The Idyl of Twin Fires
Chapter XXIV
SOME RURAL PROBLEMS
There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelorbefore he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new rangeof social relations and impulses which follow a happy union. I do notmean social relations with a capital S. About such I know little andcare less. Presumably marriage may bring them, also, into the life of aman who chooses the wrong wife. In fact, Stella and I have seen morethan one case of it in Bentford, where we dwell near enough to thefringes of Society to observe the parasitic aspirations of several ladieswith more fortune than "position." Mrs. Eckstrom, we have discoveredsince her call, is such a one. We, of course, were of no use to her,and she had not troubled us since, though two gold fish did arrive thatnight, as I have told. We are grateful for Antony and Cleopatra.
No, what I mean by social relations and impulses are the opportunitiesfor service and the impulses to jump in and help others, which matrimonydiscloses and breeds. Who can say why this is so? Who can say why thebachelor is generally negatively--if not actively--selfish, while thesame man when he has achieved a good wife, opened a house of his own,begun to employ labour directly instead of through the medium of a clubor bachelor apartment hotel, is suddenly aware of wrong conditionsin the world about him and a new desire to help set them right? Itcannot entirely be due to the woman, for very often her maiden life hasbeen as barren of social service as his own. It is inherent in the stateof matrimony, and to me it seems one of the glories of that state.Those couples who have not felt it, I think, have been but sterilelymated, though they have reproduced their kind never so many times.
At any rate, it was not long after the Eckstrom invasion that Stella andI went to play golf, carrying a load of lettuce heads and cauliflowersto market on our way. As all Bert's cauliflowers are sold in bulk to aNew York commission merchant, I found I had the local market prettymuch to myself, and was getting 15 cents a head for my plants. Mikedearly loved cauliflowers, and babied ours as a flower gardener babieshis hybrid tea roses. They were splendid heads, and were bringing me in adollar a day or more. I had visions of greatly increasing my outputanother season, for I could easily supply the two hotels as well.
We left our farm wagon in the church horse-sheds and went down to thelinks. There was a crowd of caddies of all ages sitting on the benchesreserved for them, and half a dozen came rushing toward us. I chosea large boy, because I am one of those idiots who carries around atleast seven more clubs than he ever uses, and Stella picked a smaller boybecause she liked his face. As golf is not an engrossing game when youare playing with your wife, and she's a beginner into the bargain(matrimony has its drawbacks, too!) we fell to talking with our caddies.
"You must be in the high school, eh?" said I to mine.
"I went last year," he replied, "but I ain't goin' no more. Goin'to work."
"Work at your age? What are you going to do?" asked Stella.
"I dunno--somethin'," he answered.
"Why don't you keep on at school?" I said.
"Aw, what's the use?" said he. "They don't learn younothin'--algebra and English and stuff like that."
"A little English wouldn't hurt you at all, young man," said Stella."You don't like to study, do you?"
The boy looked sheepish, but admitted that he didn't.
"What do you like to do?" I asked. "You don't like to caddy verywell, because you don't keep your eye on the ball, and you've madethe little fellow take out the pin on every hole so far."
The boy flushed at this, and went up to the next pin himself.
"I'd like to work in a garden," he said, as we were walking to thenext tee.
"You want to be a gardener, eh?" said I. "Has anybody ever taught youhow to start a hotbed?"
"No, sir."
"Ever run a wheel hoe?"
"No, sir."
"Would you know what date to plant early peas, and corn, and limabeans?"
"No, sir."
"Ever graft an apple tree?"
"No, sir."
"Well, you're not very well fitted to take a job as a gardener yet,are you?" said I.
He admitted that he wasn't.
"Would you keep on going to school if they taught you how to be agardener?" asked Stella, carrying on the line of questioning.
"You bet," he replied. "But, gee! they don't teach nothin' likethat. Only bookkeepin' and typewritin', and then you have to go awayto a business college somewhere before you can get a job."
