Homespun Tales

JACK.

This was the sort of message that had been coming to Susanna of late, bringing up little pictures of home duties and responsibilities, homely tasks and trials. “John giving up the store for good”; what did that mean? Had he gone from bad to worse in the solitude that she had hoped might show him the gravity of his offenses, the error of his ways? In case she should die, what then would become of the children? Would Louisa accept the burden of Jack, for whom she had never cared? Would the Shakers take Sue? She would be safe; perhaps she would always be happy; but brother and sister would be divided and brought up as strangers. Would little Sue, grown to big Sue, say some time or other, “My mother renounced the world for herself, but what right had she to renounce it for me? Why did she rob me of the dreams of girlhood and the natural hopes of women, when I was too young to give consent?” These and other unanswerable questions continually drifted through Susanna’s mind, disturbing its balance and leaving her like a shuttlecock bandied to and fro between conflicting blows.

“Mardie,” came a soft little voice from across the room; “Mardie, what is a backslider?”

“Where did you hear that long word, Sue?” asked Susanna, rousing herself from her dream.

“‘T is n’t so long as ‘regenerating’ and more easier.”

“Regenerating means ‘making over,’ you know.”

“There’d ought to be children’s words and grownup words,—that’s what I think,” said Sue, decisively; “but what does ‘backslider’ mean?”

“A backslider is one who has been climbing up a hill and suddenly begins to slip back.”

“Does n’t his feet take hold right, or why does he slip?”

“Perhaps he can’t manage his feet;—perhaps they just won’t climb.” 295

“Yes, or p’raps he just does n’t want to climb any more; but it must be frightensome, sliding backwards.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Is it wicked?”

“Why, yes, it is, generally; perhaps always.”

“Brother Nathan and Sister Hetty were backsliders; Sister Tabitha said so. She told Jane never to speak their names again any more than if they was dead.”

“Then you had better not speak of them, either.”

“There’s so many things better not to speak of in the world, sometimes I think ‘t would be nicer to be an angel.”

“Nicer, perhaps, but one has to be very good to be an angel.”

“Backsliders could n’t be angels, I s’pose?”

“Not while they were backsliders; but perhaps they’d begin to climb again, and then in time they might grow to be angels.”

“I should n’t think likely,” remarked Sue, decisively, clicking her needles as one who could settle most spiritual problems in a jiffy. “I think the sliding kind is diff’rent from the climbing kind, and they don’t make easy angels.”

A long pause followed this expression of opinion, this simple division of the human race, at the start, into sheep and goats. Then presently the untiring voice broke the stillness again.

“Nathan and Hetty slid back when they went away from here. Did we backslide when we left Fardie and Jack?”

“I’m not sure but that we did,” said poor Susanna.

“There’s children-Shakers, and brother-and-sister Shakers, but no father-and-mother Shakers?”

“No; they think they can do just as much good in the world without being mothers and fathers.”

“Do you think so?”

“Ye-es, I believe I do.”

“Well, are you a truly Shaker, or can’t you be till you wear a cap?”

“I’m not a Shaker yet, Sue.”

“You’re just only a mother?”

“Yes, that’s about all.”

“Maybe we’d better go back to where there’s not so many Sisters and more mothers, so you ‘ll have somebody to climb togedder with?”

“I could climb here, Sue, and so could you.”

“Yes, but who’ll Fardie and Jack climb with? I wish they’d come and see us. Brother Ansel would make Fardie laugh, and Jack would love farmwork, and we’d all be so happy. I miss Fardie awfully! He did n’t speak to me much, but I liked to look at his curly hair and think how lovely it would be if he did take notice of me and play with me.”

A sob from Susanna brought Sue, startled, to her side.

“You break my heart, Sue! You break it every day with the things you say. Don’t you love me, Sue?”

“More’n tongue can tell!” cried Sue, throwing herself into her mother’s arms. “Don’t cry, darling Mardie! I won’t talk any more, not for days and days! Let me wipe your poor eyes. Don’t let Elder Gray see you crying, or he’ll think I’ve been naughty. He’s just going in downstairs to see Eldress Abby. Was it wrong what I said about backsliding, or what, Mardie? We’ll help each udder climb, an’ then we’ll go home an’ help poor lonesome Fardie; shall we?”

