The Diary of a Saint

IX

SEPTEMBER

September 15. At last Kathie is gone. What with having dressmakers and seeing to her, and doing the shopping, and corresponding with the principal of the school, and all the rest of it, I have had my hands full for the last three weeks. I have enjoyed it, though; I suppose it is always a pleasure partaking of the moral for a woman when she can conscientiously give her whole mind up to the making of clothes. I do not doubt the delight of sewing fig-leaves together went for the moment far toward comforting Eve for leaving Paradise. I cannot now help smiling to see how entirely Kathie's fine scruples about breaking her vow not to come into the house were forgotten when I had a dressmaker here waiting to fit her frocks.

I feel a little as if I were trying to be Providence and to interfere in her life unwarrantably now she is gone and there is nothing more to do about it but to await the result. I have done what I thought best, though, and that is the whole of it. As Father used to say, it is not our duty to do the wisest thing, for we cannot always tell what it is, but only to be honest in doing what seems to us wisest. I hope she will do well, and I believe she will.

September 17. Cousin Mehitable writes me from Rome that she is sure I am tired of baby, and had better come over for a couple of months. I cannot tell whether she means what she says, or is only trying to carry her point. She has never had a child near her, and can hardly know how completely a baby takes possession of one. There are many things in the world that I should enjoy, and I should certainly delight in going abroad again, but baby has so taken the first place in my heart and life that everything else is secondary. I wonder sometimes whether after a woman has a child of her own she can any longer give her husband her very warmest love. Perhaps the law of compensation comes in, and if men grow less absorbed in their wives the wives have an equal likelihood of coming to feel that the husband is less a part of their lives than the child. Only if a woman really loved a man —

September 18. It is a childish habit to break off in the middle of a sentence because one does not know how to finish it. I have been turning over the leaves of this book to see if I had done it often, and I have been amused and humiliated to find so many places where I have ended with a dash, like an hysterical schoolgirl. Yet I do not see just what one is to do when suddenly one finds a subject hopelessly too deep. Last night when I got to a place where I was balancing the love of a mother for her husband and for her child, I naturally realized suddenly that I had never had a child, and very likely never really loved a man. The love I had for George seems now so unreal that I feel completely fickle; although I believe I am generally pretty constant. I could not bear to think I am not loyal in my feelings. I have come to be so sure the George I was fond of never existed, though, that I can hardly have the same feelings I had before.

This is the sort of subject, however, which is sure to end in a dash if I go on with it, so it seems wiser to stop before such a catastrophe is reached.

September 19. To-day is Father's birthday. It is always a day which moves me a good deal. I can never be reminded of an anniversary like this without finding my head full of a swarm of thoughts. I cannot think of the beginning or the ending of Father's life without looking at it as a whole, and reckoning up somehow the effect of his having lived. This is the real question, I suppose, in regard to any life. He was to me so wonderful, he was so great a man, that I have almost to reason with myself to appreciate why the world in general does not better remember him. His life was and is so much to me that I find it hard to realize how narrow is the circle which ever even knew of him at all. His books and his decisions keep his name still in the memory of lawyers somewhat, and those who knew him will not easily forget; but after all this is so little in comparison to the fame he might have had.

How persistent is an old thought! I should have supposed this idea might have died long ago. Father himself answered it when he told Cousin Mehitable he was entirely satisfied if his part in the progress of humanity was conducted decently and in order; he was not concerned whether anybody knew he lived or did not know. "The thing is that I live as well as I can," he said, "and not that it should be known about. I shan't mind, Cousin Mehitable, whether anybody takes the trouble to praise me after I am dead, but I do think it may make some tiny difference to the race that I did my level best while I was alive."

I can see him now as he stood by the library fire saying this, with his little half whimsical smile, and I remember thinking as he spoke how perfectly he lived up to his theories. Certainly the best thing a man can leave to his children is a memory like that which I have of Father: a memory half love and half respect.

Father's feeling about the part of the individual in the general scheme of things was like certain oriental doctrines I have read since his death; and I suppose he may have been influenced by the writings of the East. He seemed to feel that he was part of a process, and that the lives of those who sometime would come after him might be made easier and happier if he lived well and wisely. I am sure he was right. I do not know how or where or when the accounts of life are settled, or whether it makes any difference to the individual as an individual or not; but I am sure what we do is of consequence, and I wish my life might be as fine, as strong, as noble as was Father's.

