Читать книгу Mother Mason - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 5

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Mother having been introduced, it would be well to get a glimpse of the other members of the Mason household--a "close-up" of each, as it were.

Mother herself, standing on that plateau of life where one looks both hopefully forward and longingly back, felt that life had been very gracious to her. It had brought her health, happiness, and Henry--and sometimes, in a spasm of loyal devotion, she decided that the greatest of these was Henry.

For thirty-five years Henry Mason had given his time, his thought, his every waking moment to building up the First National Bank of Springtown. He was not only a part of the bank, he was the bank. He knew every man in the community, his financial rating, his capabilities, his shortcomings, his life history.

The country banker is an entirely different species from your city banker. The city banker may hold his hand on the pulse of the nation's financial ebb and flow, but your country banker lives close to the hearts of the people. He is the financial pastor of his flock. "Better slow up, Jim," he will say; "you're running bigger grocery bills than a family of your size ought to have." And sometimes Jim doesn't like it, says the old man better mind his own business; but it is noticeable that he takes the advice to heart.

The country banker is also lawyer, judge, physician. In his little back office, thick with smoke, spattered with gaudy calendars and farm-sale bills, he advises his patrons when to sell hogs and when to marry, when to buy bunches of yearlings and when to have their appendixes removed. He carries a burden of confidences that is far from being merely financial, a burden of greater proportions than the minister's.

Father was not a great church worker. His voice was never raised in the congregation; but not every one who saith Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom. His religion was a very simple thing. He made no public demonstration of it, but he did a great many things unto the "least of these." He saw that more than one load of wood and sack of potatoes found their way to tumble-down back doors. He sent lame Annie Bassert to business school. When Lizzie Beadle came into the bank and wanted a loan to take her old mother to the sanitarium, Father refused the loan at the bank window because there was no security; but he called Lizzie into the back office and made out his personal check to her. Business was business at the grated window, but the back office was his own.

Once the influential members of the community wanted to send Father to the legislature. It pleased him immensely, but he would have given his right hand rather than let on how gratified was his pride. He thought it all over and then, "Thank you, boys," he said; "guess I'd better just stay here and saw wood." He was a son of the soil, was Henry Mason. He had come from good old farmer stock. One of his earliest recollections was lying flat on the bottom of a prairie schooner and watching the coarse wild grass billow away from the big wooden wheels.

That very characteristic, love of the soil, was his greatest asset as a country banker. The members of the bank force had a joke among themselves concerning this. It was about farm sales. That is another phase of country banking of which your city banker lives in dark and fathomless ignorance. In the country communities of the great Mid-West, the winter and early spring dispersion sales draw vast crowds of buyers to the various farms. To each sale goes the farmer's banker to set up a miniature place in which to do banking business for the day. It is usually the cashier or an assistant who is listed for the work, seldom the older president, for the work is dirty, the whole day hard.

Father, however, reveled in the earth smells, the tramping stock, the call of the auctioneer, the noon-day lunch in the farmyard. On the morning of a sale day he talked of nothing else. He asked each customer as soon as he stepped inside the bank if he intended going. He walked around restlessly, looking out of the big windows at the sky, wondering what the weather would be.

D. T. Smith, the cashier, and Bob Mason, and the other two boys would all wink at each other. Bob might say, "Gee, I certainly hate to go out in this wind." Father always fell for it. "Wind? My golly, Son, that's just a little breeze."

"Don't feel like going yourself, do you, Father?"

And Father, trying not to answer too hastily that he'd just as soon go if Bob didn't want to, could scarcely get away fast enough to the locker, where he kept an old moth-eaten Galloway coat, an equally dilapidated cap, and a pair of hip boots. He would leave for the sale as happy as a little boy going on a fishing trip, and the minute the door closed the force would laugh and chuckle at the joke before settling down to the cleaner indoor work of the day.

To Mother a farm sale was always a trial. In addition to the mud-spattered condition in which Father often returned, he always bought something, some outlandish worn-out thing for which they had no possible use.

"Nobody bid on it," Father would explain apologetically, as though the statement vindicated him.

As some men collect Sir Joshua Reynolds and Corots, so Father collected odds and ends from the farm sales. Once he bought a broken grindstone, and one time a sickly calf, and once a pair of collapsible bedsprings that collapsed perfectly but failed to have any other virtue.

"He's missed his calling," Marcia would say pertly before him. "He's really by nature and inclination a junk dealer, you know."

"He can't help it, poor dear!" Katherine would add. "Some men can't resist gambling, but Father can't resist bidding on old trash."

"I'm saving them for your wedding presents, Kathie," Father would retort good-naturedly, which lately had the effect of bringing a shell-pink ripple of color to Katherine's smooth cheek.

Katherine was the eldest Mason daughter, serious-eyed, lithe and lovely--and just graduated from the State University. In the bosom of her family Katherine held the self-appointed office of Head Critic. With zeal and finesse she engaged in constant attempts to manage the activities of the other Masons. Their manners, their grammar, their very opinions on art, literature, and music were supervised by the eldest daughter and sister. To be sure, results were far from satisfactory to the ardent critic; the Masons, individually and collectively being of a too independent disposition to follow dictation, sheeplike. At Katherine's unceasing efforts to bring them all up to certain standards of propriety, they merely shrugged their shoulders and went blithely on their respective ways. They loved her, but they did not obey her.

