The Romance of a Plain Man

"I'd rather work for you," I said, looking straight at John Chitling, for it occurred to me that if I were made to murder anything I'd rather it would be oysters.

"Ha! ha! he knows by the look of you, you're needin' one to make up the dozen," exclaimed the butcher.

"Well, I declar he does seem to have taken a regular fancy," acknowledged John, flattered by my decision. "I don't want any real hands now, sonny, but if you'd like to tote the marketing around with Solomon, I reckon I can let you have a square meal or so along with the others."

"What'll yo' old woman say to it, John?" enquired the poultryman, with a loud guffaw, "when you send her a new one of yo' own providin'?"

John Chitling was busily arranging a pile of turnips with what he doubtless thought was an artistic eye for colour, and the facetiousness of the poultryman reacted harmlessly from his thick head.

"You needn't worry about my wife, for she ain't worryin'," he rejoined, and the shine seemed to gather like moisture on his round red face under his shock of curling red hair. "She takes what comes an' leaves the Lord to do the tendin'."

At this a shout went up which I did not understand, until I came to know later that an impression existed in the neighbourhood that the Chitlings had left entirely too much of the bringing up of their eleven children in the hands of Providence, who in turn had left them quite as complacently to the care of the gutter.

"I don't know but what too much trust in the Lord don't work as badly as too little," observed the fish dealer, while John went on placidly arranging his turnips and carrots. "What appears to me to be best religion for a working-man is to hold a kind of middle strip between faith and downright disbelievin'. Let yo' soul trust to the Lord's lookin' arter you, but never let yo' hands get so much as an inklin' that you're a-trustin'. Yes, the safest way is to believe in the Lord on Sunday, an' on Monday to go to work as if you wa'nt quite so sartain-sure."

A long finger of sunshine stretched from beyond the chimneys across the street, and pointed straight to the vegetables on John Chitling's counter, until the onions glistened like silver balls, and the turnips and carrots sent out flashes of dull red and bright orange.

"I'll let you overhaul a barrel of apples, sonny," said the big man to me; "have you got a sharp eye for specks?"

When I replied that I thought I had, he pointed to a barrel from which the top had been recently knocked. "They're to be sorted in piles, according to size," he explained, and added, "For such is the contrariness of human nature that there are some folks as can't see the apple for the speck, an' others that would a long ways rather have the speck than the apple. I've one old gentleman for a customer who can't enjoy eatin' a pippin unless he can find one with a spot that won't keep till to-morrow."

Kneeling down on the bricks, as he directed, I sorted the yellow apples until, growing presently faint from hunger, I began to gaze longingly, I suppose, at the string of fish hanging above my head.

"Maybe you'd like to run across an' get a bite of somethin' befo' you go on," suggested John, reading my glances.

But I only shook my head, in spite of my gnawing stomach, and went on doggedly with my sorting, impelled by an inherent determination to do with the best of me whatever I undertook to do at all. To the possession of this trait, I can see now in looking back, I have owed any success or achievement that has been mine – neither to brains nor to chance, but simply to that instinct to hold fast which was bred in my bone and structure. For the lack of this quality I have seen men with greater intellects, with far quicker wits than mine, go down in the struggle. Brilliancy I have not, nor any particular outward advantage, except that of size and muscle; but when I was once in the race, I could never see to right or to left of me, only straight ahead to the goal.

Overhead the sun had risen slowly higher, until the open spaces and the brick arches were flooded with light. If I had turned I should have seen the gay vegetable stalls blooming like garden beds down the dim length of the building. The voices of the market men floated toward me, now quarrelling, now laughing, now raised to shout at a careless negro or a prowling dog. I heard the sounds, and I smelt the strong smell of fish from the gleaming strings of perch and mackerel hanging across the way. But through it all I did not look up and I did not turn. My first piece of work was done with the high determination to do it well, and it has been my conviction from that morning that if I had slighted that barrel of apples, I should have failed inevitably in my career.

CHAPTER VI

CONCERNING CARROTS

When I had finished my work, I rose from my knees and stood waiting for John Chitling's directions.

