Part 14

I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’ Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained, getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas so _like_ her! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used to talk a lot about it--what a nice place ’twould be for socials, and how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up. But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there is _to_ the town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen said _they_ couldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier, with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes, and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the panes of glass were broken--regular dumping-ground for trash.

“Well, one morning bright and early--I’ve heard my mother tell about it a thousand times--the first person that went by the Town Hall seen the door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her, and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living, ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’

“He went away kind of quick, and told about her over in the store, and they looked out, and sure enough out she come, limping along (she had the rheumatism _bad_) and dragging that old mattress with her. She drug it out in front to a bare place, and poured some kerosene on it and set fire to it; and I guess by that time every family in the street was looking out at her from behind the window-shades. Then she went back in, leaving it there burning up, high and smoky, and in a minute out she came again with her dustpan full of trash. She flung that on the fire as if she’d been waiting all her life to have the chance to get it burned up, and went back for more. And there she was, bobbing back and forth all the fore part of the morning. Folks from the Lower Street that hadn’t heard about it would come up for their mail, and just stop dead, to see the bonfire blazing and Aunt Almera limping out with maybe an old broken box full of junk in her arms. She’d always speak up just as pleasant and gentle to them--_that_ made ’em feel queerer than anything else. Aunt Almera talking so mild! ‘Well, folks, how are you this morning?’ she’d say. ‘And how are all the folks at home?’ And then _slosh!_ would go a pail of dirty water, for as soon as she got it swept out, didn’t she get down on her creaking old marrow-bones and scrub the floor! All that afternoon every time anybody looked out, splash! there’d be Aunt Almera throwing away the water she’d been scrubbing the floor with. Folks felt about as big as a pint-cup by that time, but nobody could think of anything to do or say, for fear of what Aunt Almera might say back at them, and everybody was always kind o’ slow about trying to stop her once she got started on anything. So they just kept indoors and looked at each other like born fools, till Aunt Almera crawled back home. It mighty nigh killed her, that day’s work. She was all crippled up for a fortnight afterwards with rheumatism. But you’d better believe folks stirred around those two weeks, and when she was out and around again there was this room all fixed up just the way ’tis now, with furniture, and the floor painted, and white curtains to the windows, and all. Nobody said a word to her about it, and neither did she say a word when she saw it--she never was one to do any crowing over folks--once she’d got her own way.”

The hassocks in our pew began to look shabby, and my aunt brought them home from church to put fresh carpeting on them. They suggested church, of course, and as she worked on them a great many reminiscences came to her mind. Here is one: “I used to love to ride horseback, and grandmother always made father let me, although he was afraid to have me. Well, one summer evening, right after supper I went for a little ride, and didn’t get home till about half-past seven. As I rode into the yard I looked through the open windows, and there was grandmother putting her bonnet on; and it came to me in a flash that I’d promised to go to evening prayers with her. I was a grown-up young lady then, but I was scared! You did what you’d promised grandmother you would, or something happened. So I just fell off my horse, turned him out in the night pasture, saddle and all, and ran into the house. Grandmother was putting on her gloves, and, although she saw me with my great looped-up riding skirt on and my whip in my hand, she never said a word nor lifted an eyebrow; just went on wetting her fingers and pushing the gloves down on them as though I was ready with my best hat on. That scared me worse than ever. I tore into my room, slipped off my skirt, put on another right over my riding trousers, slammed on a hat, threw a long cape around me, and grabbed my gloves. As the last bell began to ring and grandmother stepped out of the house, I stepped out beside her, all right as to the outer layer, but with the perspiration streaming down my face. I’d hurried so, and those great thick riding trousers were so hot under my woolen skirt! My! I thought I’d die! And it was worse in the church! Over in our dark, close corner pew there wasn’t a breath of air. It must have been a hundred by the thermometer. I was so hot I just had to do something or die! There weren’t but a few people in the church, and nobody anywhere near our corner, and it was as dark as could be, back in our high pew. So when we knelt down for the General Confession I gathered the cape all around me, reached up under my full skirt, unbuttoned those awful riding trousers, and just cautiously slipped them off. My! What a relief it was! Grandmother felt me rustling around and looked over sharp at me, to see what I was doing. When she saw the riding trousers, she looked shocked, and frowned; but I guess I must have looked terribly hot and red, so she didn’t say anything.

“Well, I knew it was an awful thing to do in church, and I was so afraid maybe somebody _had_ seen me, although old Dr. Skinner, the rector, was the only one high enough up to look over the pew-top, and he was looking at his Prayer Book. But I felt as mean as though he’d been looking right at me. Well, he finally got through the prayers and began on the First Lesson. It was something out of the Old Testament, that part about how the Jews went back and repaired the broken walls of Jerusalem, each one taking a broken place for his special job, and then how they got scared away, all but a few, from the holes in the walls they were trying to fix up. Dr. Skinner always read the Lessons very loud and solemn, as though he were reading them right at somebody, and he’d sort of turn from one to another in the congregation with his forefinger pointed at them, as if he meant that just for them. What _do_ you suppose I felt like when he turned right towards our corner and leaned ’way over and shook his finger at me, and said in a loud, blaming tone, ‘But Asher continued and _abode_ in _his_ breaches!’ I gave a little gasp, and grandmother turned towards me quick. When she saw the expression on my face (I guess I must have looked funny), she just burst right out into that great laugh of hers--ha! ha! ha! She laughed so she couldn’t stop, and had to actually get up and go out of church, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. We could hear her laughing as she went down the walk outside!

