The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 34

"I dunno," said Bert.

"That's it. You don't know. You don't know anything about what your schools are doing. You must be on the school committee!"

Bert grinned at this. "No, I ain't," he said, "but I guess I'm ez good ez them that are. They do say Buckstone--you know, the man who runs the 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 go run 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 were rebuking us.

"He thinks we are b.u.t.ting in," said Stella, as we walked home. "I suppose you have to live in a New England town thirty years before you are really a citizen. Well, I'm getting my mad up. Let's b.u.t.t!"

We next consulted Mrs. Pillig on the subject, and found her as stiffly opposed to vocational education as Bert, but on entirely different grounds.

"I don't want my boy educated as if he wa'n't as good as anybody else's," she said. "Just because I'm poor is no reason why my boy shouldn'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 to know, had been obliged to go to Phillips Andover for a year after his graduation from our high school before he could get into college.

"In the first place," I answered, "your high school doesn't fit for college 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 make a better living, and be a better man?" said Stella.

"I want he should have what the rest have," the mother stoutly maintained.

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 cla.s.s from Bert, but with the fundamental conservatism--to give it the pleasantest name possible.

"There's too much fol-de-rol in the school now," he said. "If they'd just try to teach 'em Greek and Latin and the things you need for a liberal education and the college entrance examinations, I wouldn't have had to send my boy to Andover."

"Your boy, yes," I answered. "How many other boys and girls in his cla.s.s are going to college?"

"Well, there's another one," he replied.

"Out of a cla.s.s 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 at human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn't believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are grounded in the fetish of the old "humanist" curriculum (which when it originated was strictly vocational). He didn't believe that trade instruction educated. There was no "culture" in it. I left him, wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn't done as much harm as good in the world.

After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We brought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchard afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope.

"Yes," he said, "there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you've got to get your arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy, they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than we do in rural New England!"

I didn't quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a Bentford Town Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuing autumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list of voters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort in Bentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerable summer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of our taxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (however desultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a total voting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twenty were directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers on the estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part time farmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of a similar nature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged in manual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roads or trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred and one, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position to benefit by agricultural education--a truly tremendous proportion. At the same time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higher inst.i.tutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and a slightly greater number of girls--most of the latter to normal school.

It was with such overwhelming figures as these, backed up by the promise of state aid for an approved agricultural course, which would reduce the expenses of the town to $500 a year, that the superintendent of schools and I, supported by a few members of the Grange, went before the town at the annual Town Meeting in March, and asked for an appropriation.

Our article in the warrant was laid on the table. The appropriation committee refused to endorse it. The town was too poor. It was going to cost $9,000 for roads that year.

This would be rather amusing if it weren't, as Stella points out, so terribly tragic. The roads cost us $9,000 not alone because we do not employ a road superintendent, and don't know how to build them right, still employing the ancient American method of sc.r.a.ping back the gutters to crown the road anew every spring (and this soil, furthermore, is now so saturated with oil that it makes a pudding whenever there is a heavy frost), but because a great deal of the money evaporates in petty graft. I had supposed that Tammany Hall was the great grafting inst.i.tution till I moved to a New England small town. There I learned Tammany Hall was, relatively, a mere child. I've told how selectman Morrissy sc.r.a.ped my lawn--admitting I was party to the crime. Since then I have learned how this same Morrissy sold gravel to the 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 "honest farmers" rush to gobble their share of that road appropriation as soon as Town Meeting is over, hauling gravel where a good deal of the time it isn't needed, if the roads are properly made, getting their teams on the job about an hour after contract time and taking them home at night an hour early, and seeing to it that all of the $9,000 is spent before 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 the selectmen used to overdraw the appropriation, and the town was so much the poorer, and couldn't afford an extra $500 to educate its children properly. The law has at least stopped the overdraft, but we still lack the $500.

If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a road contract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he is taking away the bread from town labour, and the next year he is so snowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He is snowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labour up to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquor license. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, even when they don't know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people--the richest taxpayers, who are summer residents--don't care anyhow, so long as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, these rich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declare a half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are left are, as the expressive phrase goes, "up against it."

