The Brown Mouse

“Yennie,” said he, “this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up.”

“Lined up! What do you mean?”

“The way he is doing in the school,” said Haakon, “is all wrong. If you can’t line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybody has his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble with him, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for a second term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention without your home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, every piece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him up and have him do right.”

“But he is so funny,” said Jennie.

“He likes you,” said Haakon. “You can line him up.”

Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarrassment, got out for the purpose of cranking her machine.

“But if I can not line him up?” said she.

“I tank,” said Haakon, “if you can’t line him up, you will have a chance to rewoke his certificate when you take office.”

So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson’s suggestion as to “lining up” Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a good deal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentment at Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent the necessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. The idea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning of the old and tried school methods under which both he and she had been educated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored “more practical education,” and Jim’s farm arithmetic, farm physiology, farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed analysis, corn clubs and the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie’s mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim’s work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.

“Father,” said she that night, “let’s have a little Christmas party.”

“All right,” said the colonel. “Whom shall we invite?”

“Don’t laugh,” said she. “I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and nobody else.”

“All right,” reiterated the colonel. “But why?”

“Oh,” said Jennie, “I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of his foolishness.”

“You want to line him up, do you?” said the colonel. “Well, that’s good politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim.”

“Rather unlikely,” said Jennie.

“I don’t know about that,” said the colonel, smiling. “I begin to think that Jim’s a Brown Mouse. I’ve told you about the Brown Mouse, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” said Jennie. “You’ve told me. But Professor Darbishire’s brown mice were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn’t prove that the Brown Mouse is any good.”

“Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “And he founded the greatest breed of horses in the world.”

“You say that,” said Jennie, “because you’re a lover of the Morgan horse.”

“Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way.”

“For the better, always?” asked Jennie.

“No,” said the colonel. “The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim … sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas, by all means.”

In due time Jennie’s invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an explosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling – quite upsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait for social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period, she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings, scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At such times she sat at the family table and participated in the neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school could give him in the way of education, found his first job at “making a hand,” Mrs. Irwin, at her son’s urgent request, ceased going out to work for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.

“I can’t go, James,” said she; “I can’t possibly go.”

“Oh, yes, you can! Why not?” said Jim. “Why not?”

“You know I don’t go anywhere,” urged Mrs. Irwin.

“That’s no reason,” said her son.

“I haven’t a thing to wear,” said Mrs. Irwin.

“Nothing to wear!”

I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim Irwin heard those words from his mother’s lips. He was approaching thirty, and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure – but his mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues, neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made. Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned back – but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garments in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companionship with Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H. Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are derived in a transcendental manner from Sartor Resartus and the agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and Feeding.

“Why, mother,” said he, “I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!”

Was a woman ever quite without a costume?

Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress – a dress which Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body, once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart – under the arms, and at some of the seams – and she handled it as one deals with something very precious.

“I never thought I’d wear it again,” said she, “but once. I’ve been saving it for my last dress. But I guess it won’t hurt to wear it once for the benefit of the living.”

Jim kissed his mother – a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by the established custom between them.

“Don’t think of that, mother,” said he, “for years and years yet!”

CHAPTER X

HOW JIM WAS LINED UP

There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they were a queer couple. They weren’t like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of a different pattern. To be sure, Jim’s clothes were not especially noteworthy, being just shiny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the inability of a New York sweatshop to anticipate the prodigality of Nature in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often enjoyed Jim’s presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of the land. Jim’s queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his personality.

On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin’s queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white and red and green – tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike’s Peak. Jennie felt that it must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs. Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story – a story in which the stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with knowledge that her dress didn’t fit, and with the difficulty of behaving naturally – like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years’ term – that she took on a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so have blotted out his record as her father’s field-hand, he would have seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course, but the sort people look after – and follow.

“Come to dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the other fixings of a Christmas dinner. “It’s good enough, what there is of it, and there’s enough of it such as it is – but the dressing in the turkey would be better for a little more sage!”

The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family melted away in a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie. The colonel, in stiff starched shirt, black tie and frock coat, carved with much empressement, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of the value of manner.

“I had bigger turkeys,” said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, “but I thought it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat.”