"Run along to the next street," he said kindly, "an' you can tell my house, I reckon, by the number of children in the gutter. It's the house with the most children befo' it. You'll find my wife cookin', likely enough, in the kitchen, an' all you've got to say is that I told you to tell her that you were hungry. She won't ax you many questions, – that ain't her way, – but she'll jest set to work an' feed you."

Reassured by this description, I whistled to Samuel, and crossed the narrow street, crowded with farmers' wagons and empty wheelbarrows, to a row of dingy houses, with darkened basements, which began at the corner. By the number of ragged and unwashed children playing among the old tin cans in the gutter before the second doorway, I concluded that this was the home of John Chitling; and I was about to enter the close, dimly lighted passage, when a chorus of piercing screams from the small Chitlings outside, brought before me a large, slovenly woman, with slipshod shoes, and a row of curl papers above her forehead. When she reached the doorway, a small crowd had already gathered upon the pavement, and I beheld a half-naked urchin of a year or thereabouts, dangled, head downwards, by the hand of a passing milkman.

"The baby's gone an' swallowed a cent, ma," shrieked a half-dozen treble voices.

"Well, the Lord be praised that it wa'nt a quarter!" exclaimed Mrs. Chitling, with a cheerful piety, which impressed me hardly less than did the placid face with which she gazed upon the howling baby. "There, there, it ain't near so bad as it might have been. Don't scream so, Tommy, a cent won't choke him an' a quarter might have."

"But it was my cent, an' I ain't got a quarter!" roared Tommy, still unconsoled.

"Well, I'll give you a quarter when my ship comes in," responded his mother, at which the grief of the small financier began gradually to subside.

"I had it right in my hand," he sniffled, with his knuckles at his eyes, "an' I jest put it into the baby's mouth for keepin'."

By this time Mrs. Chitling had received the baby into her arms, and turning with an unruffled manner, she bore him into the house, where she stopped his mouth with a spoonful of blackberry jam. As she replaced the jar on the shelf she looked down, and for the first time became aware of my presence.

"He ain't swallowed anything of yours, has he?" she enquired. "If he has you'll have to put the complaint in writing because the neighbours are al'ays comin' to me for the things that are inside of him. I've never been able to shake anything out of him," she added placidly, "except one of Mrs. Haskin's bugle beads."

She delivered this with such perfect amiability that I was emboldened to say in my politest manner, "If you please, ma'am, Mr. Chitling told me I was to say that he said that I was hungry."

"So the baby really ain't took anything of yours?" she asked, relieved. "Well, I al'ays said he didn't do half the damage they accused him of."

As I possessed nothing except the clothes in which I stood, and even that elastic urchin could hardly have accommodated these, I hastened to assure her that I was the bearer of no complaint. This appeared to win her entirely, and her large motherly face beamed upon me beneath the aureole of curl papers that radiated from her forehead. With a single movement she cleared a space on the disorderly kitchen table and slapped down a plate, with a piece missing, as if the baby had taken a bite out of it.

"To think of yo' goin' hungry at yo' age an' without a mother," she said, opening a safe, and whipping several slices of bacon and a couple of eggs into a skillet. "Why, it would make me turn in my grave if I thought of one of my eleven wantin' a bite of meat an' not havin' it."

As she switched about in her cheerful, slovenly way, I saw that her skirt had sagged at the back into what appeared to be an habitual gap, and from beneath it there showed a black calico petticoat of a dingy shade. But when a little later she sat me at the table, with Samuel's breakfast on the floor beside me, I forgot her slatternly dress, her halo of curl papers, and her slipshod shoes, while I plied my fork and my fingers under the motherly effulgence of her smile. Tied into a high chair in one corner, the baby sat bolt upright, with his thumb in his mouth, deriving apparently the greatest enjoyment from watching my appetite; and before I had finished, the ten cheerful children trooped in and gathered about me. "Give him another cake, ma!" "It's my turn to help him next, ma!" "I'll pour out his coffee for him!" "Oh, ma, let me feed the dog," rose in a jubilant chorus of shrieks.

"An' he ain't got any mother!" roared Tommy suddenly, and burst into tears.

A sob lodged in my throat, but before the choking sound of it reached my ears, I felt myself enfolded in Mrs. Chitling's embrace. As I looked up at her from this haven of refuge, it seemed to me that her curl papers were transfigured into a halo, and that her face shone with a heavenly beauty.