That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. I was blue, despondent, ready to give up.

"Twenty-five per cent. who really cared," said she, "could reform the universe. Reform is like the dictionary--it takes infinite patience. The first thing is to get the 25 per cent. together."

"You're right!" I cried, taking heart again. "There's plenty of work for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mere upstarts because we've lived here only a year or two. But that is just why we can see so many things which must be altered. We've got to keep our batteries on the firing line. We've got plenty of work besides getting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncovering our perennials."

We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by the woodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used the spring before.

It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. If we couldn't have real vocational instruction, at least we might have school 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 and the master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that, after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, what similar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of cooperation among those working for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of a piece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfully volunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as an incentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the large estates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen) volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at five o'clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from the district sent quant.i.ties of government seeds, and more were donated by one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land, nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty little squares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boy toiling. We had the beginnings of vocational instruction. It had been entirely accomplished by voluntary cooperation among the minority who saw the need for it.

I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, an Irish-American who had practically grown up into the management of one of the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his natural strength 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't organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight of 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 hitherto scattered and ineffectual minority.

It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I remarked one day that the town didn't get more than 60 cents' worth of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: "Well, if we didn't pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or to break out the snowdrifts in winter, we'd have to pay for their keep in some other way. They would be 'on the town.'"

"On the town!" The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent b.a.l.l.s, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece, past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn, the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a pleasant land, be "on the town?" Why should some of us own acres upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once stood in her ancestor's name. Why had the acres slipped away in the intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities--to make New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle with fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till something 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, all independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves "poor worms" on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century with a new problem on our hands.

And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when I see the road work being done by "town labour," I think of what that means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which floats in the blue above our dwelling.

Chapter XXV

HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS

But this story is, after all, an idyl, and the idyl is drawing to its close. Even as the Old Three Decker carried tired people to the Islands of the Blest, my little tale can only end with "and they lived happy ever after." Into the sweet monotony of such happy years what reader wants to follow? The reader sees his fellow pa.s.sengers, the characters, disembark, waves them good-bye--and turns to sail for other isles! So please consider that the hawsers are being loosed, the farewells being spoken.

That second summer at Twin Fires, of course, showed us many things yet to be done. Neither Rome nor the humblest garden was ever built in a day.

Our ramblers did their duty well, but the grape arbour and the pergola would not be covered properly in a season. There were holes in the flower beds to be filled by annuals, and mistakes made in succession, so that July found us with many patches dest.i.tute of any bloom. Out in the vegetable area there were first cutworms and then drought and potato blight to be contended with. In our ignorance we neglected to watch the hollyhocks for red rust till suddenly whole plants began to die, and we had to spray madly with Bordeaux and pull off a great heap of infected leaves, to save any blooms at all. There were clearings to be made in the pines for ferny spots, and constant work to be done about the pool to keep the wild bushes from coming back. There were chickens to be looked after now, also, and new responsibilities in the village for both of us. We had neither attempted nor desired to avoid our full share of civic work. We lived a busy life, with not an hour in the day idle, and few hours in the evening. We lived so full a life, indeed, that it was only by preserving an absolute routine for my own bread-winning labours, from nine A.M. till one, that I was able to resist the siren call of farm and garden, and get my daily stint accomplished.

The preceding summer I had made about $200 out of my produce, which in my first nave enthusiasm pleased me greatly. But it was surely a poor return on my investment, reckoned merely in dollars and cents, and the second season showed a different result. Having two cows and a small family, I managed to dispose of my surplus milk and cream to a farmer who ran a milk route. This brought me in $73 a year. As I further saved at least $100 by not having to buy milk, and $60 by Peter's efforts at the churn, and could reckon a further profit from manure and calves, my cows were worth between $300 and $400 a year to me. Now that we had hens and chickens, we could reckon on another $100 saved in egg and poultry bills. To this total I was able to add at the end of the summer more than $500 received from the sale of fruit and vegetables, not only to the market but to the hotels. I was the only person in Bentford who had cultivated raspberries for sale, for instance, and the fact that I could deliver them absolutely fresh to the hotels was appreciated in so delicate a fruit. Stella and Peter were the pickers.