“Abby!” called Elder Gray, stepping into the entry of the Office Building.

“Yee, I’m coming,” Eldress Abby answered from the stairway. “Go right out and sit down on the bench by the door, where I can catch a few minutes’ more light for my darning; the days seem to be growing short all to once. Did Lemuel have a good sale of basket-work at the mountains? Rosetta has n’t done so well for years at Old Orchard. We seem to be prospering in every material direction, Daniel, but my heart is heavy somehow, and I have to be instant in prayer to keep from discouragement.”

“It has n’t been an altogether good year with us spiritually,” confessed Daniel; “perhaps we needed chastening.”

“If we needed it, we’ve received it,” Abby ejaculated, as she pushed her darning-ball into the foot of a stocking. “Nothing has happened since I came here thirty years ago that has troubled me like the running away of Nathan and Hetty. If they had been new converts, we should have thought the good seed had n’t got fairly rooted, but those children were brought to us when Nathan was eleven and Hetty nine.”

“I well remember, for the boy’s father and the girl’s mother came on the same train; a most unusual occurrence to receive two children in one day.”

“I have cause to remember Hetty in her first month, for she was as wild as a young hawk. She laughed in meeting the first Sunclay, and when she came back, I told her to sit behind me in silence for half an hour while I was reading my Bible. ‘Be still now, Hetty, and labor to repent,’ I said. When the time was up, she said in a meek little mite of a voice, ‘I think I’m least in the Kingdom now, Eldress Abby!’ ‘Then run outdoors,’ I said. She kicked up her heels like a colt and was through the door in a second. Not long afterwards I put my hands behind me to tie my apron tighter, and if that child had n’t taken my small scissors lying on the table and cut buttonholes all up and down my strings, hundreds of them, while she was ‘laboring to repent.’”

Elder Gray smiled reminiscently, though he had often heard the story before. “Neither of the children came from godly families,” he said, “but at least the parents never interfered with us nor came here putting false ideas into their children’s heads.”

“That’s what I say,” continued Abby; “and now, after ten years’ training and discipline in the angelic life, Hetty being especially promising, to think of their going away together, and worse yet, being married in Albion village right at our very doors; I don’t hardly dare to go to bed nights for fear of hearing in the morning that some of the other young folks have been led astray by this foolish performance of Hetty’s; I know it was Hetty’s fault; Nathan never had ingenuity enough to think and plan it all out.”

“Nay, nay, Abby, don’t be too hard on the girl; I’ve watched Nathan closely, and he has been in a dangerous and unstable state, even as long ago as his last confession; but this piece of backsliding, grievous as it is, does n’t cause me as much sorrow as the fall of Brother Ephraim. To all appearance he had conquered his appetite, and for five years he has led a sober life. I had even great hopes of him for the ministry, and suddenly, like a great cloud in the blue sky, has come this terrible visitation, this reappearance of the old Adam. ‘Ephraim has returned to his idols.’”

“How have you decided to deal with him, Daniel?”

“It is his first offense since he cast in his lot with us; we must rebuke, chastise, and forgive.”

“Yee, yee, I agree to that; but how if he makes us the laughing-stock of the community and drags our sacred banner in the dust? We can’t afford to have one of our order picked up in the streets by the world’s people.”

“Have the world’s people found an infallible way to keep those of their order out of the gutters?” asked Elder Gray. “Ephraim seems repentant; if he is willing to try again, we must be willing to do as much.”

“Yee, Daniel, you are right. Another matter that causes me anxiety is Susanna. I never yearned for a soul as I yearn for hers! She has had the advantage of more education and more reading than most of us have ever enjoyed; she’s gifted in teaching and she wins the children. She’s discreet and spiritually minded; her life in the world, even with the influence of her dissipated husband, has n’t really stained, only humbled her; she would make such a Shaker, if she was once ‘convinced,’ as we have n’t gathered in for years and years; but I fear she’s slipping, slipping away, Daniel!”

“What makes you feel so now, particularly?”

“She’s diff’rent as time goes on. She’s had more letters from that place where her boy is; she cries nights, and though she does n’t relax a mite with her work, she drags about sometimes like a bird with one wing.”

Elder Daniel took off his broadbrimmed hat to cool his forehead and hair, lifting his eyes to the first pale stars that were trembling in the sky, hesitating in silver and then quietly deepening into gold.