I was given a bed in the attic, with the six younger Chitlings, and two days later, when my father tracked me to my hiding-place, I hid under the dark staircase in the hall, and heard my protector deliver an eloquent invective on the subject of stepmothers. It was the one occasion in my long acquaintance with her when I saw her fairly roused out of her amiable inertia. Albemarle, the baby, had spilled bacon gravy over her dress that very morning, and I had heard her console him immediately with the assurance that there was "a plenty more in the dish." But possessed though she was with that peculiar insight which discerns in every misfortune a hidden blessing, in stepmothers, I found, and in stepmothers alone, she could discern nothing except sermons.

"To think of yo' havin' the brazen impudence to come here arter the harm you've done that po' defenceless darling boy," she said, with a noble dignity which obscured somehow her slovenly figure and her dirty kitchen. Peering out from under the staircase, I could see that my father stood quite humbly before her, twirling his hatbrim nervously in his hands.

"I ax you to believe, mum, what is the gospel truth," he replied, "that I wa'nt meanin' any harm to Benjy."

"Not meanin' any harm an' you brought him a stepmother befo' six months was up?" she cried. "Well, that ain't my way of lookin' at it, for I've a mother's heart and it takes a mother's heart to stand the tricks of children," she added, glancing down at the gravy stains on her bosom, "an' it ain't to be supposed – is it? – that a stepmother should have a mother's heart? It ain't natur – is it? – I put it to you, that any man or woman should be born with a natchel taste for screamin' an' kickin' an' bein' splashed with gravy, an' the only thing that's goin' to cultivate them tastes in anybody is bringin' ten or eleven of 'em into the world. Lord, suh, I wa'nt born with the love of dirt an' fussin' any mo' than you. It just comes along o' motherhood like so much else. Now it stands to reason that you ain't goin' to enjoy the trouble a child makes unless that child is your own. Why, what did my baby do this mornin' when he was learnin' to walk, but catch holt of the dish an' bring all the gravy down over me. Is thar any livin' soul, I ax you plainly, expected to see the cuteness in a thing like that except a mother? An' what I say is that unless you can see the cuteness in a child instead of the badness, you ain't got no business to bring 'em up – no, not even if you are the President himself! – "

Just here I distinctly heard my father murmur in his humble voice something about having named an infant after the office and not the man. But so brief was the pause in Mrs. Chitling's flow of remonstrance that his interjection was overwhelmed almost before it was uttered. Her very slovenliness, expressing as it did what she had given up rather than what she was, served in a measure to increase the solemn majesty with which she spoke; and I gathered easily that my father's small wits were vanquished by the first charge of her impassioned rhetoric.

"I thank you kindly, mum, it is all jest as you say," he replied, with the submissiveness of utter defeat, "but, you see, a man has got to give a thought to his washin'. It stands to reason – don't it?" – he concluded with a flash of direct inspiration, "that thar ain't any way to get a woman to wash free for you except to marry her."

The logic of this appeared to impress even Mrs. Chitling, for she hesitated an instant before replying, and when she finally spoke, I thought her tone had lost something of its decision.

"An' to make it worse you took a yaller-headed one an' they're the kind that gad," she retorted feebly.

My father shook his head, while a stubborn expression settled on his sheepish features.

"Thar's the cookin' an' the washin' for her to think of," he said. "I ain't got any use for a woman that ain't satisfied with the pleasures of home."

"The moral kind are, Mr. Starr," rejoined Mrs. Chitling, who had relapsed into a condition of placid indolence. "An' as far as I am concerned since the first of my eleven came, I've never wanted to put on my bonnet an' set foot outside that do'. My kitchen is my kingdom," she added, with dignity, "an' for my part, I ain't got any use for those women who are everlastingly standin' up for thar rights. What does a woman want with rights, I say, when she can enjoy all the virtues? What does she want to be standin' up for anyway as long as she can set?"

