6. A Genre Piece
Whittaker was one of those peopiv amo rake offense gradually. Adams's rude remarks about preachers had rankled in him. The first day after he made up his mind that it was offensive. In two or three days he concluded that he would not visit the keen-witted but aggressive shoe-maker again until some apology should be made. By this time the election was over he doubted whether he ought to greet Mr. Adams on the street if he should chance to meet him. At least he would let his crusty friend make the first advance.
Now Adams was penitent for his rudeness even while he was being rude; it was an involuntary ferocity. He had regretted the words before he uttered them. He knew that he ought to apologize, but he must do even that by contraries. Meeting the minister one afternoon, right at the town pump, he stationed himself so as to block Whittaker's path, bowed, smiled grimly, and then came out with :
" Mr. Whittaker, you and I had some sharp words in our discussion about good old Henry VIII, the last time you were at my house. You haven't been there since, and you haven't been in the shop, either. It occurs to me that may be you said something on that occasion for which you would like to apologize. If so, you now have an opportunity."
This was said with such droll, mock-earnestness, that Whittaker could not but laugh.
" Of course I will apologize, Mr. Adams," he said, not without emphasis on the pronoun.
" And I," said the other, lifting himself up as if to represent the height of his own magnanimity " and I will freely forgive you. Come and see me tonight. I haven't had a human soul to quarrel with since you were therG before, except Roxy, and she won't quarrel back worth a cent. Now the old score's wiped out and we've settled Bluebeard and his wives, come 'round tonight and abuse me about something else."
" I'll come this very evening," said Whittaker.
"Now?"
" No ; this evening."
" Oh ! you're a confirmed Yankee," said Adams. " Why, it's evening now. After supper we call it night. Come, let's reconcile the confusion of tongues. Come to supper. I suppose you call it tea. Come, we'll teach you English if you live in these wild heathen parts long. Now I've made up, I am aching to quarrel, I tell you."
Mr. Whittaker made some feeble resistance. But the village society was so insipid that he found in himself a yearning for the stimulant conversation of the paradoxical Adams. It was a relief to talk with somebody who did not give an ex officio deference to a minister's opinion. Perhaps there was an unconscious inclination to see Roxy again, but this did not come into the category of admitted reasons for eating supper with the shoe-maker.
When Roxy saw Mr. Whittaker coming home with her father, she put hat upon the reluctant Bobo and sent him home. Then she began to " fly around," as the western phrase is, to get a supper " fit for a preacher." If Mr Whittaker had been observant of trifles he might hs.ve foretold the character of the supper, for the " company supper," among the better families in a western town did not vary much. There was commonly fried chicken in a rich gravy made with cream ; there was strong coffee with plenty of loaf-sugar and cream ; there might be " preserves " of apple, or peach, or quince, of a tempting transparency, and smothered with cream ; and then there were generally hot biscuits of snowy whiteness, or some of those wonderful "corn batter-cakes," which dwellers north of the great corn belt have never tasted. Western housekeepers are all Marthas. They feel obliged to "put themselves about," as the Scotch say, when they have company. And so Roxy got out the old china tea-pot and sugar-bowl which had come down from her grandmother, divers parts of handles, lids, and spouts having suffered those accidents which china is heir to, and been judiciously mended with cement. There were yet three tea-cups and two saucers of the old set left. The cups had dainty handles and were striped and flowered with gilt. She served the two saucers to her guest and her father, while she was forced to use a china cup with a saucer which did not match. I may add in digression that table manners were not the same then and there as now and here. Then one must not drink from the cup, but only from the saucer, into which the coffee was poured to cool. Such loose food as could not be eaten with an old-fashioned steel fork with two tines was gracefully and daintily shoveled into the mouth with the knife, but it was de rigeur that the knife should be presented with the back towards the lips.
Supper over, the minister and the shoe-maker fell into a dispute, of course, and as Whittaker persisted in exasperating Adams by his politeness, and especially by his downcast interrogative of "What say?" when he did not comprehend the drift of his companion's remark, the rudeness of the shoe-maker might have grown as pronounced as it had been before, if a kindly chance had not made a break in the talk. Old Tom Roberts or, as the people would pronounce it, " Robberds " had brought a load of impressed hay to town, and having stood all day upon tho street without finding a purchaser, had resolved in sheer despair to make a virtue of a necessity, and get rid of his hay by paying a long-standing debt for a pair of boots. The opportunity to collect such a debt was not to be missed, and Adams found it necessary to forego the company of his guest while he should stow away the hay in the mow, as Roberts pitched it off the wagon.