"We seem to have stumbled on a civic problem," I remarked to my wifeas we teed up. "I don't believe an educational survey would do thistown any harm."
"And the finger of destiny points to us?" she smiled.
"Probably," said I. "You'd hardly expect the Eckstroms to tackle thejob!"
That night we began by consulting Bert. Bert is one of the best men Iknow, and he applies the latest methods to growing cauliflowers; buthe's a New England farmer, none the less, and he has the true "ruralmind."
"'Vocational education!'" he exclaimed. "We got more education thanwe kin afford now. Taxes are way up, an' the school appropriation'sthe biggest one we have--$19,000, to only $7,000 for the roads! And thenyou talk about more! We got along pretty well without it so far."
"Have you, though?" said Stella. "You've got a high school, but howmany boys have you got in it?"
"I dunno," said Bert.
"That's it. You don't know. You don't know anything about what yourschools are doing. You must be on the school committee!"
Bert grinned at this. "No, I ain't," he said, "but I guess I'm ezgood ez them that are. They do say Buckstone--you know, the man who runsthe meat market--engages teachers on their looks."
"Not a bad idea," said Stella; "looks mean a lot to children."
"Not the kind Buckie's after, I reckon," said Bert. "But you two gorun your farm an' don't worry about this town. We'll git along."
Bert spoke good naturedly, but we felt, none the less, as if he wererebuking us.
"He thinks we are butting in," said Stella, as we walked home. "Isuppose you have to live in a New England town thirty years before youare really a citizen. Well, I'm getting my mad up. Let's butt!"
We next consulted Mrs. Pillig on the subject, and found her as stifflyopposed to vocational education as Bert, but on entirely differentgrounds.
"I don't want my boy educated as if he wa'n't as good as anybodyelse's," she said. "Just because I'm poor is no reason why my boyshouldn't be fitted to go to college same as young Carl Swain."
Carl Swain was the son of the village bank president. He, I happened toknow, had been obliged to go to Phillips Andover for a year after hisgraduation from our high school before he could get into college.
"In the first place," I answered, "your high school doesn't fit forcollege now. In the second place, is Peter going to college?"
"Of course he ain't," said Mrs. Pillig.
"Then why not educate him in some way that will really fit him to makea better living, and be a better man?" said Stella.
"I want he should have what the rest have," the mother stoutlymaintained.
Stella shook her head. "It's hopeless," she whispered.
I mentioned the matter next to Mr. Swain, when I was in the bank. He,too, was a true New Englander, of a different class from Bert, but withthe fundamental conservatism--to give it the pleasantest name possible.
"There's too much fol-de-rol in the school now," he said. "If they'djust try to teach 'em Greek and Latin and the things you need for aliberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn'thave had to send my boy to Andover."
"Your boy, yes," I answered. "How many other boys and girls in hisclass are going to college?"
"Well, there's another one," he replied.
"Out of a class of how many?"
"Twenty," said he.
"Hm--you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?"
He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew athuman selfishn
ess. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn'tbelieve in vocational education, either. He had one of those vagueand paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for hisopposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they aregrounded in the fetish of the old "humanist" curriculum (which whenit originated was strictly vocational). He didn't believe that tradeinstruction educated. There was no "culture" in it. I left him,wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn't done as much harm as good in theworld.
After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. Webrought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchardafterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take agrateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.
"Yes," he said, "there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in thehigh school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you arein the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you've got to get yourarguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we canhave any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy,they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools thanwe do in rural New England!"
I didn't quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a BentfordTown Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuingautumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list ofvoters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort inBentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerablesummer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of ourtaxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (howeverdesultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a totalvoting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twentywere directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers onthe estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part timefarmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of asimilar nature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged inmanual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roadsor trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred andone, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position tobenefit by agricultural education--a truly tremendous proportion. At thesame time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higherinstitutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and aslightly greater number of girls--most of the latter to normal school.
