Chapter 4
What a grubby old stopping place this world is, anyway. How hard we have to work just to keep the flesh on our bones and that flesh covered, even with nothing better than homespun. And we are getting a little tired of it all, aren't we, my dear? Just a little tired of the treadmill, where, like a sheep in a dairy, we pace our limited beat to bring a handful of inadequate butter. We have trudged to and fro about long enough, and have half a mind to throw up the contract with fate. But hold on a bit. There is something worse than too much work, and that is idleness. Imagine a sudden hush in all the myriad sounds of labor. The ceasing of the whirr of countless wheels whereat men stand day after day through toilful years, fashioning everything from a pin's head to a ship's mast; the suspended click of millions of sewing machines, above which bend delicate women stitching their lives into shirts and garments that find their way onto bargain tables, where rich women crowd to seize the advantage of the discount. Let all suspended hammers in the myriad workshops swing into silence and all footsteps cease their weary plodding to and fro, I think the awful hush would far transcend the muteness of midnight or that still hour when dawn steals in among the pallid stars, and on the dim, uncertain shore of time the tide of man's vitality ebbs faint and low. There is no blight so fell as the blight of enforced calm. It is in the unworked garden that weeds grow. It is in the stagnant water that disease germs waken to horrid life. Ennui palls upon a brave heart. Ennui is like a long-winded, amiable, but watery-idea'd friend who drops in to see us and dribbles platitudes until every nerve is tapped. Ennui is like being forced to drink tepid water or to eat soup without salt. Labor, on the contrary, is like a friend with grit and tonic in his make-up. It comes to us as a wind visits the forest, and sets our faculties stirring as the wind rustles the leaves and sets the wood fragrance flying. It puts spice in our broth and ice in our drink. It puts a flavor in life that starts an appetite, or, in other words, awakens ambition. Although the world is full of toilers it would be worse off were it full of idlers. Good, hard workers find no time to make mischief. Your anarchists and your breeders of discord are never found among busy men; they breed, like mosquitoes, out of stagnant places. It is the idle man that quickens hatred and contention, as it is the setting hen and not the scratching one that hatches out the eggs.
XLVI.
PAINTING THE OLD HOMESTEAD.
It had been a battle renewed for more years than there are dandelions just now in the front yard. Various members of the family had declared from time to time that if the old house was not painted it would fall to pieces from sheer mortification at its own disreputable appearance.
"Why, you can put your toothpick right through the rotten shingles," cried the doctor. "The only way to save it is to paint it."
Now, I have always been the odd sheep of a highly decorous fold. I have more love for nature than hard good sense, I am told. So I loathe paint just as I hate surface manners. I want the true grain all the way through, be it in boards or people. I love the weather stain on an old house. I love the mossy touches, the lichen grays and the russet browns that age imparts to the shingles, and I almost feel like murdering the paint fiend when he comes around every spring, and transforms some dear old landmark into a gorgeous "Mrs. Skewton," with hideous coats and splashy trimmings. But alas for sentiment when the money bags are against it! Profit before poetry any day in this nineteenth century, my dear, and so when an interested capitalist came up from town and gave it as his opinion that the old house would be worth a third more if put on the market in a terra cotta coat with sage-green trimmings the day was lost for me. I had to strike my colors like many another idealist in this practical world. In the first place, there has been for the last fifteen years or so, a vine growing all over the old home, catching its lithe tendrils into the roof and making cathedral lights in all the windows. It has been the home of generations of robins. It has hung full of purple, bell-shaped blossoms on coral stems that have attracted a thousand humming birds and honey bees by their fragrance. It has changed into a veritable cloth of gold in early September, and in late October has flamed into scarlet against the gray roof, like a blaze that quivers athwart a stormy sky. It has been the joy of my life and the inspiration of my dreams, but it had to come down before the paint-pot! So one night when I reached home, tired to death with a hand-to-hand encounter with the demon who gives poor mortals their bread and butter for an equivalent of flesh and blood and spirit, I noticed that the little folks greeted me with an air of subdued decorum as though fresh from a funeral. There were no caperings, no flauntings, no cavortings. Each young minx had on her Sunday go-to-meeting air, and the boy stood with his hat on one side of his head, as though for a sixpence he would fight all creation. Wondering at the change, I happened to look toward the house, and there it stood in the light of the fading day, like a poor old woman without a veil to hide her wrinkles! Every window looked ashamed of itself, and on the ground lay the dear old vine, prone as a lost reputation.
"I never see such an ill-fired crank in all the days of my life!" remarked the painter to the new girl, after I had held a brief but spirited interview with him over the garden fence; "blanked if she didn't cry because her vine was down!"
XLVII.
THE OLD SITTING-ROOM STOVE.