September 20. Aunt Naomi came in this forenoon with her catlike step, and seated herself by the south window in the sunshine. The only eye which could be seen clearly was bright with intention, and it was evident at a glance that she had things to say. She was rather deliberate in coming at it. Aunt Naomi is an artist in gossip, and never spoils the effect of what she has to tell by failing to arouse expectation and interest. She leads one on and stirs up curiosity before she tells her news, and with so much cleverness does she manage, that a very tiny bit of gossip will seem a good deal when she has set it forth. It is a pleasure to see anything well done, even gossip; so Aunt Naomi is an unfailing source of amusement to me, – which is perhaps not to my credit.

She made the usual remarks about the weather and asked after baby; she observed that from the way Miss Charlotte breathed when she was asleep in prayer-meeting last night she was afraid she had taken cold; she told me Ranny Gargan's divorced wife was at death's door again, and tried to get from me some sort of information of Rosa's feelings toward the possible widower; then she gradually and skillfully approached her real subject.

"It's strange how folks get over being in love when once they are married," she said, hitching her chair into the sunlight, which had moved a little from her while she talked.

I knew by her careless tone, too careless not to be intentional, that something was coming, but I would not help her. I simply smiled vaguely, and asked where the sewing-circle was to be next week. She was not disconcerted by the question, but neatly turned it to her uses.

"At Mrs. Tobey's," she answered. "I hope we shan't see anything unpleasant across the road."

"What do you mean?" I asked, rather startled at this plain allusion to George's house.

"They say George Weston and his wife do rather queer things sometimes."

I asked her at once to say exactly what she meant, and not to play with it. I added that I did not see why George and his wife should be so much discussed.

"They are talked about because they deserve it," Aunt Naomi returned, evidently delighted by the effect she had produced. "If they will quarrel so all the neighborhood can hear and see, of course people will talk about it. Why shouldn't they? We ought to take some interest in folks, I should think."

I was silent a minute. I wanted to know why she said this, and what George and his wife had been doing to make the village comment, but I would not go on gossiping about them, and I dropped the subject altogether. I made a remark about the Willeyville Fair. Aunt Naomi chuckled audibly, but she did not persist in talking about the Westons.

September 22. Rosa is once more in a state of excitement, and the household is correspondingly stirred. Hannah goes about with her head in the air and an expression of the most lofty scorn on her face; Rosa naturally resents this attitude, both of mind and of body; so I have to act as a sort of buffer between the two.

The fuss is about Ranny again. I begin to feel that I should be justified in having him kidnapped and carried off to some far country, but I hardly see my way clear to measures so extreme. I am astonished to find that Aunt Naomi did not know all the facts about the illness of Ranny's wife; or perhaps she was too much occupied with the affairs of the Westons to tell the whole. Ranny seems this time to have got into real difficulty, and apparently as the result of his latest escapade is likely to pay a visit to the county jail. It seems that while he was pretty far gone in liquor ex-Mrs. Ranny came to plead with him to take her back and marry her over again. She having had the greatest difficulty in getting divorced from him in the first place, one would think she might be content to let well enough alone; but she is evidently madly fond of Gargan, who must be a good deal of an Adonis in his own world, so completely does he sway the hearts of the women, even though they know him to be brutal, drunken, disreputable, and generally worthless. On this occasion Ranny behaved worse than usual, and met his former wife's petition by giving her a severe beating with the first thing which came to hand, the thing unluckily being an axe-handle. The poor woman is helpless in her bed, and Ranny has been taken possession of by the constable.

Rosa refuses to see anything in the incident which is in the least to the discredit of Ranny. I was in the garden this morning, and overheard her defending her lover against Hannah's severe censures upon him and upon Rosa for siding with him.

"Why shouldn't he beat his own wife when she deserved it," Rosa demanded, "and she nothing but a hateful, sharp-nosed pig?"

"She isn't his wife," Hannah retorted, apparently not prepared to protest against a doctrine so well established as that a man might beat his spouse.

"Well, she was, anyhow," persisted Rosa; "and that's the same thing. You can't put a man and his wife apart just by going to law. Father O'Rafferty said so."

"Oh, you can't, can't you?" Hannah said with scornful deliberation. "Then you're a nice girl to be talking about marrying Ranny Gargan, if he's got one wife alive already."

This blow struck too near home, I fear, for Rosa's voice was pretty shrill when she retorted.

"What do you know about marrying anyhow, Hannah Elsmore? Nobody wants to marry you, I'll be bound."

It seemed to be time to interfere, so I went nearer to the window and called to Rosa to come out to baby and me.

"Rosa," I said, when she appeared, flushed and angry, "I wish you wouldn't quarrel with Hannah."