“You’d have thought she’d be mortified, wouldn’t you? _I_ was mortified almost to death! But she wasn’t a bit. She laughed every time she thought of it, for years after that. It was just like her! She did love a good laugh! Let anything happen that struck her as funny, and she’d laugh, no _matter_ what!”

Later on, as we carried the hassocks back to the church and put them in our pew, my aunt said, reflectively, looking round the empty church: “I never come in here that I don’t remember how grandmother used to say the Creed, loud and strong--she always spoke up so clear: ‘From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost: The Holy Catholic Church: The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins--’ and then she’d stop dead, while everybody went on, ‘The Resurrection of the body;’ and then she’d chime in again, ‘And the Life everlasting, Amen.’ You couldn’t help noticing it, she took the greatest pains you should. But if anybody said anything about it she always said that she didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, and she wasn’t going to _say_ she did. Sometimes the ministers would get wrought up, especially the young ones, and one of them went to the bishop about it, but nobody ever did anything. What _could_ you do? And grandmother went right on saying the Creed that way to the day of her death.”

On the hundredth anniversary of the organization of our parish there were, of course, great doings in the way of centenary celebrations. Many of the old rectors came back to visit, and to make after-dinner talks and to preach at special services. One of the most interesting of these old men was the Reverend Mr. Jason Gillett, who had been rector for a year shortly after the Civil War, when he was a young man just out of the Theological Seminary. He had since become well-known, one might say famous (in church circles at least) for his sermons of a fervor truly evangelical (so it was said), delivered in a voice noted for its harmony and moving qualities. We had often read about his preaching, in the Church papers. He had brought up from decay several old parishes and had founded one of the finest and most thriving in Chicago.

There was a stir when his return for a day was announced, and the morning when he preached, the church was crowded to the doors. He proved to be a spiritual-faced, white-haired, handsome old man, equipped with fine eyes and beautiful hands as well as his famous voice. He preached a sermon which held every one in the church breathlessly attentive. I noticed that his stole was exquisitely worked in gold thread, and after the service, when the Altar Guild were putting things away, we saw that his surplice was of extremely fine material, with a deep band of embroidery about the hem. “Loving lady-parishioners,” conjectured one of the Guild, holding it up.

“They say the women are always crazy about him, everywhere, and no wonder!” said another. “Such a fascinating, attractive personality.”

“How did you like his sermon?” I asked. Personally I had found it rather too dramatic for my taste. It rubs me the wrong way when I feel that somebody is trying to work my feelings up, although I always feel a little ashamed of this natural ungraciousness, which is labeled in the talk of the old people of our locality as “Canfield cussedness.”

One of my companions answered me, “Why, the tears ran right down my cheeks, towards the end of that sermon!”

And another added, “Such a power for good as he has been, all his life. Think of his having begun his wonderful work right here in our little parish.”

The door opened and the preacher himself entered in his black cassock, followed by a group of people. He was a little flushed from the handshaking reception he had been holding in the vestibule and still wore the affable smile which had gone with the handshaking. The men and women who had followed him in were still talking two or three at once, trying to get his attention, still fixing their eyes on him, unwilling to leave him, moved evidently by his mere presence.

“It’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in this dear old parish,” he said genially, using a set of inflections of his fine voice quite different from those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!”

He broke off to say in still another tone, “I know none of you will object to my saying also that it is an immense relief to find the parish rid of that detestable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must all breathe a happier air, since she took her mocking cynicism into another world.”

A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and suppressed smiles told him that he had been indiscreet. He faced the uncomfortable little situation with a well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. Then, seeing by my expression that I was the one involved, he said gallantly, “It’s not possible that so very young a lady can have any connection with a generation so long since passed away.”

“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grandmother,” I said, perhaps rather drily. Not that I cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom at that time I knew very little, and who seemed as remote from my life as Moses. But that same hateful, contrary streak in my nature was roused to resentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and a word from him could set anything straight.

He found the fact of my relationship and of my knowledge of it very amusing, “Where, oh, where, out of Vermont could you find a modern young person who even knew the name of her great-grandmother? I’m sure, my dear, that family loyalties are outlawed by such a long interval of years. And I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are not at all like your great-grandmother.”

He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be sure to take that as a compliment. She must have been an old Tartar.