What is there within the home, during the winter season at least, that seems so thoroughly to constitute the soul of home as the family-room stove? It can never be replaced by that ugly hole in the floor which floods our rooms with furnace heat, with no glow of cheerful firelight, no flicker of flame or changeful play of shadow out of which to weave fantastic dreams and fancies. I once watched the dying out of one of these fires in a great base burner, around which for years a large and loving family had gathered. The furniture of the home had all been sold, and the family was about to scatter. The trunks were packed and gone, the last article removed from the place, and the old stove was left to burn out its fire at the last, that it, too, might be removed next morning. And after the evening had come and was far spent, the last evening wherein any right should remain to us to enter the old home as its owners and occupants, I took my pass-key and slipped over from the neighbor's for my final good-bye to the dear old home. The fire-light, like the glance of a reproachful eye, shone upon me through the gloom of the deserted parlor. "Have I not warmed you and comforted you and cheered you with my genial glow?" a voice seemed to say; "and now you have come to see me die! I am the vital spirit of your home. I am dying, and nothing can ever reanimate these deserted rooms again with the dear, the beautiful past."
Like the eye of one who is going down to death, the firelight faded and finally went out in the pallor of ashes, while I, sitting alone in the darkness, felt the whole world drearier for a little space for the final extinguishment of this fire, the death hour of a once happy home.
XLVIII.
A TALK ABOUT DIVORCE.
Somebody asked me the other day if I favored divorce. Like everything else in the world the matter depends largely upon special circumstance, but in the main I do not believe in divorce. If husbands and wives cannot live together without quarreling, let them live apart, but they have no business to sever the bond that unites them. The promise to take each other for "better or for worse" must be regarded in both readings of the clause. If the "worse" comes along we have no right to ignore it because the "better" has failed. If your husband is a drunkard, all the more reason for you to stand by him if you are a good woman. If he is cruel and abusive, you need not put your life in danger by staying under his roof, but you need not throw him over and get another husband. If he goes into the gutter, pull him out, and know that your experience is only a big dose of the "worse" you promised to take along with the "better." It is the quinine with the honey, and you have no right to reject it. There are 10,000 things that work discord in married life that a little tact and forbearance would dissipate, as a steady wind will blow away gnats. The trouble with all of us is, we make too much of trifles. We nurse them, and feed them, and magnify them, until from gnats they grow to be buzzards with their beaks in our hearts. Not for one sin, nor seven sins, nor seventy sins, forsake the friend you chose from all the world to make your own. A good woman will save anything but a liar, and God's grace is adequate, in time, for even him. I say unto wives, be large-hearted, wide in your charity, generous, not paltry, nor exacting, (exaction has murdered more loves than Herod murdered babies!) companionable, forbearing and true, and stand by your husbands through everything. And I say unto men, be _men_! Don't choose a wife, in the first place, for the mere exterior of a pretty face and form. Be as alert in the choice of a wife as you are in a bargain. You don't invest in a house just because it looks well, or buy a suit of clothes at first sight, or dash on change and snatch at the first deal. After you are once married stand by your choice like a man. If you must have your beer, don't sneak out of it on a clove and a lie; carefully weigh the cost, and if you conclude to risk everything for the gratification of an appetite drink at home and above board, and don't attempt to deceive your wife with subterfuges and excuses. Don't run after other women because your wife is not so young as she once was, or because the bloom is faded a little from the face you once thought so fair. It is the part of an Indian to retract a gift once given, or to go back on a bargain. Don't live together if you can't rise above the level of fighting cats, but be careful how you throw aside the bonds that God has joined between you. Live the lot you have chosen as bravely as you can, remembering that the thorn that you have developed will never change into a rose by mere change of circumstances. Divorce and the mere shifting of the stage setting will never make your tragedy over into a vaudeville or a light opera.
XLIX.
GONE BACK TO FLIPPITY-FLOPPITY SKIRTS.
The rainy season is here again, and where is dress-reform? My soul grew sick, the other morning as, with unfurled umbrella, lunch-basket, bundle, and draperies, I beheld the working woman on her weary march. Give a man a petticoat, a bundle and an umbrella, and the streets would be full of capering lunatics whenever it rained. Stay at home, did you say? That is good advice for the woman who has nothing else to do, but in these latter days the right sort of husband don't go round. Either he died in the war or the stock has run low, so that more than half the well-meaning women have no homes to stay in. What Moses is going to lead the poor creatures to the commonsense suit that shall protect them from the inclement weather they are forced to meet as they go abroad to earn their bread and salt? It must be a concerted movement, for there is none among us who dares take the war path alone. The children of Israel went in a crowd and so must we. For a principle there are those among us who would die, perhaps, but there is no principle on the earth below nor in the heaven above for which we would suffer ridicule. As for me, I have furled my banner and laid aside my bugle. I am tired of being a martyr to an unpopular cause. I am too big a coward to be caught making an everlasting object of myself. I have gone back to flippity-floppity skirts and long gowns and all the rest of the "flesh pots." Browning says of a certain class of people: "The dread of shame has made them tame," and I am one of the tame ones. A domestic tabby couldn't be tamer, nor a yellow bird fed on lump sugar. I expect nothing but that my winter's hat will be adorned with a chubby green parrot, and that I shall walk the street leading a brimstone dog by a magenta ribbon. If one is forced to eat, drink and sleep with the Romans, perhaps it is better for one's peace of mind not to be too pronounced a Greek!
