The American Country Girl Part 6

CHAPTER VIII

THE INHERITANCE

We men of earth have here the stuff Of Paradise--we have enough!

We need no other thing to build The stairs into the Unfulfilled-- No other ivory for the doors-- No other marble for the floors-- No other cedar for the beam And dome for man's immortal dream.

Here on the path of every day-- Here on the common human way-- Is all the busy G.o.ds would take To build a heaven, to mold and make New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime To build Eternity in time!

_Edwin Markham._

CHAPTER VIII

THE INHERITANCE

This, then, is the indictment of country life as it now is, by the Country Girl who is now living in the midst of it.

It is depressing, it is terrible, that a concourse of country girls will stand up before The Fathers and declare that while they love the country, and prefer to remain there all their days, yet they cannot, because life there is intolerable to them. They say this in all sobriety; no one can accuse them of speaking in haste; their mood is most judicial. The young woman in the farm life of to-day has a deep-seated love for country life; many things about it command her affection and give her delight; but there are also some things that she does not feel called upon to endure. If it were not for them, for these, and these, and lo! all of these, objections to it, she would be perfectly content and satisfied to live on the farm all her days; but as it is, well, she can only join that funeral procession of the nation cityward.

It is true that the Country Girl does not enjoy a house with no music under its roof-tree, a house where no games are played, where no stories are told or read about the lamp in the long winter evenings: a house, in short, with nothing she calls happiness in it; but this is a small part of her indictment.

She does not enjoy trudging back and forth a million times a year over the same square yards of floor-s.p.a.ce; but that, too, is immaterial to her. In fine, she does not object to the work itself, but she cannot endure that heterogeneous, unsystematized, objectless drudgery, the enforced character of the toil, the out-of-date methods, the absence of acknowledgment of any economic value in her contribution to the business--this is what grinds her soul.

She is not wanting in appreciation of the possibilities in farm life and the farming business; but, to quote with variations, she says to herself:

If they be not fair for me, What care I how fair they be?

She sees the beauty of the changing seasons, and she enjoys the companionship of animals, naming them one by one after all her favorite heroes and heroines of fairyland; but the fact that she has nor chick nor lambkin for her own is as

The little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Country Girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes their care a pleasure to her.]

If the struggle to pay the mortgage is long and the work heavy, she does not especially enjoy spending days and nights of toil with the rest of the family to accomplish the desired end; but more than all this does she dislike having the father keep all the trouble to himself; she wants a share in the responsibility. She wants some acres of her own, some stock of her own. She wants her personality as a factor in the business, which it really is, to be justly acknowledged. For without that, she reasons, what is there to look forward to? Hope is the anchor of the soul; and without something to hope for, how can one hope? She finds that she has none of these joyous antic.i.p.ations of the future that every young woman loves and has the right to entertain. She cannot look forward to the natural and normal life of the home for her future lot, for the existing scheme of country life does not provide her with a husband.

Therefore if the home cannot be made happy and the work in the farmhouse cannot be made interesting, if her fair share of incentive as a human being in the common round of life cannot be a.s.signed to her, if her part in the complex structure of the farmstead cannot be put upon an equitable basis, if the universal happy fortune of woman cannot be seen to shine as a goal in the long service of the farmstead, why, she will have none of it!

If this is the irrevocable decision of the farmers' daughters of the present day, it is a very serious matter. It means that the farmstead will have to be broken up, that the farm home must go out of existence, and the whole system of farm life must be revolutionized. What will happen then, it pa.s.ses wisdom to prophesy! The Country Girl may well say, "After me, the deluge!" For if at any one point in the procession of the generations, the women will stand together and say "Thus far and no farther!" the procession must stand as still as the pillar of salt that commemorates the wife of the unfortunate Lot.

Can it be that the Country Girl has in some measure reached this point by doing what Lot's wife did--by simply looking behind her? Casting her eye along back over the generations, did she see anything that appalled her? May it have been something in the experience of her own mother that lent decision to her mind as she considered what she herself would choose for a life-path? Or rather, as she looked over the career that lay nearest to her, the life-struggle that was visible to her in her own homestead, did she see something that held up before her a warning hand?

There still lives many a farm woman who has to walk down a hill and carry up from a spring all the drinking and cooking water for her household and who gets it fresh for every meal. Her round of work may include all the house work with the washing and ironing, the scrubbing and cleaning. She sweeps all the rooms up stairs and down every week, covering all the furniture with sheets to keep off the dust that she flings into s.p.a.ce with her besoms and brooms. She picks the berries for the table and they may have them three times a day. She gathers all the vegetables. If she has no cow, she goes for the milk and brings it home. She is an expert cook, serving the meals in courses, carrying in and out the dishes, and providing ample quant.i.ties of everything. She may can the fruit and make the pickles, jellies and preserves. She will certainly take care of the chickens. In spite of all this she will never seem tired. She will go to the woods and bring ferns and put them into pots to set about the house. She will bring wild flowers and carry them with all sorts of dainties to neighboring houses where there is illness.

