Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880», sayfa 7
Amelia E. Barr.
MALLSTON'S YOUNGEST
The railroad-village of Fairfield woke up one spring morning and found a clumsy blue car, with a skylight in its roof, standing on the common near the blacksmith-shop. Horses and tongue were already removed, the former being turned into the tavern pasture and the latter stowed in the tavern barn. A small sky-colored ladder led up to the door of this artistic heaven, which remained closed long after a crowd of loungers had gathered around it.
The Fairfield loungers were famously lazy savages, though to the last degree good-natured and obliging. They wore butternut overalls and colored shirts, a few adding the picturesque touch of bright handkerchiefs and broad straw hats: there were a few coats in various stages of rags and grease, and one or two pairs of boots, but the wearers of these put on no airs over the long ankles and sprawling toes which blossomed around them. The whole smoking, stoop-shouldered, ill-scented throng were descendants of that Tennessee and Carolina element which more enterprising Hoosiers deplore, because in every generation it repeats the ignorance and unthrift branded so many years ago into the "poor white" of the South.
Those who could read traced the legend "Photographic Car" on the sides of the vehicle, and with many a rude joke each bantered the other to have his picter took for such purposes as skeerin' stock off the railroad-track or knockin' the crows stiff. Their scuffling and haw-haws waked the occupant of the car, who rose in his bunk and drew the curtain from a window. The boys saw his face and hushed. Raising the window, he scattered a bunch of handbills among them, which set them all to scrambling, and, when they had caught the bills, to struggling with large and small type which announced that an unrivalled photographer would be in that vicinity in a very few days with his beautiful travelling-car, giving everybody an opportunity of securing such tin-types and photographs as only the large cities turned out, and at the lowest possible prices.
Presently the photographer appeared at his own door and looked abroad. The tender spring morning, though it glorified surrounding woods and rich farming-lands, could do little for this dilapidated village, which consisted of one lane of rickety dwellings crossed at right angles by the Peru Railroad, a stern brick building, a wooden elevator and a mill. It was a squalid sight, though the festive season of the year and that glamourous air peculiar to Indiana brooded it. The photographer surveyed his new field with an amused sneer, and descended the steps to go to his breakfast at the tavern, a peak-roofed white frame set among locust trees—the best house on the street. Before it stood that lozenge-shaped sign on a fat post which stands before all country taverns, making a vague, lonesome appeal to the traveller.
The loungers moved in groups on the station-platform, their hands in their pockets and their necks stretched forward, eying the stranger.
Out of the blue distance on the railroad two plumes of steam rose suddenly: then a black object stood up on the track and gave two calls at a crossing. Double-shuffles were danced on the platform, as if the approaching train charged these vagabonds with some of its own strength. It screamed, and bore down upon this dilapidated station to stop for one brief minute, change mail-sacks and gaze pityingly out of its one eye at the howling crew which never failed to greet it there. People in the cars also looked out as if glad they were not stopping, and a few with long checks in their hats, who appeared to be travelling to the earth's ends, were envied by a girl approaching the post-office in the brick block.
She waited near the photographic car until the train passed, her lip curling at this blue van and the pretensions of its owner.
Later she came out of the post-office by a back hall, and, darting a fierce look at Jim Croddy, who ran against her in his performance of the double-shuffle, took her way across the common, crushing her letters in her hand. This time she scarcely looked at the photographic van, but with dilated eyes and set teeth pursued her path into the springing weeds. The photographer, who had returned, looked at her, however, and found her individuality so attractive that he watched her swift step until it took her out of sight within the doorway of a brick residence detached from the village by a meadow and long lawn.
The young man opened his car and prepared for business. His landlady was going to bring her grandchild to be photographed. A locker received his primitive couch, and he further cleared the deck for action by stowing in the back apartment where he prepared his chemicals all remaining litter. Jim Croddy and kindred spirits ventured to look in.
"See here, boys," inquired the photographer, "couldn't one of you get me a bucket of water from somewhere?"
They would all do it. The heartiest and most obliging set of idlers in the world, they almost fought for the pail, and two, taking it between them, cantered to the pump in front of the post-office. The rest were fain to enter, treading each other's bare heels as they tumbled up the steps.
"Don't you want your pictures taken?" inquired the artist, quizzically surveying his shaggy crowd.