I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned away again, to go on chatting with the people who continued to hang on his words, laughing loudly when he said something playful, nodding a grave concurrence in his more seriously expressed opinions, their eyes always fixed on his.

They all moved away, out into the church and down the aisle and I did not see him again till that evening, when, quite unexpectedly, he appeared beside me in the break-up of the company after the large public dinner.

“I feel that I owe you an apology,” he began persuasively and courteously, “for having let slip that chance remark about a relative of yours, even so very far distant. I would not have said it, of course, if I had dreamed that any member of her family....” Up to this point he had used the same sort of voice and tone that he had employed after church that morning, but now he suddenly dropped into another tone, quite different. I had a divination that it was not only quite different from any inflection he had used, but also not at all what he had had the intention of using. “I try to be fair ... to be tolerant ... to be _forgiving_, but really I can never forget the....” (it was as if a wave of lava had burst up out of the smiling pleasantness of his agreeable manner) “I simply can’t express to you the blighting, devastating effect she had on me, young, sensitive, emotional and ardent as I was at that time!”

He started at the violence of his own voice and glanced quickly around him as if to see whether any one else had heard it. And then he looked intensely annoyed by his own gesture.

“You are probably assuming that I refer,” he went on more quietly, but still pressingly (it was as if for some reason he quite cared to influence my unimportant opinion), “that I refer to her dictatorial assurance that she knew better than any one else how things ought to be run. Of course you must have heard plenty of stories of her overbearing ways. But that is not the point; no, although she was a hard parishioner on that account for a young clergyman struggling with the administration of his first parish. What came back to me, in a wave of bitterness as I stood up to preach to-day, was the remembrance of the peculiarly corrosive vein of irony, with which she withered and dried to the root any play of poetry or emotion in those about her. So far from feeling any natural, human sympathy with ardent youth, she had a cold intolerance for any nature richer or more warmly colored than her own. She made it her business to drop an acid sneer upon any expression of emotion or any appeal to it; and a life-long practice in that diabolical art had given her a technique of raw, brutal roughness, guaranteed to hamstring any spontaneity of feeling, any warmth of personality. I could quote you dozens of such poisoned shafts of hers.... Here’s one that came into my mind as I stood again in that pulpit, where I first dedicated myself to the service of God.

“I can never forget her comment on the first sermon in which I let myself go into the fervor which was given me by nature. It was an appeal for foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. I was carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured out my soul to my listeners. I have always considered that to be my first real sermon, the first time I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood in the robing room, faint with the reaction after my emotion, I heard some one just outside the door say, ‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think of the sermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! She said, ‘Oh, I _like_ to see anybody enjoy himself as much as that young man did.’”

This unexpected conclusion brought to me such a sudden horrifying desire to laugh that I felt quite shaken by the necessity to curb it. And it was essential not to let it be seen. For he had wound himself up again to a heat which astonished me. It was as if he had meant casually to show me an old scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound was as raw and smarting as ever.

“Why,” he cried, “she all but drove me wholly out of preaching, at the very outset of my career, sitting there as she did, Sunday after Sunday, fixing that cynical aged eye on me. You can’t know ... I hear that you have been brought up, luckily for you, outside of this deadly New England atmosphere.... You can’t _imagine_ how it kills and freezes all the warmth and color and fire out of life to have such a ... if I hadn’t escaped out of it to....”

“I’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New England atmosphere,” I said, beginning to feel very cross and prickly.

As if struck by something in my tone, he now looked at me very hard. I don’t know what he saw in my face ... perhaps a family resemblance of expression ... but he suddenly seemed to come to himself with a start. He said abruptly, with an expression of extreme annoyance once more on his face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I can’t think what in the world made me!” and turned away with a noticeable lack of suavity and grace of manner.

Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the stepmother turn the poor girl out--yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs. Canfield--that was some kin to you, I forget what--where I was working, she went right out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a word.

“But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s time drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’ she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear Margaret talking that way.

“And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d all the doors and windows open for the first time, Margaret had gone down the walk to look at the lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and around the corner came John Dawson!

“Her back was to him and he hadn’t any idea she was there, so when she turned round, they stared at each other for just a minute, as if they’d never seen each other. Now the moment had come, Margaret stood there frozen, just waiting, like a little scared, helpless--I had the half of me hanging out the kitchen window to see what would happen, and I’ll never forget it--never--never--never--the look on his face, the astounded look on his face, so full of pity and love, so strong with pity and love. ‘Margie! _Margie!_’ he said in a loud voice, and threw his sack off his back and his gun from his hand, and ran, ran to take her in his arms.

“Well, when I could see again, I went off to tell old Mrs. Canfield, and there was the old lady in her own bedroom, standing bolt upright in the middle of the floor, and crying at the top of her voice. Her wrinkled old face was just a-sop with tears. Faith, but it was the grand cry she was having! And the good it did her! When she came to, she says to me, ‘Well,’ says she, ‘folks aren’t so cussed as they seem, are they?’