Her dress is invariably changed in the afternoon; and she always goes to prayer meeting. She is a great reader and stays up after the family have gone to bed to read the church paper and the farmers' magazine. She is full of life and fun and can talk intelligently on any subject. Every evening after her work is done she may walk to a neighbor's to visit, or if the village is near enough she will go every night to bring the mail.

This woman of the rural realm is a super-woman in the farm environment; her discouraging example cannot be taken as a rule to be followed by others, since few can equal her in strength of body or mind. She is one who has in some way become possessed of a mental training above the average; her intellectual outlook has been brought to such a point that she can take pleasure in many of the resources of culture. She has learned to read,--really read--a thing accomplished by but few of the many who can glibly reel off the words from the printed page. This woman of the farm gathers the ideas and enjoys the fancies that lie behind the mere alphabetical letters. She is one who can gain solace from her hour of reading whenever it is possible to have one; and this keeps her young and buoyant. Then she has also a real interest in everything around her, the garden, the making of the jelly, the missionary cause, all the great wonderful world--everything has attraction for her. Moreover as a result of her mental and inner poise, she has the power to systematize the work of her home and so to get the best results in the shortest time. Does her husband appreciate what a wonderful woman fate has a.s.signed to him?

If not, if he never acknowledges the economic value of this woman's courage and gay spirit, as well as of her mere hand-work and its efficient system, then there may be a sore spot underneath that will never be cured in all her life. Many a farmer husband has said affectionately to his wife that he could never have made a financial success of his farm without her help. But it will take more than a.s.surances like that to satisfy the mind and the heart of the Country Girl in the new era.

Going but half a generation farther back into the past one may find the woman who had not only all that has been described to do but the milking and the b.u.t.ter making beside. She worked up the wool and spun, wove, and made full cloth for men's wear, for flannel sheets and for all the flannel dresses, and she knit all the socks and stockings for the big family. She would rise at four, summer and winter. She would build her own fires, milk four to eight cows, and have breakfast at six. There would be a sugar orchard that made many hundred pounds of sugar, and she would make the syrup and care for it. The floors of her rooms would be covered with carpets of her weaving. The table linen and toweling would be both spun and woven by her hands. All the time she had for intellectual employments would be while some labor was going on. It is a tradition from the past in this country that if a woman can work with her hands or her feet and at one and the same time employ the eyes in some studious pursuit, she has a fair right to whatever intellectual attainment she may be able to gain thereby. Roxana Beecher in Guilford, Connecticut, a hundred years ago, had a volume of philosophy fastened to her wheel and read the book while she treadled and spun; and no woman was really accomplished in the old days unless she could knit and read at the same time.

Sometimes--but rarely--the women of past time in this country took some part in the outside farm labor. The author knows of a woman who husked six hundred bushels of corn in one summer. The following season she piled up one hundred cords of wood and did all the housework beside. It would not be possible to speak of some pathetic cases of enforced toil lest some good men should be led thereby to fall from grace and wish they were noncombatants. The truth is that it has never been the custom in this country that the women should enter into the heavier farm work; from the beginning women were held so sacred that nothing must be risked that could injure their permanent strength. The men rolled in the logs of wood for the big fireplaces and did all the heavier work of the place, answering without a moment's demur the request of the women for help. Such a spirit in the men of America has crystallized in many laws more favorable to women than to men, and in many others designed to give special protection to women and to ward off the possibility of a failure in the persistence of their physical soundness. But clever bad men may break laws that clever good men may make; or good men may be confidingly inattentive while valuable laws and customs become obsolete. Yet the fact does stand out that the spirit of the republic does not favor anything that will dull the physical vigor of the women; and those who feel this spirit and are representative of its urgency--and they are, we must believe, the great majority--are the men in most danger of falling from grace in the manner referred to above. Moreover they are also the people, voters and what not, who will make an effective bar against the inroads of a certain disposition on the part of the foreigners who are, in the main beneficently, coming across the wide seas to find homes in our farming regions, namely, to place the women of their tribes in rows along the fields who bend their backs like the picture of "The Gleaners"

by Millet, and to produce such descendants as Markham's "Man with the Hoe." A sight like this with promise such as this is abhorrent to the inst.i.tutions of our country; the men of the republic, not to say the women, will not tolerate it.

But progress is made little by little. There are cases of arrested development and examples of r.e.t.a.r.dation. There are places where backward-drawing influences have kept some groups from making the advance that other groups have made. If we could penetrate still farther into the past, we should find more reason for the drawbacks that we run across here and there in our own time. We have no histories of selected working days that the great mothers of times past wrote--they certainly had no time to count up calories and set down scientific records of their cookery and their collections of simples. There is a Journal extant which was written by one Abigail Foote in 1779. It goes something like this:

September 2. I spun.

" 3. I spun.

" 4. I spun.

" 5. I spun.

" 6. I spun.

" 7. I spun.

And so on, excepting, of course, Sundays.

About November the record is stated in this wise:

November 11. I wove.

" 12. I wove.

" 13. I wove.

" 14. I wove.

" 15. I wove.

And so on, again. Certainly monotony could no farther go. If such workers had not fastened a book to the distaff, insanity would surely have set in. The weaving never could be quite so monotonous as the spinning, for there was necessary a constant watching of the web that effectually prevented any wandering from the business in hand, or any flashing of looks toward the window-sill where lay the volume of romance.