"We ain't got no money," replied Bill Stillman, the smallest but readiest-tongued.
"You got money, Bill," retorted Leonard Price, a parchment-colored wisp of nineteen who had recently become a widower.
"I got to git clo'es with it if I hev'. There's Mallston: git him to set for his picter."
Mallston was hooted for as he came across the dewy grass on feet of brawn, shaming puny rustics by his huge physique. The photographer mentally limned him: a bushy, low-browed head and dark, reddish, full-lipped face, bearded; muscle massed upon his arms and tatter-clothed legs; a deep, prominent chest; hands large, black, powerful; the whole man advancing with a lightness which in some barbaric conqueror would have been called dignified grace.
Mallston had nothing to answer for himself. He stood folding his arms and looking in. It was said he had African blood in his veins—barely enough to stain the red of his skin, pinch up his children's hair and give them those mournful, passionate black eyes through which the tragedy of the race always looks. But so vague, so mere a hearsay, was this negro stain, if it existed at all, that he had married a white wife, and moved in society unchallenged by these very fastidious descendants of Carolina and Tennessee.
Mallston's wife had lately added a son to his family. He had two sons before, also two daughters. From any standpoint it seemed an unnecessary addition when the economist considers that he had no means of support except his big-fingered paws, and these, though very willing, depended on chance jobs and days' works given him by other men. In face of these facts the youngest was there as well as the oldest—scarcely seven; the second, scarcely five; and the third and fourth, aged three and a half and two—in his rented house of one room, containing beds in opposite corners, a table and a cooking-stove in front of the fireplace. A generous family and scant provision for it being the mode in Fairfield, however, Mallston may not have seen his desperate position, especially with summer and harvest wages coming. Just now he was out of a job, having finished a ditching contract, and his black, speculative eyes looked anxiously at the photographer.
"Come, clear now!" exclaimed that young man with some authority to his loafers: "I am going to have some sitters."
The landlady and her grandchild were already coming to take advantage of morning sunlight and the domestic lull before dinner. With them came a curious neighbor in ill-made, trailing calico and dejected sun-bonnet, who walked with her hands on her hips and puckered her upper lip, with consciousness of the loss of two front teeth, when she laughed. As they proceeded at a pace regulated by the toddling child, they encountered an old woman with no teeth at all, whose nose and chin leaned very much toward each other: her grizzled hair curled under a still more dejected sun-bonnet, and, setting down a basket of clothes, she stood panting from exertion and wiping her wan face on the bonnet cape.
"I'm a-garn to hick'ry that Bill," she exclaimed weakly. "I tole him to carry me wash-water, and here he is stannin' round thish yer car! George and John's just out, too, and so's Foster. Soon's they git the'r vittles they up and leave me to do the best I kin. Laws! who's garn to pay out money fer fortygraphs? If folks all had to work as hard as I do, they wouldn't have no money fer no such things, so they wouldn't. It 'ud stan' 'em in hand to be savin'."
"Why don't you drive off some yer good-fer-nothin' boys and make 'em do somethin', Mis' Stillman?" bantered the neighbor.
"Well, they've all been a-workin'," relented the mother. "Bill, he's as good a feller to work as ever was if he don't git with a lot of orn'ry boys. Hit hurts Fawt to work stiddy, so it does.—Bill, come here and tote these clo'es home fer me."
Bill came, ruddy and laughing from a scuffle, and walked off with the basket.
"And git the wash-water and make a fire under the kittle," called his mother.
"I'll be apt to," responded Bill.
"Come along into the daguerreyan car, Mis' Stillman," invited the landlady. "You never see the inside o' one, did you?"
"Laws! is that wher' you're garn to? I can't stop but a minute. Hit looks mighty fine. The boys said this feller was drivin' into town last night when meetin' broke. Who's garn to have their picter took?—You, Jane?"
"Me?" replied the neighbor. "Laws! no: I ain't rich."
"Oh, you'll change your minds," drawled the landlady patronizingly, as became a lady of means: "he takes 'em reel cheap."
The photographer met this group at his door and assisted them into the car, from which all his earlier visitors had dispersed except Mallston.