“One of the hens would ’a’ been plenty,” replied Mrs. Irwin. “How much did they weigh?”

“About fifteen pounds apiece,” was the answer. “The gobbler would ’a’ weighed thirty, I guess. He’s pure Mammoth Bronze.”

“I wish,” said Jim, “that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild bronze turkeys from Mexico.”

“Why?” asked the colonel.

“They’re the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys,” said Jim, “and they’re bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even. They’re a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our common birds originated.”

“Where do you learn all these things, Jim?” asked Mrs. Woodruff. “I declare, I often tell Woodruff that it’s as good as a lecture to have Jim Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here, Jim.”

There came into Jim’s eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause – and the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more plainly wherein his queerness lay.

“There’s an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of Mexico – ”

“What’s chaparral?” asked Jennie, as a diversion. “It’s one of the words I have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it – but after all it’s just a word, and nothing more.”

“Ain’t that the trouble with our education, Jim?” queried the colonel, cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.

“They are not even living words,” answered Jim, “unless we have clothed them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. ‘Chaparral’ to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard.”

Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase – and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim’s development was not so rapid, but Jennie’s perception of it was. She began to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical notions seem so plausible – and who was clearly fired with some sort of evangelistic fervor – had kissed her, once or twice, on bringing her home from the spelling school.

“I think we lose so much time in school,” Jim went on, “while the children are eating their dinners.”

“Well, Jim,” said Mrs. Woodruff, “every one but you is down on the human level. The poor kids have to eat!”

“But think how much good education there is wrapped up in the school dinner – if we could only get it out.”

Jennie grew grave. Here was this Brown Mouse actually introducing the subject of the school – and he ought to suspect that she was planning to line him up on this very thing – if he wasn’t a perfect donkey as well as a dreamer. And he was calmly wading into the subject as if she were the ex-farm-hand country teacher, and he was the county superintendent-elect!

“Eating a dinner like this, mother,” said the colonel gallantly, “is an education in itself – and eating some others requires one; but just how ‘larnin’ is wrapped up in the school lunch is a new one on me, Jim.”

“Well,” said Jim, “in the first place the children ought to cook their meals as a part of the school work. Prior to that they ought to buy the materials. And prior to that they ought to keep the accounts of the school kitchen. They’d like to do these things, and it would help prepare them for life on an intelligent plane, while they prepared the meals.”

“Isn’t that looking rather far ahead?” asked the county superintendent-elect.

“It’s like a lot of other things we think far ahead,” urged Jim. “The only reason why they’re far off is because we think them so. It’s a thought – and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever be.”

“I guess that’s so – to a wild-eyed reformer,” said the colonel. “But go on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing.”

“Thanks, I believe I will,” said Jim. “And a little more of the cranberry sauce. No more turkey, please.”

“I’d like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff.

“Why,” said Jim, “you’d be there showing them how! They’d get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner – and they’d bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the table would come in as a study – flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!”

“I’d take on that class,” said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. “The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children.”

“And when the food came on the table,” Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, “just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it – well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now,” said he, referring to the remains on his plate. “That’s physiology. The cranberry-sauce – that’s botany, and commerce, and soil management – do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil – which would kill alfalfa or clover?”

“Read something of it,” said the colonel, “but it didn’t interest me much.”

“And the difference between the types of fowl on the table – that’s breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut – that’s geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents – and they’re mathematics.”

“We must have something more than dollars and cents in life,” said Jennie. “We must have culture.”

“Culture,” cried Jim, “is the ability to think in terms of life – isn’t it?”

“Like Jesse James,” suggested the hired man, who was a careful student of the life of that eminent bandit.

There was a storm of laughter at this sally amidst which Jennie wished she had thought of something like that. Jim joined in the laughter at his own expense, but was clearly suffering from argumentative shock.

“That’s the best answer I’ve had on that point, Pete,” he said, after the disturbance had subsided. “But if the James boys and the Youngers had had the sort of culture I’m for, they would have been successful stock men and farmers, instead of train-robbers. Take Raymond Simms, for instance. He had all the qualifications of a member of the James gang when he came here. All he needed was a few exasperated associates of his own sort, and a convenient railway with undefended trains running over it. But after a few weeks of real ‘culture’ under a mighty poor teacher, he’s developing into the most enthusiastic farmer I know. That’s real culture.”