If however, a leaf from the daily life of one of our grandmothers were accessible, it would contain the story not only of the bread-making, but of the soap-making too. That good grandmother in her brisk and energetic days would kindle the big fire in the back yard, bring the large kettles up from the cellar, pack the barrel full of good hard-wood ashes and set it on its supports, and then pour the water through it to make the lye.

She would then melt up the bones and grease saved from the winter's supply of pork, and when the grease was tried out she would mix the lye and the melted grease with as nice an art and with an expertness as much the product of long experience as is the skill of the artist when he combines his paints for a masterpiece. "With what do you mix your paints?" inquired a young sprig of a great artist. "With brains, sir,"

was the answer. So might the housewife of a hundred years ago have said if she had been asked how she attained her ends in the soap, the candles, the dyes, the cakes, the baking of the beans--as critical a piece of business as ever a Parisian chef could attempt--the turning of the heel in stocking-making, the weaving of the colors in the carpet, the bleaching to snowy whiteness of the linen and the woolen blankets.

"I mix all these processes with brains--with the results of experience bought through many decades of experiment by many costly mistakes and especially by a vivid and unfailing memory of what happened when it was done in one special way and what happened when it was done in some other way. By these means I gained the power to do these things and to gain these successes. It was not so easy as it may seem." Thus might the ghostly grandmother speak if she could come back and let her voice be heard and then she would point to the long rows of soap-bars, put away side by side, white or brown or yellow according to the purity of the grease that had been used, to become dry and fit for household use for the next half-year. Meantime the tallow would have been saved out to be used for dipping the candles or for molding them out in the tin candle-forms. The cotton cord would be strung through the long tin tubes and pulled out at the lower end for the wick end; or the strings of wicking would be hung along a pole, to be dipped into the melted fat again and again as fast as the grease would cool on the strings and thus increase with every dipping the size of the slender tapering candle.

Between the intervals of dipping, the little mother would hurry back to her chair and there sit and cut long strips of cloth and sew them together into carpet rags. When the piles on the floor at her side would be high enough, she would run them off around her elbow into a hank ready to be colored. The little girls in the family would have peeled bark from the b.u.t.ternut trees and gathered golden rod and other herbs and these would have been steeped thoroughly for the magical liquors which would be standing ready in crocks full of dyes to give the brown and yellow and green and blue tint to these hanks of rag-cord. Then the weaving loom would be got ready in the attic and the shuttle would fly back and forth and the rags would soon be transformed into a smooth, well-striped carpet, which would come off in pieces several yards long.

Later on these would be sewed together into a beautiful floor covering to be used for the parlor first, afterward, when the freshness was somewhat worn off, for the living-room; later for some hallway, and last of all, what remained from many footsteps would be made into little rugs to be put down extra in such places as needed special protection.

The craftswoman who did all this was equally gifted in making the cross-st.i.tch initials for the corner of the bolster and the knitted lace for its edge. She was master of all tricks with the needle as well as with the shuttle and the wooden spoon. Moreover, that grandmother was the mother of fifteen children, and there was n.o.body but herself to make mittens and stockings for all of them for both winter and summer.

So her knitting-needles simply had to fly in all the interstices between tasks of weaving and spinning and dyeing and soap-making and candle-making and other work. All this was to be done besides what the average women of to-day have to do and think pretty hard for them.

Edith Abbott in her book, _Woman in Industry_, mentions forty-nine different processes in the factory of to-day that now take the place of the work of one woman as she st.i.tched a pair of shoes in her home, as women often did in the middle New England pioneering era, to accomplish the detail of all the industries that pa.s.sed through the hands of that capable little grandmother of ours in, say, 1790 or thereabouts.

In still earlier days the women performed prodigies of heavy labor and bore a child a year while they did it. History, however, grimly adds the illuminating note that most of these had a short career. And it is just possible that the women of that earlier time went beyond their strength, exhausting their resources of vigor, so that the women of to-day have not their full share of energy for the tasks before them and therefore do not add to the sum of life in the same numbers that their foremothers did.

Such grandmothers, such mothers as those, were "the kind of mothers that men must worship," says Sarah Comstock in _The Soddy_ as she describes the trials of women in present-day pioneering; and she adds, "worshiping mothers makes men great!" Is it not clear where the true greatness of America lies? If there are old men living who are the sons of such mothers, though they may be worshipers of the memory of their heroism, if those sons have any spark of chivalry remaining in their bosoms, they will wish that their mothers had lived to-day instead of then, that their labor might be lessened by modern work-saving methods and their lives brightened by modern amplitude of resource.

The practical executive ability of those great women of one, two, and three generations ago should be the inheritance of the Country Girls of to-day, and their faithful examples should be an inspiration to them.

But the loyal descendants of those self-sacrificing and sacrificed women should say that they will do all in their power to make the time come swiftly when there shall be a new day in the kitchen, a day when the housework may be a joy and not a burden to press the strength and buoyancy out of the young spirits of those who prefer--if they can get themselves to be brave enough--to enter upon the long service of life in the environment of the open country.