Mallston stood at the steps and watched the landlady's grandchild prepared for a sitting. The rabble had begun their morning business of pitching horseshoes, but his interest was held by that little child—its fresh clothes, rings of black hair and pomegranate coloring. The artist, having placed his camera, was in the farther room preparing his plate. When he came out and was in the act of closing the door he noticed Mallston, and asked, "Do you want a job?"
The barbarian did decidedly.
"Come into the back room, then, and help me."
Mallston went striding through the car, and placed himself in an obedient attitude behind the partition.
"Laws!" exclaimed Mrs. Stillman, standing between the camera, where the artist was burying his head under a black cloth, and the object to be photographed, "when we lived in Bartholomew county—'twas the year after we moved f'm Johnson county—Foster and John they was little fellers then, and I did want the'r picters that bad, so I did. But the'r pap he 'lowed it was a waste o' money. Pore man! he was a mighty hard worker: he'd go a mile'd to make a cent, and then he'd lose it all with bad management, so he would. But I had easy times them days, with everything to my han': I spun and wove all the jeans the men-folks wore, and we milked a dozen cows—"
"Will you please move aside?"
"Git out o' the way, Mis' Stillman: the man can't see through ye."
"Oh!" exclaimed the old woman, jerking herself from the photographer's line of vision, "I didn't go fer to git in the way. But this ain't doin' my washin'," she added, moving toward the entrance. Here, on a little shelf, she found some tiles and brushes, which she took up to examine and hold before the other women, who were seated awaiting the picture-taking. "What's these here things?"
"Artists' materials," replied the photographer, removing his head from under the black cloth, and that from the camera.—"Now, my little man, look straight at the hole in the box, and don't move.—That large brick house—keep perfectly quiet—across the field seems a good point to sketch from. Who lives there?"
"Harbisons," replied the landlady.
"Harbisons, eh? I suppose it was Miss Harbison I saw go past this morning?—Don't move, my little man."
"I do' know," demurred the washer-woman, whose sole recreation in life was the faculty of speech. "I ain't seen Mis' Harbison to town to-day. They's him and her and the boys. Both the boys is away f'm home now. What-fer lookin' woman?"
"It was a young lady in a wide hat."
"Oh, that's Miss Gill: she's some kin to 'em. She's a school-teacher to Bunker Hill or Peru. Laws! I hate to see anybody so proud."
"That's a good boy!" said the photographer. He removed his plate and carried it to the rear room, where he required the assistance of Mallston, who had watched the process with silent interest. Presently reappearing with the dripping negative, which he held for the women to see, he repeated incidentally, "Proud, is she, this Miss Gill?"
"Yes, she is, kind o'," testified the neighbor who was called Jane.—"It's a reel good one, ain't it?"
"If ye take as good as this all the time," cried the pleased landlady, holding off the negative and giving that excited drawl to the terminal word which may distinguish Kentuckians, for she claimed to be one, "every girl in town 'll be comin' after the'r picter-uh!"
"Except the proud Miss Gill."
The landlady, who had a moustache, bristled it over her square mouth: "I never ast much about her. She's kind o' yaller-complected, but some says she's smart. Bill Harbison was smart too, but he's all broke up now. They don't own nothin' but the house and grounds they're livin' in."
"Laws!" poured in the steady washer-woman, "I used to work fer Mis' Harbison when she was well off—I done knit socks and pieced quilts—and she was always liber'l, so she was. When we fust come here he was gittin' down with his last sickness, and we left a good place in Bartholomew county, fer his folks they kep' a-writin', 'Here's the place, Billy: this is wher' you'll find the flitter tree and the honey pond.' And it wasn't never my will, but come we must; and you orto seen Fairfield then. Why, ther' wasn't nothin' but mud, so ther' wasn't.—My soul! if thern don't go Bill, and I know he ain't carried me no wash-water."
The artist helped her down the steps and asked her to come again, which courtesy she distrusted. She 'lowed he was p'tendin'. He throwed his head up like he was big-feelin'. It ruffled her that anybody should be big-feelin' over a pore widder-woman that took in days' washin's, and had a pack o' triflin' boys that et her out o' house and home.
Still, this old woman enjoyed the fruit trees' budding promise as she patted along the railroad, and perhaps some old thrill shot again as a meadow-lark uttered his short, rich madrigal from the weather-darkened fence.