L.
I SHALL MEET HIM SOME DAY.
I shall meet the man who ties his horse's nose in a bag, some day, in single combat, and there will be only one of us left to tell the tale of the encounter. Wouldn't I love to see that man forced to take his dinner while tied up in a flour bag! I should love to deal out his coffee through a garden hose, and serve his vegetables through a long-distance telephone. There is nothing like turn about to incite justice in the human breast. While we are afflicted with such an epidemic of strikes, why not have one that has some sense in it. Let the overworked horses, straining themselves blind with terrible loads, go on a strike. Let the persecuted dogs, deprived of water and scrimped for food, stoned and hounded as mad when they are only crazed by man's inhumanity, go on a strike. Let the cattle, and the countless thousands of stock, prodded into cars and cramped in long passages of transit, blinded with the crash of fellow-victims' horns while crowded together in their inadequate quarters, trampled under riotous hoofs, and kept without food and overfilled with water to make them look fat, go on a strike. Let the chickens and geese and all the live feathered stock on South Water Street, kept in little bits of coops and flung headlong and screaming down into dark cellars, trundled over rough roads in jolting wagons and utterly deprived for hours at a time of a drop of water to cool the fever of their terrible fear, go on a strike. Let the horses of these fat aldermen, left all day in the court house alleyway without food and checked tight with head-check lines, go on a strike. Let the patient nags that stand all day by the curbstone and are plagued and annoyed by mischievous boys, go on a strike. In such a strike as any of these the Lord himself might condescend to take sides with the oppressed against the oppressor.
LI.
A MANNISH WOMAN.
There are many disagreeable things to be met with in life, but none that is much harder upon the nerves than a mannish woman. With a strident voice and a swaggering walk, and a clattering tongue, she takes her course through the world like a cat-bird through an orchard; the thrushes and the robins are driven right and left before the advance of the noisy nuisance. A coarse-tongued man is bad enough, heaven knows, but when a woman descends to slangy speech, and vulgar jests, and harsh diatribes, there is no language strong enough with which to denounce her. On the principle that a strawberry is quicker to spoil than a pumpkin, it takes less to render a woman obnoxious than to make a man unfit for decent company. I am no lover of butter-mouthed girls, of prudes and "prunes and prism" fine ladies; I love sprightliness and gay spirits and unconventionality, but the moment a woman steps over the border land that separates delicacy of feeling, womanliness and lovableness, from rudeness, loud-voiced slang and the unblushing desire for notoriety, she becomes, in the eyes of all whose opinion is worth having, a miserable caricature upon her sex. It is not quite so bad to see a young girl making a fool of herself as to see an elderly woman comporting herself in a giddy manner in public places. We look for feather-heads among juveniles, but surely the cares and troubles of fifty years should tame down the high spirits of any woman. Chance took me into a public office the other day, largely conducted by women. Conspicuous among the clerks was a woman whose age must have exceeded fifty years. She was exchanging loud pleasantries with a couple of beardless boys upon the question of "getting tight." Noble theme for a woman old enough to be their grandmother to choose! As I listened to the coarse jests and looked into her hard and unlovely face, I could but wonder how nature ever made the mistake to label such material--"woman." It would be no more of a surprise to find a confectioner's stock made up of coarse salt, marked "sugar," or to buy burdock of a florist, merely because the tag attached to it was lettered "moss rose."
LII.
THE ONLY WAY TO CONQUER A HARD DESTINY.
The only way to conquer a cast-iron destiny is to yield to it. You will break to pieces if you are always casting yourself upon the rocks. Sit down on the "sorrowing stone" now and then, but don't expect to last long if you are constantly flinging yourself head first against it. If life holds nothing nobler and sweeter than the routine of uncongenial work, if all the pleasant anticipations and lively hopes of youth remain but as cotton fabrics do when the colors have washed away, if good intention and noble purpose glimmer only a little now and then from out the murky environments of your lot, as fisher lights at sea, accept the inevitable and make the best of it. Nothing can stop us if we are bound to grow. We are not like trees that can be hewed down by every chance woodman's axe; death is the only woodman abroad for us, and he does not hew down, he simply transplants. God is our only judge; to him alone shall we yield the record of life's troubled day, and isn't it a great comfort to think that he so fully understands what have been our limitations, and how we have been handicapped and baffled and hindered? If jockeys were to enter their horses for the great Derby with the understanding that the road was rough and the horses blind, do you think much would be expected of the finish? And is heaven less discriminating than a horse jockey?