But Roxy, to make amends for her father's absence, hurried through with her work, and when she had cleared away the " supper things," sat down in the sitting-room. There was an old-fashioned fire-place stuffed full of great green asparagus bushes now, to hide its black walls. Above was the mantel-piece, over which hung a common print of "Washington crossing the Delaware." In one corner stood the tall clock, whose loud, slow, steady, sixty beats to the minute was typical of the way in wliich time passed in those un progressive days. There is a characteristic pertness and unsteadiness about the ticking of clocks nowadays sharp-set, jerky things, with brass inside.
Roxy lit a candle and set it upon the round center-table of cherrywood which stood in the middle of the room, the floor of which was covered with bright new rag-carpet ; and then, while Whittaker sat in the red, gilt-striped, rocking arm-chair, she sat upon a straight-back, splint-bottom rocker swaying herself gently to and fro as she knitted and talked. A malediction on the evil genius who invented knitting machines ! There nevei was any accompaniment to talk like the click of knitting-needles. The employment of the fingers gives relief from all nervousness, gives excuse for all silence, gives occasion for droopings of the eyes, while it does not in fact preoccupy the mind at all. And then let us forever maintain with sweet Charles Lamb, that there is no light like candle-light : it gives the mixed light and shadow so much prized by the old painters. Indeed, Roxy looked like a figure out of an ancient picture, as she sat there with the high lights brought out by the soft illumination of the candle, and with her background of visible obscurity. Hers was not what you would call a handsome face, in the physical sense. There was no sensuous beauty of red lips and softly rounded cheeks. But it was indeed a very extraordinary face, full of passionate ideality, and with high enthusiasms shining through it. I have seen an emblematic face in an illuminated title to the Gospel of Matthew that was full of a quiet, heavenly joy, as though there were good tidings within, ever waiting to be told. This pure gladness there was in Roxy as she looked up now and then from her knitting. It was such a face as a master would have loved to paint, and would have worshipped after he had painted it. So it seemed to Whittaker, as he sat on one side of the table trying to guess which it was of all the saints he had seen in old prints that she was like. His eye took in the mantel-piece and the old clock in the corner, almost lost in the shadow, and, though he was not ar artist, the sentiment of the picture moved him deeply.
Like most men who have lived bookish lives, Whittaker thought it needful to adapt his speech to the feminine understanding. He began talking to Roxy of her father, her garden, her chickens, her friends ; but to all of his remarks or inquiries upon these subjects Roxy answerec half absently. The minister was puzzled by this, and while he debated what course was best, the conversation flagged and an awkward silence ensued, which was presently broken by Roxy asking him what he thought of the experiences of President Edwards's wife.
Mr. Whittaker started a little. What did a village girl, and a Methodist at that, know of the experiences of Jonathan Edwards's wife ? This then was the ground on which she was to meet him not chickens, or garden, or girls, or beans ! From the experiences of Mrs. Edwards Roxy passed to the saints in the Methodist calendar to Mrs. Fletcher, the lady preacher, to Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers, who accepted banishment to her mother's kitchen as" a penalty for her piety, and thence to Lady Huntington, who was better known to Whittaker. The minister listened with wonder as her face glowed with sympathetic enthusiasm and thought he detected the latent ambition to be such a saint as these. He was a New Englander, and the training of a quieter school of religion had its place with him, but all the more did he wonder at finding in the heart of this imaginative girl an altar on which was burning so bright a flame of mystical devotion. He noticed that in that face illuminated from within, there was something about the set of the lip that indicated a great endurance of purpose. This mysticism might come to be more than a sentiment.
Mr. Adams came back again after a while and started a discussion on the merits of Napoleon Bonaparte, in which Mr. Whittaker ought to have been much interested. But somehow he did not now care anything about the justice or injustice of the execution of the Due d'Enghien and all the rasping paradoxes which the contradictory shoe-maker could put forth failed to arouse in him any spirit of contradiction. For Roxy had by this time put down her knitting and was passing in and out of the room attending to her household duties, and the preacher had come to feel that somehow the red-and-yel low, striped ragcarpet, and the old clock and the splint-bottom chairs were made lovely by her presence. He watched her as she came in and went out, and wondered as he had often wondered before at that look of gladness in her face. He heard Mr. Adams say something about Bonaparte's being the one man in modern times who understood that the people needed to be governed. But what did he care for Bonaparte, or for modern times ? Here was a saint a very flesh and blood saint. A plague on all Bonapartes and garrulous shoe-makers !