"Ho, Mis' Stillman," called Mallston's wife, standing in her door with the youngest on her arm, "le's go over and see that ther' picter car."
"I done done it," responded the old woman.
By the end of two weeks this photographic car had done good execution on the community. The artist himself appeared friendly, which greatly assisted his trade, openness to familiarity being a prime virtue in all rustic neighborhoods. Every youngster who came to the store after groceries, with a bag slung over the horse's neck in which to carry them, gave pap no peace until means were furnished for a rosy-cheeked tin-type of himself in a pink, green or purple case. The Appledore girls, handsome daughters of a rich farmer, and therefore able to sit for pictures in Kokomo, or even Indianapolis, yet put on all their chains, rings and bracelets and went to the car to test this young photographer's skill. Mrs. Stillman received money from her daughter in Ellwood, together with the written command: "You go and git your fortygraph took fer me, mother: we don't none of us never know what's a-garn to happen." So she removed her black alpaca from its peg on the wall for her adornment, and came also, explaining to the neighbors that Kit sent the money, so she did, and was makin' a pore mouth about not havin' no picter of mother. And having got the picture, she used all her past trials and present misfortunes to save half the price, which she succeeded in doing.
Every day the artist had a few sitters. It was surprising how many of the bilious, bare-legged children who collected to gaze at his framed specimens were brought to be photographed, for most of the villagers were squalidly poor and the farmers were entering their busy season. During this time he had opened the Harbison domicile to himself, being son of a friend who had sat in the State legislature with Mr. Harbison. All Fairfield knew that he went there nearly every day, and that it was not to shoot with the long-bow on the lawn. They had no idea how he loved to lounge from one empty room to another of this picturesque, half-furnished house, and how he was gratified by the fitness of the inhabitants to their abode. He liked to see Miss Gill tuck a bunch of peach-blossoms in her coil of hair, and to feel the quickening influences of spring supplemented by her electricity.
Mrs. Harbison took her earth-loving hands from garden-making and went to show the young people the ferns in the woods. She pulled her sun-bonnet over her eyes and trod out with the solid steps of a woman bred to love the soil under her feet. The photographer sketched along the way, but he finally sat down by Little Wildcat where the water boiled over boulders, and Mrs. Harbison went farther to dig ginseng. There was a joyful hurry of birds all around. That leopard of the Indiana woods, the sycamore, repeated itself in vistas.
"Sycamores always look like dazzling marble shafts blackened with patches of moss," said the young man.
"And their leaves," said the girl sitting on the log not far from him, "smell like poetry. I spread them on my face late in summer after a shower and suck up their breath. But I never can put the sensation into words."
"How's that for a sycamore?" he asked, showing a scrap.
She examined it with great satisfaction: "Why do you go about with a photographic car? Why don't you set out to be an artist?"
He laughed: "Because there is so much of the vagabond in me, I suppose. Then I never had any education in art. Folks as poor as Job's turkey."
"But a man can do so much or so little."
"Well, when I'm going about with the car I see a great many odd people, and can pick up little striking things for studies. I get a living, too, such as it is, which I shouldn't do if I set up as an artist. Look here!" He turned over his book and showed an etching of Mallston stepping across the common carrying his youngest, with the four older children at his heels. One had sprawled, and was evidently lifting a howl to the paternal ear. They both laughed at it.
"He's a good fellow," remarked the photographer, "but there's no end to the ignorance and misery such creatures bring upon the world. He couldn't take decent care of himself, and he has a wife and five children hanging on him."
"It is just so with nearly all these people," exclaimed Miss Gill in high scorn. "They have no idea of what life should be—no ambition, and scarcely a soul to divide around among them all. It smothers me!" She threw her arms out impetuously. "I want such different things—the society of the cultivated, the stimulus of great natures. Maybe I could write something that would get before the public then."
"Have you ever sent anything East?" he inquired with a Hoosier's vast respect for older civilization.
"Yes," she answered with a falling inflection of voice and head. "But it's no use: I never shall amount to anything with my surroundings."
The water gurgled over its boulders and the green landscape sent up an exquisite loamy breath. The young people, both representing the afflatus of the State, met in one tragic look which ended in a smile.