Brother Ansel was a Believer because he had no particular love for the world and no great susceptibility to its temptations; but what had drawn Daniel Gray from the open sea into this quiet little backwater of a Shaker Settlement? After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly found himself in a society of which he had never so much as heard, a company of celibate brothers and sisters holding all goods and possessions in common, and trying to live the “angelic life” on earth. Illness detained him for a month against his will, but at the end of that time he had joined the Community; and although it had been twenty-five years since his gathering in, he was still steadfast in the faith.

His character was of puritanical sternness; he was a strict disciplinarian, and insisted upon obedience to the rules of Shaker life, “the sacred laws of Zion,” as he was wont to term them. He magnified his office, yet he was of a kindly disposition easily approached by children, and not without a quaint old-time humor.

There was a long pause while the two faithful leaders of the little flock were absorbed in thought; then the Elder said: “Susanna’s all you say, and the child, well, if she could be purged of her dross, I never saw a creature better fitted to live the celestial life; but we must not harbor any divided hearts here. When the time comes, we must dismiss her with our blessing.”

“Yee, I suppose so,” said Eldress Abby, loyally, but it was with a sigh. Had she and Tabitha been left to their own instincts, they would have gone out into the highways and hedges, proselyting with the fervor of Mother Ann’s day and generation.

“After all, Abby,” said the Elder, rising to take his leave, still in a sort of mild trance, “after all, Abby, I suppose the Shakers don’t own the whole of heaven. I’d like to think so, but I can’t. It’s a big place, and it belongs to God.”

IX. Love Manifold

The woods on the shores of Massabesic Pond were stretches of tapestry, where every shade of green and gold, olive and brown, orange and scarlet, melted the one into the other. The somber pines made a deep-toned background; patches of sumach gave their flaming crimson; the goldenrod grew rank and tall in glorious profusion, and the maples outside the Office Building were balls of brilliant carmine. The air was like crystal, and the landscape might have been bathed in liquid amber, it was so saturated with October yellow.

Susanna caught her breath as she threw her chamber window wider open in the early morning; for the greater part of the picture had been painted during the frosty night.

“Throw your little cape round your shoulders and come quickly, Sue!” she exclaimed.

The child ran to her side. “Oh, what a goldy, goldy morning!” she cried.

One crimson leaf with a long heavy stem that acted as a sort of rudder, came down to the windowsill with a sidelong scooping flight, while two or three gayly painted ones, parted from the tree by the same breeze, floated airily along as if borne on unseen wings, finally alighting on Sue’s head and shoulders like tropical birds.

“You cried in the night, Mardie!” said Sue. “I heard you snifferling and getting up for your hank’chief; but I did n’t speak ‘cause it’s so dreadful to be catched crying.”

“Kneel down beside me and give me part of your cape,” her mother answered. “I’m going to let my sad heart fly right out of the window into those beautiful trees.”

“And maybe a glad heart will fly right in!” the child suggested.

“Maybe. Oh! we must cuddle close and be still; Elder Gray’s going to sit down under the great maple; and do you see, all the Brothers seem to be up early this morning, just as we are?”

“More love, Elder Gray!” called Issachar, on his way to the toolhouse.

“More love, Brother Issachar!”

“More love, Brother Ansel!”

“More love, Brother Calvin!”

“More love!.... More love!.... More love!” So the quaint but not uncommon Shaker greeting passed from Brother to Brother; and as Tabitha and Martha and Rosetta met on their way to dairy and laundry and seed-house, they, too, hearing the salutation, took up the refrain, and Susanna and Sue heard again from the women’s voices that beautiful morning wish, “More love! More love!” speeding from heart to heart and lip to lip.

Mother and child were very quiet.

“More love, Sue!” said Susanna, clasping her closely.

“More love, Mardie!” whispered the child, smiling and entering into the spirit of the salutation. “Let’s turn our heads Farnham way! I’ll take Jack and you take Fardie, and we’ll say togedder, ‘More love’; shall we?”

“More love, John.”

“More love, Jack.”

The words floated out over the trees in the woman’s trembling voice and the child’s treble.

“Elder Gray looks tired though he’s just got up,” Sue continued.

“He is not strong,” replied her mother, remembering Brother Ansel’s statement that the Elder “wa’n’t diseased anywheres, but did n’t have no durability.”