"Thar's no doubt that it is true, mum," rejoined my father; and when he took his leave a few minutes afterwards, their relations appeared to have become extremely friendly, – not to say confidential. For an instant I trembled in my hiding-place, half expecting to be delivered into his hands. But he departed at last without discovering me, and I emerged from the darkness and stood before Mrs. Chitling, who had begun absent-mindedly to take down her curl papers.

"Most likely it ain't his fault arter all," she observed, for her judgment of him had already become a part of the general softness and pliability of her criticism of life; "he seems to be a nice sensible body with proper ideas about women. I like a man that knows a woman's place, an' I like a woman that knows it, too. Yo' ma was a decent, sober, hard-workin' person, wa'nt she, Benjy?"

I replied that she was always in her kitchen and generally in her washtub, except when she went to funerals.

"Well, I ain't any moral objection to a funeral now an' then, or some other sober kind of entertainment," returned Mrs. Chitling, removing her curl papers in order to put on fresh ones, "but what I say is that the woman who wants pleasure outside her do' ain't the woman that she ought to be, that's all. What can she have, I ax, any mo' than she's got? Ain't she got everything already that the men don't want? Ain't sweetness an' virtue, an' patience an' long suffering an' childbearin' enough for her without her impudently standin' up in the face of men an' axin' for mo'? Had she rather have a vote than the respect of men, an' ain't the respect of men enough to fill any honest female's life?"

In the beginning of her discourse, she had turned aside to slap a portion of cornmeal into a cracked yellow bowl, and after pouring a little water out of a broken dipper, she began whipping the dough with a long, irregular stroke that scattered a shower of fine drops at every revolution of her hand. Two of the children had got into a fight over a basin of apple parings, and she left her yellow bowl and separated them with a hand that bestowed a patch of wet meal on the hair of one and on the face of another. Not once did she hasten her preparations or relinquish the cheerful serenity which endowed her large, loose figure with a kind of majesty.

The next day I started in as general assistant and market boy to John Chitling, and when I was not sorting over ripe vegetables or barrels of apples fresh from the orchard, I was toiling up the long hill, with a split basket, containing somebody's marketing, on my arm. By degrees I learned the names of John Chitling's patrons, the separate ways to their houses, which always seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat, smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon the customers I served was largely coloured by his narratives, but when at last he dropped off and went on a new job at the butcher's, I arrived gradually at a more correct, and certainly a more charitable, point of view. By the end of the winter I had ceased to believe that John Chitling was a skinflint and his customers all vipers.

In the bright soft weather of that spring the city opened into a bloom of faint pink and white, which comes back to me like a delicate fragrance. The old gardens are gone now, with their honeysuckle arbours, their cleanly swept walks, bordered by rows of miniature box, their deep, odorous bowers of microphylla and musk cluster roses. Yet I can look back still through the gauzy shadows of elms and sycamores; I can hear still the rich, singing call of the negro drivers, as the covered wagons from country farms passed sleepily through the hot sunshine which fell between the arching trees; and I can smell again the air steeped in a fragrance that is less that of flowers than of the subtle atmosphere of an unforgettable youth. To-day the city is the same city no longer, nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening in brain and heart.

The morning that I remember best is the one on which I carried the day's marketing to an old grey house, with beds of wallflowers growing close against the stuccoed bricks, and a shrub that flowered bright yellow glancing through the tall gate at the rear. I had passed the wallflowers as was my custom, and entering the gate at the back, had delivered my basket at the kitchen door, when, as I turned to retrace my steps, I was detained by the scolding voice of the pink-turbaned negro cook.

"Hi! if you ain' clean furgit de car'ots!" she cried.

Now the carrots had been placed in the basket, as I had seen with my own eyes, by the hands of John Chitling himself, and I had been cautioned at the time not to drop them out in my ascent of the steep hill. There was a lady in the grey house, he had informed me, who was supposed to subsist upon carrots alone, and who was in consequence extremely particular as to their size and flavour.

"Are you sure they ain't among the vegetables?" I asked. "I saw them put in myself."

"Huh! en you seed 'em fall out, too, I lay!" rejoined the negress, protruding her thick red lips as she turned the basket upside down with an indignant blow.

"If they're lost, I'll go back and bring others," I said, thinking disconsolately of the hill.