LIII.
THE "SMART" PERSON.
Next to a steam calliope preserve me from a "smart" person. There is as much difference between smartness and brain as there is between a jewsharp and a flute, or between mustard and wine. A "smart" person may turn off a lot of work and make things hum, so does a buzz-saw! Who would not rather spend an afternoon with a lark than with a hornet? The lark may not be so active, but activity is not always the most desirable thing in the world. A smart person may accomplish more than a dreamer, but in the long run I'll take my chance with the latter. When we go up to St. Peter's gate by and by, after life's long, blundering march is over, it will not be the answer to such questions as this: "How many socks can you darn in an afternoon, besides baking bread, washing windows, tending babies and scrubbing floors?" that is going to help us; but, "How many times have you stopped your work to bind up a broken heart, or say a comforting word, or help carry a burden for somebody worse off than yourself?" I tell you, smart folks never have the time to be sympathetic; they always have too much thundering work on hand.
LIV.
A PRETTY STREET INCIDENT.
The other day a horse was trying to get a very small quantity of oats from the depths of a very small nosebag. In vain the poor fellow tossed his head and did his best to gain his dinner. At last, just as he was settling down to dumb and despairing patience, a bright-faced boy of perhaps ten or twelve years of age happened along. Seeing the dilemma of the horse, the little fellow stopped and said: "Halloa, can't get your oats, can you? Never mind, I'll fix you!" And straightway he shortened up the straps that held the bag in place, and, with a kindly pat and a cheery word which the grateful horse seemed to appreciate, went his way. I would like to be the mother, or the aunt, or even the first cousin of that boy. I would rather that he should belong to me than that I should own a Paganini violin, or a first-water diamond the size of a Concord grape. Bless his heart, wherever he is, and may he long continue to live in a world that needs him. Kindness of heart, and tenderness; consideration for the needs of the helpless and the weak, and the courage that dares be true to a merciful impulse, are traits that go far toward the make-up of angels. We need tender-hearted boys more than we need a new tariff to bring up and develop the resources of the country. The boy that succeeds in bringing in the greatest number of dead sparrows may be the embryo man of the future, and you may praise his energy and his smartness, but give me the boy who took the trouble to adjust the nose-bag every time. A little less business acumen, a good bit less greed and cruelty, will tell on future character to the comfort of all concerned.
LV.
POLICY A DAMASCUS BLADE, NOT A CLUB.
Policy in the hands of a diplomat is like a sharp sword in the grasp of an able fencer, but policy in the hands of fools, is like a good knife wielded by a half-wit. It takes brains to be truly politic, the unfortunate person who attempts to be cautious, and wise, and reticent, and to let policy thread every action as a string runs through glass beads, only succeeds in making himself ridiculous. To be afraid to speak what is in your mind for fear you will make yourself unpopular, to be too cautious to mention the fact that you are having a new latch put on your front gate for fear that you might be over-communicative, to be backward in taking sides for fear of committing yourself to a losing cause, may be politic to your own feeble intelligence, but in the estimation of brainy folks it is a species of feline idiocy worse than fits.
LVI.
THE CONSTANT YEARS BRING AGE TO ALL.
All day long it has been trying to snow out here in the country. To me not even June, with its showering apple-tree flowers and its alternations of silver rain and golden sunshine, is more beautiful than these soft winter days, full of snow-feathers and great shadows. I love to watch the young pines take on their holiday attire. How they robe themselves from head to foot in draperies of fleecy white, pin diamonds in their dark branches and wind about their slender girth the strands of evanescent pearl! I love to watch the skies at dawn when they kindle like a flame above the bluffs and scatter sparkles of light as a red rose scatters its petals. Where has the last year fled? It seems but yesterday that I sat by this same window and hatched the lilac plumes unfold on that old bush that to-day is getting ready to don its ermine. Why, at this rate, my dear, it won't be longer than day after to-morrow morning before you and I wake up and find ourselves old folks. How odd it will seem to look in the glass and see wisps of frosted stubble in place of the wavy locks of brown, and jet, and gold! Ah, well, it is a comfort to think that some folks defy time, and are as young at seventy as at seventeen. Beauty fades, and witchery takes unto itself wings, but true hearts, like wine, mellow and enrich with years.
LVII.
DID YOU EVER READ THE "LITTLE PILGRIM."