"Then what for's she all the time twitting me about Ranny Gargan?" demanded the girl with angry tears in her eyes. "She don't know what it is to care for a man anyhow, and what for does she be taking me up short when I'm that bad in my mind a'ready I can't stand it? Ranny Gargan's old beast of a wife's got him into a scrape, but that don't make any difference to me. I ain't going back on him."

I established myself on the grass beside the sun-dial, and took baby, sweet and lovely, into my arms.

"I am sorry, Rosa," I said when we were settled comfortably. "I hoped you'd got over thinking about Ranny Gargan. He is certainly not the sort of man to make you happy, even if he were free. He'd never think of sparing you or letting you have your own way."

"Who's wanting to have their own way, Miss Privet?" demanded my astonishing handmaid; and then went on in her usual fashion of striking me breathless when she comes to discourse of love and marriage. "That ain't what women marry for, Miss Privet. They're just made so they marry to be beat and broke and abused if that's what pleases the men; and that's the way they're best off."

"But, Rosa," I put in, "you always talk as if you'd be meekness itself if a husband wanted to abuse you, but I confess I never thought you would be at all backward about defending yourself."

A droll look came into her rosy Irish face, and a funny little touch of brogue into her voice.

"I'd think if he loved me the way he ought to, Miss Privet, he'd be willing to take a whack himself now and then, just in the way of love. Besides," she added, "I'd come it round Ranny when it was anything I really wanted. Any man's soft enough if a woman knows how to treat him right."

I abandoned the discussion, as I am always forced to abandon a talk of this sort with Rosa. I suppose in her class the crude doctrine that it is the right of the man to take and the duty of the woman to give still exists with a good deal of simplicity and force, but it almost stops my breath to hear Rosa state it. It is like a bit of primeval savagery suddenly thrust into my face in the midst of nineteenth-century civilization. The worst of it all is, moreover, to feel the habits of old generations buzzing dizzily in my ears until I have a confused sensation as if in principle the absurd vagaries of Rosa might be right. I am tinglingly aware that fibres which belonged to some remote progenitress, some barbaric woman captured by force, perhaps, after the marriage customs of primitive peoples, retain the instinct of submission to man and respond to Rosa's uncivilized theories. I have a sort of second sense that if a man I loved came and asserted a brutal sovereignty over me, it would appeal to these inherited instincts as right and proper, according to the order appointed by nature. I know what nonsense this is. The sense of justice has in the modern woman displaced the old humiliating subjection, – although if one loved a man the subjection would not be humiliating, but just the highest pleasure. I can conceive of a woman's being so fond of a man that to be his abject slave would be so much the happiest thing in the world that to serve him to her very utmost would be so great a delight as almost to be selfishness.

How Father would have shouted over a page like this! I would not have supposed even Rosa could have spurred me into such an attempt at philosophy, and I hardly believed I knew so many long words. After all I doubt if Rosa and I are so far apart in our instincts; only she has the coolness to put them into words I only imitate, and cannot pretend to rival.

September 24. It is delightful to see how really fond Tom is becoming of baby. I came home from a walk this afternoon, and there in the parlor was Tom down on the floor with Tomine, shaking his head at her like a bear, and making her laugh. Rosa beamed from the background with the most complete approval. He sprang up when I appeared, but I ignored all the strangeness, and only said how glad I was to see him. I think he liked my taking as a matter of course his being there, and very likely this was what made him confess he had been in two or three times to play with baby when he knew that I was not at home.

"I saw you going down the other side of the river," he said, "so I came to keep Thomasine from being lonesome."

I returned that it was not very complimentary to tell me he had tried to avoid me, but that I appreciated how much more fascinating baby was than I, so he need not apologize; and the end of it was that after this nonsense had broken the ice we sat on the floor together to entertain her ladyship. She was pleased to be in the most sunny mood imaginable, and responded to our fooling most graciously. With truly feminine preference, however, she bestowed most of her attention upon the man. She is a more entrancing creature every day; and she certainly has her father's eyes. I compared them this afternoon.

September 26. The reading-room seems really at last to be coming into being. I have found a place for it. It is a kind of square box over the post-office, but with furniture and pictures it can be made rather attractive. I have made out a list of periodicals, and sent to Boston for framed photographs for the walls. To-day I went to talk over the plan with Deacon Richards.

The mill was fragrant with its sweet mealy smell, and Deacon Daniel was as dusty as a moth-miller. As I stood in the doorway waiting for him to come down from the wheel, where he was doing something or other about the hopper, I fell to humming the old rhyme we sang as children when we went by the mill: —

"That isn't very polite," Deacon Daniel said, coming up behind me before I knew he had left his perch.