"En you 'ould be back hyer agin in time fur supper," retorted the outraged divinity. "Wat you reckon Miss Mitty wants wid car'ots fur 'er supper? Dey is hern, dey ain' mine, but ef'n dey 'us mine I'd lamn you twel you couldn't see ter set. Hit's bad enough ter hev ter live erlong in de same worl' wid de slue-footed po' white trash widout hevin' dem a-snatchin' de car'ots outer yo' ve'y mouf."

My temper, never of the mildest, was stung quickly to a retort, and I was about to order her to hold her tongue and return me my basket, when the door into the house opened and shut, and the little girl of the enchanted garden appeared in the flesh before me.

"I want the plum cake you promised me, Aunt Mirabella," she cried; "and oh! I hope you've stuffed it full of plums!" Then her glance fell upon me and I saw her thick black eyebrows arch merrily over her sparkling grey eyes. "It's my boy! My dear common boy!" she exclaimed, with a rush toward me. For the first time I noticed then that she was dressed in mourning, and that her black clothes intensified the dark brightness of her look. "Oh, I am glad to see you," she added, seizing my hand.

I gazed up at her, wounded rather than pleased. "I shan't be a common boy always," I answered.

"Do you mind my calling you one? If you do, I won't," she said, and without waiting a minute, "What are you doing here? I thought you lived over on Church Hill."

"I don't now. Ma died and I ran away."

"My mother died, too," she returned softly, "and then grandmama."

For a moment there was a pause. Then I said with a kind of stubborn pride, "I ran away."

The sadness passed from her and she turned on me in a glow of animation. "Oh, I should just love dearly to run away!" she exclaimed.

"You couldn't. You're a girl."

"I could, too, if I chose."

"Then why don't you choose?"

"Because of Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca. They haven't anybody but me."

"I left my father," I replied proudly, "and I didn't care one single bit. That's the trouble with girls. They're always caring."

"Well, I'm not caring for you," she retorted with crushing effect, shaking back the soft cloud of hair on her shoulders.

"Boys don't care," I rejoined with indifference, taking up my market basket.

She detained me with a glance. "There's one thing they care about – dreadfully," she said.

"No, there ain't."

Without replying in words she went over to the stove, and standing on tiptoe, gingerly removed a hot plum cake, small and round and shaped like a muffin, from the smoking oven.

"I reckon they care about plum cake," she remarked tauntingly, and as she held it toward me it smelt divinely.

But my pride was in arms, for I remembered the cup of milk she had refused disdainfully more than three years ago in our little kitchen.

"No, they don't," I replied with a stoicism that might have added lustre to a nobler cause.

In my heart I was hoping that she would drop the cake into my basket in spite of my protest, not only sparing my pride by an act of magnanimity, but allowing me at the same time the felicity of munching the plums on my way back to the Old Market. But the next moment, to my surprise and indignation, she took a generous bite of the very dainty she had offered me, making, while she ate it, provoking faces of a rapturous enjoyment.

I was lingering in the doorway with a scornful yet fascinated gaze on the diminishing cake, when the pink-turbaned cook, who had gone out to empty a basin of pea shells, entered and resumed her querulous abuse.

"De bes' thing you kin do is ter clear out," she said, "you en yo' car'ots. He ain' fit'n fur you ter tu'n yo' eyes on, honey," she added to the child, "en I don' reckon yo' ma would let yo' wipe yo' foot on 'im ef'n she 'uz alive. Yes'm, Miss Mitty, I'se a-comin'!"

Her voice rose high in response to a call from the house, but before she could leave the kitchen, the door behind the little girl opened, and a lady said reprovingly: —

"Sally, Sally, haven't I told you to keep away from the kitchen?"

"Oh, Aunt Mitty, I had to come for my plum cake," pleaded Sally, "and Aunt Matoaca said that I might."

An elderly lady, all soft black and old yellow lace, stood in the doorway. Then before she could answer a second one appeared at her side, and I had a vision of two slender maidenly figures, who reminded me, meek heads, drooping faces, and creamy lace caps, of the wallflowers in the border outside blooming in a patch of sunshine close against the old grey house. At first there seemed to me to be no visible difference between them, but after a minute, I saw that the second one was gentler and smaller, with a softer smile and a more shrinking manner.