Next morning Mallston took his usual post in the car, shifting from one bare foot to the other, while the photographer lounged on his locker waiting for custom. The native frequently parted his shaggy jaws, but considered how he should offer his information. He watched his employer with real attachment, and his dark red face deepened its hue around the eyes as he broke out, "We've got a little feller t' 'r house."
"What! not another one?"
"He's two month ole," explained Mallston.
"Oh, your youngest. Why, yes, I've seen him." Mallston was evidently surprised that so humble a creature as his youngest had attracted the great photographer's notice. "He's a fine youngster," added the latter.
Mallston was then emboldened to blurt out, "We've named him."
"You have? Well, what do you call him?"
"We called him after you."
"Why, here's an honor! How did you come to name him for me?"
"I done it."
"Let me see: what can I do for him? Suppose you bring him over now while we aren't very busy and I'll take his picture."
Mallston grinned with pleasure: "My woman wanted his picter. My woman 'lowed mebby you wouldn't charge for it if you knowed he was a namesake."
"Certainly I won't. So bring him right along and we'll do our best for him."
It was some time before he reappeared, carrying his youngest in his arms, its cheeks polished and its wet hair turning over in rings, decked in its chief finery, a blue quilted cloak. The mother came along to hold her cherub in her lap. She was a long, raw-boned woman, immature in face under all her crust of care and tan, evidently distressed in her free waist by the tightness of her calico dress and in her unfenced feet by shoes.
"What are you going to do with the baby?" inquired Miss Gill kindly as she encountered this group at right angles on her return from the post-office.
"Garn with him to the man to git his picter. Come in and see him took," invited Mrs. Mallston timidly.
The young woman, ready to seize on any distraction, went in, scarcely understanding that her bruised ambition reached for healing to such homely, lowly natures as these.
The artist was glad to see her, and she sat on the locker while preparations went on. She exchanged amused glances with him when the other Mallstons flocked to the steps, bellowing in various keys for their mother, and on their being swung in by one arm and placed in a row on the opposite locker, she gazed at them in turn, wondering what the future held out to such lumps of dirt and sombre black eyes.
Mallston set his youngest on the mother's lap and looked at it with sneaking fondness. The whole tribe seemed equally dear to him, but this youngest appealed to his strength. Mrs. Mallston was not celebrated as a tender mother. She went after pails of water and left her children playing beside the railroad-track; their tattered and ludicrous appearance bespoke her unskilfulness with the needle; she was said to have scalded the eldest boy with a skilletful of hot water in which she had soaked bacon, pouring it out of the window on his head. But she probably did as well as she knew how, and Mallston did much better. The photographer watched him go back a dozen times to straighten the baby's sturdy legs, tap it under the chin with his colossal fore finger, cluck in the laughing red cavern of his mouth and change the folds of its quilted cloak with quite a professional air. What were poverty, the world's neglect, hard labor and circumscribed life to this man? That muscle which gathered and distributed the streams of his body may have been to him a heaven in which these five youngsters ministered as angels.
The young man felt moved with an emotion he resisted: "My God! can it be that this savage is right in his instincts, and I am wrong? Can some peculiar blessing of Heaven rest on the man who dares Fate for family love? Or is the poor wretch's fondness a recompense for his overburdened lot?"
The baby took a fine picture. Mallston stood by a window and gazed at the large tin-type. His full lips dropped apart and his head leaned sidewise. He turned to his wife and said with a foolish expression, "If the little feller 'ud happen to drop off now we got sumpin' to remember him by."
"My childern's kind o' sickly," remarked his wife, marshalling forth her quartette, "fer all they look so hearty."
The photographic car remained day after day, although sitters seldom came now, for even the loafers were helping to put in crops. The horses which should have dragged it out almost any dewy morning were not exactly eating their heads off, being turned upon pasture, but the landlord was famous for getting his entertainment's worth. As long as weekly board-bills were paid he said it was none of his business if the man stayed all summer.
On Monday the photographer resolved, "I will start on Wednesday;" on Wednesday he decided, "I will wait till Saturday;" and on Saturday, "It's too late in the week now, but I must go next Monday."
Mrs. Harbison, when interviewed about the generous portion of time he spent on her lawn with her summer visitor, answered with downrightness, "Well, what if he does like to come to our place? We know all about his folks. And if them two wants to sit and talk, they're fit company fer each other, and I reckon it won't hurt 'em. So what you going to do about it?"