I turned and greeted him smilingly, repeating the last line: —

"You naughty miller, you must die!"

"I suppose I must," he assented; "but it won't be for stealing, Miss Ruth."

I love the old mill, with its great beams and its continual sound of dashing water and the chirruping of the millstones grinding away at the corn like an insatiate monster that can never have enough. The smell of the meal, too, is so pleasant, and even the abundant dust is so clean and fresh it seems to belong there. The mellow light through the dim windows and the shadows hiding in every corner have always from childhood appealed to my imagination. I find there always a soothing and serene mood.

"I want your advice, Deacon Richards," I said.

"So as not to follow it?" he demanded. "That's what women generally want of advice."

I assured him I was ready to follow his advice if it were good, and so we talked about the reading-room. I told him it seemed to me that if it was to go on properly it should have a head; somebody to manage it and be responsible for the way in which it was carried on.

"But you will do that yourself," he said.

I answered that it must be a man, for it was nonsense to think of a woman's running a reading-room for men. He looked at me for a moment with his droll grin, and then he was pleased to say that for a woman I had a remarkable amount of common sense. I thanked him for the compliment to my sex, and then asked if he would undertake the business, and promise not to freeze the readers out the way he did the prayer-meetings.

"I'm not the sort of person you want," he answered, chuckling at my allusion to the fire question. "I've sense enough to know that without being a woman. Why don't you ask Tom Webbe?"

I confessed that I had thought of Tom, but – And there I stuck, for I could hardly tell the deacon how I thought gossip had already said enough about Tom and myself without my giving folk any more to talk about.

"I don't know what that 'but' means," he remarked, grinning more than ever, as if he did know perfectly. "Anyway, there's nobody in town who could do it so well. All the men and boys like him, and he has a level head. He's the only one of the young fellows that's been to college, and he ought to know more about books than any of the rest of them. Besides, he needs something to take up his mind."

I felt the deacon was right, and I began to ask myself whether my personal feelings should be allowed to count in such a matter. Still I could hardly make up my mind to take the responsibility of putting Tom at the head of a reading-room I had started. If nothing else were to be considered I did not want my connection with the plan to be too prominent, and gossip about Tom would be just the thing to keep my name always to the front.

"I hope you are sensible enough to do one thing," Deacon Daniel went on, "and that is to have everybody who uses the room pay for it. It needn't be much, but they'll respect it and themselves more if they pay something, and it'll give them the right to grumble."

"I don't want them to grumble," I returned.

"Oh, nobody cares much for anything he can't grumble about," was his reply, with a laugh; "but really they are twice as likely to grumble if you pay for everything than if they help. That's the way we are made."

I told him that he was an old cynic, but I saw in a moment he was right about the value that would be put on a thing which was paid for. If the men feel they are helping to support the reading-room they will take a good deal more interest in it.

"Tom Webbe will manage them all right," the deacon declared. "He'll let them grumble just enough, and make them so contented they'll think they're having their own way while he's going ahead just the way he thinks best. He's the only man for the place."

Perhaps he is; and indeed the more I think about it, the more I see the deacon is right. It would certainly be good for Tom, and that is a good deal. I wonder what I ought to do?

What Deacon Daniel said about the way in which Tom would manage the men has been running through my mind. I wonder that I, who have known Tom so well, never thought before of how great his power is to control people. It showed itself when he was a boy; and if he had carried out his plan to study law it would have been – I do wonder if Tom is working by himself, and if that is the reason he borrowed those law-books?

September 27. Old lady Andrews has solved the question for me. I am so glad I thought to go to her for advice. She suggests that we have a committee, and make Deacon Richards chairman. Then Tom can be put on, and really do the work.

"It wouldn't do at all for you to put Tom Webbe at the head alone, my dear," she said. "It would make talk, and Aunt Naomi would have you married to him a dozen times before the week was over; but this way it will be all right."

I asked her if committees did not usually have three on them, and she answered that Deacon Richards would know.

"I belong to an old-fashioned generation, my dear, and I never can feel that it's quite respectable for a woman to know about committees and that sort of thing. I'm sure in my day it wouldn't have been thought well-bred. But Deacon Daniel will know. He's always on committees at church conferences and councils."

Once more I visited the mill, and told Deacon Daniel of old lady Andrews' suggestion. He agreed at once, and declared the plan was better than that of having one man at the head.

"It'll be much the same thing as far as managing the reading-room goes," he observed, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "but somehow folks like committees, and they generally think they have a better show if three or four men are running things than if there's only one. Of course one man always does manage, but a committee's more popular."