And so the conversation lagged. The preacher was dull. He fell to agreeing in an imbecile fashion with everything Adams said. The latter, in sheer despair, vehemently asserted that Napoleon did right to divorce Josephine, to which Mr. Whittaker agreed, not awaking from his absent mood until he saw the look of surprise in Roxy's face. Then he stammered :
" Oh, I didn't know ; what was I saying? What was your remark? I'm afraid I did not understand it. I thought you said Bonaparte did right to marry Josephine."
' No ; to divorce her," said Adams. " You are not well tonight ? "
" No, not very pretty well though for me ; but excuse me, I didn't mean to agree with you about divorce. I think Bonaparte showed himself an atrocious scoundrel in that whole affair."
" Oh, you do, do you ?" cried the other, pleased that he had at last started the game from cover. But when he ended a new eulogy upon Bonaparte and divorce, and waited for another reply, Mr. Whittaker was engaged in comparing a silhouette portrait of Roxy's mother which hung near the clock, with the profile of Roxy, who stood at the window looking under the half-raised curtain at the crescent moon bravely sailing its little boat through a blue sea beset with great, white, cloud-bergs against which it seemed ever about to go to wreck. When Mr. Adams found that his companion was not in the least interested in that " splendid prodigy " which had "towered among us wrapped in the solitude of his own originality," he gave up in despair and waited in the vain hope that the other would start something which might offer a better chance for contradiction. The minister, feeling embarrassed by his own inattentiveness, soon excused himself and bade Roxy and her father good-night. Once out of the house he strolled absently through the common, then back into the town, under the shadow of the trees, to his home in the house of Twonnet Lefaure's father.
The Swiss in that day held rigidly to Presbyterianism that is to say, the few who were religious at all, attended the Presbyterian church. While they held it to be a deep and eternal disgrace for a Swiss to be anything but a Presbyterian, most of them, like Twonnet's father, did not much like a Presbyterianism which forbade them to hunt and fish on" Sunday or to drink good wine. It was not so in the old country they declared.
But Twonnet's mother was a Presbyterian truly devout, and the minister had sought board in a Swiss family that he might improve his French pronunciation. Mrs. Lefaure let him in en this evening with a cordial " Bon soir" ami a vollejof inquiries beginning with " Pourquoif* and relating to his reasons for not telling them that he was going out to tea. But when she saw by the minister's puzzled look that he only half understood her rapidly spoken French, she broke into a good-natured laugh and began to talk in English with real Swiss volubility and vivacity. Whittaker answered as best he could in his absent frame of mind, and soon managed to evade the hail-storm of the good woman's loquacity by bidding the family good night and ascending to his room. He essayed, like a faithful and regular man that lie was, to read a chapter in the Bible before going to bed, but he sat near the west window and kept looking off the book, at the moon now swimming low through the cloud-breakers near the western horizon. And he wondered what Roxy could have been thinking of when she was looking at the sky. He gave up the book presently and knit his brow. It was not love but finance that engaged his thought. How might an honorable man marry while his salary consisted chiefly of a pittance of two hundred dollars a year which the Home Missionary Society allowed him as a stipend for founding a feeble Presbyterian church in a village already blessed with a Baptist church and a Methodist and that when the young man owed a debt of five hundred dollars incurred in getting his education, toward the liquidation of which he could manage now to put by just twenty-five dollars a year ? This question puzzled him and rendered him abstracted while he was at his prayers ; it kept him awake until long, long after the moon's shallop had made safe harbor behind the hills.
Roxy was not kept awake : she only delayed long enough to read her Bible and pray and to enter in her diary:
" Had a very refreshing conversation tlm evening with Mr. Whittaker about the remarkable experiences of Mrs. Edwards, and the holy lives of Lady Huntington, Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Fletcher. Oh, that the Lord would prepare me to Jo and suffer for Him in the same spirit ! "
The outer form of this entry was borrowed no doubt from the biographies she read. But the spirit was Roxy's own.