it I felt so funny about her right off as soon as I seen her. I never felt that way about no girl before. Most girls is—well, just girls!—you know!—no good!”
“That’s love!” I declared largely.
“Love?” Nathan was awed. “Then love’s swell, ain’t it?”
“Depends how you look at it. Sometimes it is. Then again it ain’t.”
Nat pondered this. It was deep. Finally in a whisper he asked:
“Billy, why is it that girls is different from boys, and women from men?”
“It’s on account of babies,” I expatiated. “Benny Mayo said so. A man told him once.”
“How, on account o’ babies, Billy?”
Thereupon I recounted boyhood’s version of the intricacies of obstetrics, as viewed by boys who are not wholly fools.
I hold no brief for myself. The parent who will not concede that mere children do not seek light on life’s greatest mystery—where do people come from?—and ultimately discuss it, is an ass. Only there was no perverted mischief on my part about it. Nathan wanted to know something. I possessed the information. It was no more than as if he had asked me how to make a willow whistle or bait a chuck-trap.
“Gee!” exclaimed Nathan frightenedly, “suppose it’s so, Billy?”
“There’s sumpin to it,” I averred. “We’re all here, ain’t we? I’m gonna ask my Ma.”
“So’m I,” declared my chum.
Nathan finally started homeward. That night he sought elucidation for the mystery exactly where it was normal he should seek it,—from his mother. But instead of supplying his need in a healthy, kindly fashion fitted to his years, Anna Forge did a narrow, vicious thing.
She whirled on her small son with an alacrity which startled the senses out of him. And she administered a shock to the sensitive boy whose effects did not entirely vanish with manhood.
“Who put such ideas into your head?” she demanded hysterically.
“Nobody ‘specially, Ma. I was just thinkin’, that’s all.”
“No! Some one put the idea into your head. Who was it?”
Nathan began to cry.
“B-B-Billy and me was talkin’ about it in the haymow this afternoon.”
“So Billy did it! I shall see Billy’s mother in the morning and have him horsewhipped for what he told you.”
Nathan began to cry harder.
“Why, Ma?” he demanded in panic.
“Because all such things are vile and dirty and filthy and horrible! Little boys who think them don’t go to heavenand have angels love them. They go to the Bad Place and are burned in fire forever and ever. You know how it hurt when you burnt your finger on my flatiron yesterday? Imagine you were burnt all over your body like that—and there was no way to stop it and you just had to suffer terribly with never a moment to sleep or forget. That’s what happens to bad little boys who say such things or even think them!”
“But why is it bad, Ma? Billy didn’t mean to be bad. We just wondered, that’s all. I can’t help thinking about ’em, can I?”
“Oh, what a wicked, wicked little boy! Your dear mother will be up in heaven and she won’t have any little son with her. Her little son will be down in the fires of hell—burning for always and always!”
The Forge woman pictured eternal torment so vividly that Nathan grew hysterical. When the woman had the boy worked into such a state that he was too terrified to stay alone in the dark because of the devils waiting to grab him, she made him promise never to think about girls or women or babies again. Sniveling, the little shaver promised.
His mother went to her bedroom and narrated the affair to her husband. Johnathan was for thrashing the boy soundly at once.
“No—you’ve given him one whipping to-day and one whipping a day is enough. I think I’ve scared him so badly that he won’t think of the subject again. And to-morrow I shall certainly see Billy’s mother. If she doesn’t chastise her dirty-minded young one, I shan’t let Nathan go on playing with him.”
Grumbling, John Forge was persuaded. Next day Mrs. Forge went into indignant session with my mother.
“Yes, Billy catechised me in the same way,” the latter responded. “I told him what I thought it sane and reasonable to tell a lad of his years. He’ll learn it outside, anyway. Probably he’ll get a sordid, vulgar, perverted version. I don’t believe you can scare these things from the minds of live-wire children, nor stifle the most normal impulses of growing boyhood. I for one shan’t try. As my boy grows I want him to feel that he can come to his mother at any time with his problems, especially his girl problems,without having the immortal daylights scared out of him or made to feel that he’s a criminal. It ain’t natural, Anna Forge, and so it ain’t common sense.”
“My boy shall not go on playing with yours, if that’s the sort of thing they’re talking.”
“Suit yourself, Anna Forge. I believe your philosophy’s wrong and you’ll live to rue it.”
“I don’t have to be told what’s decent for my own young one!”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. That’s yet to be proven.”
Anna Forge stalked homeward. The two women did not speak for a month. But Nat’s mother had done a malicious thing that day. She had only turned the barb of my friend’s curiosity inward and prodded that worst enemy of the human race to attack her small son viciously:Repression.