“The Elder would have a lovely lap,” Sue remarked presently.

“What?”

“A nice lap to sit in. Fardie has a nice lap, too, and Uncle Joel Atterbury, but not Aunt Louisa; she lets you slide right off; it’s a bony, hard lap. I love Elder Gray, and I climbed on his lap one day. He put me right down, but I’m sure he likes children. I wish I could take right hold of his hand and walk all over the farm, but he would n’t let me, I s’pose.– More love, Elder Gray!” she cried suddenly, bobbing up above the windowsill and shaking her fairy hand at him.

The Elder looked up at the sound of the glad voice. No human creature could have failed to smile back into the roguish face or have treated churlishly the sweet, confident little greeting. The heart of a real man must have an occasional throb of the father, and when Daniel Gray rose from his seat under the maple and called, “More love, child!” there was something strange and touching in his tone. He moved away from the tree to his morning labors with the consciousness of something new to conquer. Long, long ago he had risen victorious above many of the temptations that flesh is heir to. Women were his good friends, his comrades, his sisters; they no longer troubled the waters of his soul; but here was a child who stirred the depths; who awakened the potential father in him so suddenly and so strongly that he longed for the sweetness of a human tie that could bind him to her. But the current of the Elder’s being was set towards sacrifice and holiness, and the common joys of human life he felt could never and must never be his; so he went to the daily round, the common task, only a little paler, a little soberer than was his wont.

“More love, Martha!” said Susanna when she met Martha a little later in the day.

“More love, Susanna!” Martha replied cheerily. “You heard our Shaker greeting, I see! It was the beautiful weather, the fine air and glorious colors, that brought the inspiration this morning, I guess! It took us all out of doors, and then it seemed to get into the blood. Besides, tomorrow’s the Day of Sacrifice, and that takes us all on to the mountaintops of feeling. There have been times when I had to own up to a lack of love.”

“You, Martha, who have such wonderful influence over the children, such patience, such affection!”

“It was n’t always so. When I was first put in charge of the children, I did n’t like the work. They did n’t respond to me somehow, and when they were out of my sight they were ugly and disobedient. My natural mother, Maria Holmes, took care of the girls’ clothing. One day she said to me, ‘Martha, do you love the girls?’

“‘Some of them are very unlovely,’ I replied.

“‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but you can never help them unless you love them.’

“I thought mother very critical, for I strove scrupulously to do my duty. A few days after this the Elder said to me: ‘Martha, do you love the girls?’ I responded, ‘Not very much.’

“‘You cannot save them unless you love them,’ he said. Then I answered, ‘I will labor for a gift of love.’

“When the work of the day was over, and the girls were in bed, I would take off my shoes and spend several hours of the night walking the floor, kneeling in prayer that I might obtain the coveted gift. For five weeks I did this without avail, when suddenly one night when the moon was full and I was kneeling by the window, a glory seemed to overshadow the crest of a high mountain in the distance. I thought I heard a voice say: ‘Martha, I baptize you into the spirit of love!’ I sat there trembling for more than an hour, and when I rose, I felt that I could love the meanest human being that ever walked the earth. I have never had any trouble with children since that night of the vision. They seem different to me, and I dare say I am different to them.”

“I wish I could see visions!” exclaimed Susanna. “Oh, for a glory that would speak to me and teach me truth and duty! Life is all mist, whichever way I turn. I’d like to be lifted on to a high place where I could see clearly.”

She leaned against the frame of the open kitchen door, her delicate face quivering with emotion and longing, her attitude simplicity and unconsciousness itself. The baldest of Shaker prose turned to purest poetry when Susanna dipped it in the alembic of her own imagination.

“Labor for the gift of sight!” said Martha, who believed implicitly in spirits and visions. “Labor this very night.”

It must be said for Susanna that she had never ceased laboring in her own way for many days. The truth was that she felt herself turning from marriage. She had lived now so long in the society of men and women who regarded it as an institution not compatible with the highest spiritual development that unconsciously her point of view had changed; changed all the more because she had been so unhappy with the man she had chosen. Curiously enough, and unfortunately enough for Susanna Hathaway’s peace of mind, the greater aversion she felt towards the burden of the old life, towards the irksomeness of guiding a weaker soul, towards the claims of husband on wife, the stronger those claims appeared. If they had never been assumed!—Ah, but they had; there was the rub! One sight of little Sue sleeping tranquilly beside her; one memory of rebellious, faulty Jack; one vision of John, either as needing or missing her, the rightful woman, or falling deeper in the wiles of the wrong one for very helplessness;—any of these changed Susanna the would-be saint, in an instant, into Susanna the wife and mother.