The village was going to talk about it. The female population gathered at the storekeeper's house, their favorite rallying-place because the storekeeper's wife had no opinions of her own, but made a good echo to whatever was said, and there they judged that Gill girl for taking up with strangers like she done, so stuck up, and hoped it would turn out he was a married man, and wouldn't that bring her down?
Meanwhile, the photographer stretched himself on his oilcloth-cushioned locker and stared at the now fully-unfurled woods, without one mental glance at the vivid moss in its shades, its four varieties of ferns or the ruined cabin with one side thrown down, showing nickers of sunlight through the gaps of its fireplace. He called himself ill names for remaining where he was, and made a crazy picture of a photographic car seesawing along the country roads, with a figure he well knew sitting on the platform beside him as he drove. It was so absurd, but he quoted Mrs. Dalles's song of "Brave Love" while he etched:
We could not want for long,
While my man had his violin
And I my sweet love-song.
The world has aye gone well with us,
Old man, since we were one:
Our homeless wanderings down the lanes,
They long ago were done.
Then, across some chasm of indefinite time, he saw a studio and himself happy at an easel, with this devoted dark face resting against his side, reciting her work to him and quivering with joy at some sign of success. But the whole panorama dissolved at a breath.
"Now, aren't you a nice fellow," he addressed himself, "a brilliant rascal, a wise genius, to be thinking of such a thing?"
Miss Gill was returning from the woods with a full basket before the morning heat came on. A few women at the storekeeper's fence looked sidewise at each other as she paused to chat under the photographer's window.
The morning was so clear that every object stood in startling relief. A plume of steam far up the leafy railroad vista heralded the Peru express's lightning passage through the town. Scarcely a lounger was left on the platform. Mallston had a job of cleaning the cellar for the storekeeper, and at intervals appeared from its gaping doors with a basket of decayed potatoes on his shoulders. The landscape rung with bird-songs, and the girl, who had skimmed the cream off such a morning, looked up and laughed at her dejected friend. She had purple violets tucked into her coil of hair, her belt and under her collar.
"What are you doing here? Why aren't you out trying to catch the effect of day-twilight in the thick woods?"
"I've been trying," he replied without smiling, "to catch the effect of a rash action—and a woman's face."
"How solemn! Let me see it. Is it Mrs. Stillman's?"
"No, it isn't: it's my wife's."
Her half-lifted hand dropped. While her eyes met his without blenching she turned ghastly white, her face seeming to wither into sudden age.
The express-train whistled. Only a moment before its steam-plume had been her symbol of rushing success in life, and now, for some scarcely apprehended reason, she felt that the train and Fate were running her down. With intuitive resistance and a defiant sweep of her body she turned toward it and screamed aloud.
The photographer could not credit this rapid change to himself when he saw upon the track a small rough cart drawn by Mallston's oldest girl and containing his youngest stretched upon a dirty pillow. The express was coming down-grade at full speed, but at its whistle the oldest child turned off the track and tried to drag her burden across the rail. The cart upset, and the baby sprawled, crying, between the rails, while his sister fled crying toward home.
This whole occurrence was a flash: it seemed to the spectators they had barely started forward with their blood curdling, the engine had but screamed, and Mallston was merely seen dropping a basket of potatoes and leaping with upright hair and starting eyes, before the whole thing was over. The train stopped with such a recoil that many passengers were thrown from their seats: the engineer dropped from his cab, and there was a crowd.
Mallston was jammed into a heap against a tall board fence which surrounded the store-lot. The baby sprawled near him, where he had thrown it when the engine struck him.
"Are you hurt?" asked the photographer, turning him over.
He sat up, looking dazed and ludicrous: "Wher's the little feller?"
"I got him," panted the breathless mother, shaking the child from side to side as she showed it to him.
"He's all right," cried the engineer, "but I hit you. Where are you hurt?"
"I ain't hurt no place," said Mallston, crawling up on all fours, "'cept wher' my back and head hit the fence." He stood up grinning at the excited crowd, and put his sneaking, protecting fingertips under the baby's chin. The youngest had ceased to yell during the fright, but this touched him off again.