“It’s snowing like everything,” said Jennie, who faced the window.

“Don’t cut your dinner short,” said the colonel to Pete, “but I think you’ll find the cattle ready to come in out of the storm when you get good and through.”

“I think I’ll let ’em in now,” said Pete, by way of excusing himself. “I expect to put in most of the day from now on getting ready to quit eating. Save some of everything for me, Selma, – I’ll be right back!”

“All right, Pete,” said Selma.

CHAPTER XI

THE MOUSE ESCAPES

Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmas songs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim’s mother went into other parts of the house on research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. The colonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of the threatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the front parlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing to say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was something new in the man – she sensed that. He was more confident, more persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force.

And Jim felt something new, too. He had felt it growing in him ever since he began his school work, and knew not the cause of it. The cause, however, would not have been a mystery to a wise old yogi who might discover the same sort of change in one of his young novices. Jim Irwin had been a sort of ascetic since his boyhood. He had mortified the flesh by hard labor in the fields, and by flagellations of the brain to drive off sleep while he pored over his books in the attic – which was often so hot after a day of summer’s sun on its low thin roof, that he was forced to do his reading in the midmost night. He had looked long on such women as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Isabel, Cressida, Volumnia, Virginia, Evangeline, Agnes Wickfleld and Fair Rosamond; but on women in the flesh he had gazed as upon trees walking. The aforesaid spiritual director, had this young ascetic been under one, would have foreseen the effects on the psychology of a stout fellow of twenty-eight of freedom from the toil of the fields, and association with a group of young human beings of both sexes. To the novice struggling for emancipation from earthly thoughts, he would have recommended fasting and prayer, and perhaps, a hair shirt. Just what his prescription would have been for a man in Jim’s position is, of course, a question. He would, no doubt, have considered carefully his patient’s symptoms. These were very largely the mental experiences which most boys pass through in their early twenties, save, perhaps that, as in a belated season, the transition from winter to spring was more sudden, and the contrast more violent. Jim was now thrown every day into contact with his fellows. He was no longer a lay monk, but an active member of a very human group. He was becoming more of a boy, with the boys, and still more was he developing into a man with the women. The budding womanhood of Calista Simms and the other girls of his school thrilled him as Helen of Troy or Juliet had never done. This will not seem very strange to the experienced reader, but it astonished the unsophisticated young schoolmaster. The floating hair, the heaving bosom, the rosebud mouth, the starry eye, the fragrant breath, the magnetic hand – all these disturbed the hitherto sedate mind, and filled the brief hours he was accustomed to spend in sleep with strange dreams. And now, as he gazed at Jennie, he was suddenly aware of the fact that, after all, whenever these thoughts and dreams took on individuality, they were only persistent and intensified continuations of his old dreams of her. They had always been dormant in him, since the days they both studied from the same book. He was quite sure, now, that he had never forgotten for a moment, that Jennie was the only girl in the world for him. And possibly he was right about this. It is perfectly certain, however, that for years he had not consciously been in love with her.

Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to her side. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her, but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by means of her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay his hand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he had done the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse – and she rose in self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seem to require that he be kept at too great a distance; so she maneuvered him to the sofa, and seated him beside her. Now was the time to line him up.

“It seems good to have you with us to-day,” said she. “We’re such old, old friends.”

“Yes,” repeated Jim, “old friends … We are, aren’t we, Jennie?”

“And I feel sure,” Jennie went on, “that this marks a new era in our friendship.”

“Why?” asked Jim, after considering the matter.

“Oh! everything is different, now – and getting more different all the time. My new work, and your new work, you know.”

“I should like to think,” said Jim, “that we are beginning over again.”

“Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it.”

“And yet,” said Jim, “there is no such thing as a new beginning. Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn’t any seam.”

“No?” said Jennie interrogatively.

“Our regard for each other,” Jennie noted most pointedly his word “regard” – “must be the continuation of the old regard.”

“I hardly know what you mean,” said Jennie.