“Speak to me for Thy Compassion’s sake,” she prayed from the little book of Confessions that her mother had given her. “I will follow after Thy Voice!”

“Would you betray your trust?” asked conscience.

“No, not intentionally.”

“Would you desert your post?”

“Never, willingly.”

“You have divided the family; taken a little quail bird out of the home-nest and left sorrow behind you. Would God justify you in that?”

For the first time Susanna’s “No” rang clearly enough for her to hear it plainly; for the first time it was followed by no vague misgivings, no bewilderment, no unrest or indecision. “I turn hither and hither; Thy purposes are hid from me, but I commend my soul to Thee!”

Then a sentence from the dear old book came into her memory: “And thy dead things shall revive, and thy weak things shall be made whole.”

She listened, laying hold of every word, till the nervous clenching of her hands subsided, her face relaxed into peace. Then she lay down beside Sue, creeping close to her for the warmth and comfort and healing of her innocent touch, and, closing her eyes serenely, knew no more till the morning broke, the Sabbath morning of Confession Day.

X. Brother and Sister

If Susanna’s path had grown more difficult, more filled with anxieties, so had John Hathaway’s. The protracted absence of his wife made the gossips conclude that the break was a final one. Jack was only half contented with his aunt, and would be fairly mutinous in the winter, while Louisa’s general attitude was such as to show clearly that she only kept the boy for Susanna’s sake.

Now and then there was a terrifying hint of winter in the air, and the days of Susanna’s absence seemed eternal to John Hathaway. Yet he was a man about whom there would have been but one opinion: that when deprived of a rather superior and high-minded wife and the steadying influence of home and children, he would go completely “to the dogs,” whither he seemed to be hurrying when Susanna’s wifely courage failed. That he had done precisely the opposite and the unexpected thing, shows us perhaps that men are not on the whole as capable of estimating the forces of their fellow men as is God the maker of men, who probably expects something of the worst of them up to the very last.

It was at the end of a hopeless Sunday when John took his boy back to his aunt’s towards night. He wondered drearily how a woman dealt with a ten-year-old boy who from sunrise to sunset had done every mortal thing he ought not to have done, and had left undone everything that he had been told to do; and, as if to carry out the very words of the church service, neither was there any health in him; for he had an inflamed throat and a whining, irritable, discontented temper that could be borne only by a mother, a father being wholly inadequate and apparently never destined for the purpose.

It was a mild evening late in October, and Louisa sat on the porch with her pepper-and-salt shawl on and a black wool “rigolette” tied over her head. Jack, very sulky and unresigned, was dispatched to bed under the care of the one servant, who was provided with a cupful of vinegar, salt, and water, for a gargle. John had more than an hour to wait for a returning train to Farnham, and although ordinarily he would have preferred to spend the time in the silent and unreproachful cemetery rather than in the society of his sister Louisa, he was too tired and hopeless to do anything but sit on the steps and smoke fitfully in the semidarkness. Louisa was much as usual. She well knew—who better?—her brother’s changed course of life, but neither encouragement nor compliment were in her line. Why should a man be praised for living a respectable life? That John had really turned a sort of moral somersault and come up a different creature, she did not realize in the least, nor the difficulties surmounted in such a feat; but she did give him credit secretly for turning about face and behaving far more decently than she could ever have believed possible. She had no conception of his mental torture at the time, but if he kept on doing well, she privately intended to inform Susanna and at least give her a chance of trying him again, if absence had diminished her sense of injury. One thing that she did not know was that John was on the eve of losing his partnership. When Jack had said that his father was not going back to the store the next week, she thought it meant simply a vacation. Divided hearts, broken vows, ruined lives she could bear the sight of these with considerable philosophy, but a lost income was a very different, a very tangible thing. She almost lost her breath when her brother knocked the ashes from his meerschaum and curtly told her of the proposed change in his business relations.