It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promiseof state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce theexpenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schoolsand I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the townat the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation.Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriationcommittee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going tocost $9,000 for roads that year.
This would be rather amusing if it weren't, as Stella points out, soterribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do notemploy a road superintendent, and don't know how to build themright, still employing the ancient American method of scraping backthe gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil,furthermore, is now so saturated with oil that it makes a puddingwhenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the moneyevaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the greatgrafting institution till I moved to a New England small town. ThereI learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I've told howselectman Morrissy scraped my lawn--admitting I was party to thecrime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel tothe town at 50 cents a load, from a gravel bed the town already owned,and, as selectman, O. K'd his own bill! I have seen how our "honestfarmers" rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soonas Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the timeit isn't needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teamson the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home atnight an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spentbefore July, so there is nothing to repair roads with in the autumn.Of course some roads do have to be repaired in the autumn, so theselectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was somuch the poorer, and couldn't afford an extra $500 to educate itschildren properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but westill lack the $500.
If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a roadcontract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he istaking away the bread from town labour, and the next year he is sosnowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He issnowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labourup to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquorlicense. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, evenwhen they don't know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people--therichest taxpayers, who are summer residents--don't care anyhow, solong as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, theserich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declarea half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are leftare, as the expressive phrase goes, "up against it."
That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. Iwas blue, despondent, ready to give up.
"Twenty-five per cent. who really cared," said she, "could reform theuniverse. Reform is like the dictionary--it takes infinite patience. Thefirst thing is to get the 25 per cent. together."
"You're right!" I cried, taking heart again. "There's plenty ofwork for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mereupstarts because we've lived here only a year or two. But that is justwhy we can see so many things which must be altered. We've got to keepour batteries on the firing line. We've got plenty of work besidesgetting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncoveringour perennials."
We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by thewoodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used thespring before.
It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. Ifwe couldn't have real vocational instruction, at least we might haveschool gardens, with volunteer instruction and prizes awarded, perhaps,by the Grange. I sent away that evening for bulletins on the subject,and presently took the matter up with the school superintendent andthe master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that,after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, whatsimilar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of cooperation among thoseworking for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of apiece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfullyvolunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as anincentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the largeestates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen)volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at fiveo'clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from thedistrict sent quantities of government seeds, and more were donatedby one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land,nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty littlesquares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boytoiling. We had the beginnings of vocational instruction. It had beenentirely accomplished by voluntary cooperation among the minoritywho saw the need for it.
I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, anIrish-American who had practically grown up into the management of oneof the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his naturalstrength of character had been developed by responsibility.
"The trouble is," he said, "that we organize for political parties,for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don'torganize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say oftwenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over whatthe town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bringtogether forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weightof numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club.It would be for the town, not for a party."
He carried out his idea, too,
and the Bentford Town Club was the result.It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hithertoscattered and ineffectual minority.
It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. Iremarked one day that the town didn't get more than 60 cents' worthof labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: "Well, if wedidn't pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, orto break out the snowdrifts in winter, we'd have to pay for their keepin some other way. They would be 'on the town.'"
"On the town!" The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golflinks, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-centballs, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece,past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, andsaw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchardslope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn,the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched thegreen countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such apleasant land, be "on the town?" Why should some of us own acresupon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made theland. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any whitemen had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendantsof the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did ourwashing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had oncestood in her ancestor's name. Why had the acres slipped away in theintervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to payfor the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, nodoubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases thebest blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities--to makeNew York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to minglewith fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, tillsomething perilously close to degeneracy resulted.
"On the town!" The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers,all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, allindependent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves"poor worms" on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike weregone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out ofthe poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenlysaw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity hadswept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into thecities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth centurywith a new problem on our hands.
And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since thenceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and whenI see the road work being done by "town labour," I think of what thatmeans; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, theterrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of thecountry, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. Ireflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems ofthe modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud whichfloats in the blue above our dwelling.