Marcia, the second daughter, was only a year younger than Katherine and had completed her Junior year at the University. There is in this world an occasional gay, care-free person who seems to be wafted not only to the skies but through life itself on flowery beds of ease. Such a rara avis was Marcia. While Katherine's nature was of a sweet seriousness and given to earnest study, Marcia's was neither of these.

If she was serious, she concealed it admirably. Her studying was usually a very hasty procedure, conducted on the way down a corridor to her recitation room. She had a flour-sieve mind, warranted to hold a great deal of information for at least twenty minutes.

"I always volunteer during the first part of the recitation while the going's good," she brazenly told at home, "then my silence isn't so conspicuous when the road gets rough."

Things seemed to come Marcia's way.

"I was born under a lucky star," she often told the family. And the family almost believed it.

In appearance she was undeniably lovely, and, as one of her aunts said, "as likable as she was lookable." No one could say she was lazy about the house. She simply made a wise and far-sighted choice of household tasks. Soon after she had enthusiastically offered to shell the peas, it became apparent to the other girls that the pea-shelling operation carried on under the breeze-swept grape arbor was greatly preferable to doing the dishes in the hot kitchen or making countless beds.

"Marcia certainly has the happy faculty of slipping through life easily," Mother would sometimes say in exasperation to Father.

"Well, Mother, I don't know any one in the family that makes more friends," Father would remind her.

Which brings us to Father and Mother Mason's attitude toward and about their children. For twenty-six years they had argued over them, but always when they were alone. Toward the children they presented a solid front. If Mother chose to reprove, Father either assisted at the ceremony or kept silent. And vice versa. It is a fine old policy. It has been effective since the days of Abraham and Sarah.

When they were alone, however, they argued it out. And the strange part is that neither one always took the same side. If Mother found fault with some characteristic of her offspring, Father immediately made excuses for it. If Father offered the complaint, Mother flew to her child's defense like a mother bear.

In this instance Father was right about Marcia's friends. Everybody liked her, the teachers and old people and children, and Hod Beeson, who brought the coal, and Lizzie Beadle, the town dressmaker.

When Marcia went away to school, it was as though a great deal of the sunshine of the Mason home had gone with her. When she returned for vacations, everything and every one, from the piano to Tillie, seemed to brighten at her coming. After all, the old world needs more of them--these people who turn to joyousness as the tides run to meet the moon.

Each time Marcia came home she had new tales to tell. And Father and Mother, who came to reprove, remained to laugh.

"Say, folks," she would begin, "I had to write a thesis on some form of lower animal life for old Prof. Briggs in zoölogy class, and what I know about zoölogy you could put in a spoon. So I wrote about a starfish--sort of from the fiction standpoint--and they told me old Prof. Briggs laughed till he nearly cried over the joys and sorrows of that little echinoderm--I guess it's an echinoderm. I got a grade of excellent, and all I know about a starfish to this day is that it has five points and wiggles."

"You can't go through life side-stepping that way, my girl," Father sermonized after he had suppressed a chuckle. "One of these days you'll bump up against something mighty serious and wish you'd applied yourself."

"Don't preach, Father!" Marcia rubbed a pink and white cheek against Father's graying hair. "When that time comes I'll be like Sentimental Tommy--I'll find a way." And softhearted old Father hoped it was true.

No one ever spoke of Eleanor, the sixteen-year-old daughter, as being pretty. By the side of Katherine's Madonnalike sweetness and Marcia's loveliness, Eleanor was rather plain, but she was merry hearted, and a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

Instead of being the possessor of large, luminous eyes like the other girls, she had smaller, twinkling ones, like Mother's. Most people laugh first with their mouths, but when anything pleased Eleanor, which was about four hundred times a day, there came a little crinkling at the corner of her lids so that her eyes seemed to laugh before their mirth communicated itself to her generous mouth.

Of the three girls she had always been the most hoydenish. Many an old lady in Springtown could testify to having been nearly frightened out of her wits at the diabolical speed with which Eleanor Mason rode a bicycle. She could hold her own in baseball, and she was the star guard of the high school basketball team.

Clothes she considered mere articles of apparel, worn from the necessity of being decently covered. It was sometimes recalled in the family that once, to give Eleanor more pride in her clothes, Mother had sent her to Lizzie Beadle, with two nice pieces of serge and the instructions to plan both dresses herself. On the way Eleanor had encountered Junior and a crowd of neighborhood boys, who wanted her to pitch for them. She had rushed up to the house of the Beadle lady, thrust the bundle in the door and called out, "Make 'em just alike, Miss Beadle," and taken herself off to the more glowing pleasures of the Mason cow pasture.

Boys she looked upon simply as the male of the species, somewhat to be envied for having been endowed by the gods with stronger right arms and an apparent aptitude for mathematics, denied to Eleanor herself.

To be sure, there was a Land of Romance, but it was peopled with no one she had really ever seen. The Prince and the Sleeping Beauty were there, and Laurie and Amy from the pages of Little Women, and Babbie and the little minister. If there occasionally walked some one in the shadowy forest that seemed to belong to her, alone, he was too far away and vague to take on any semblance of reality.

Junior was eleven. The statement is significant.

There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.

Just how Springtown was divided in regard to Junior and his crowd of cronies depended largely upon the amiability of its citizens. But practically every one looked upon that crowd as he looked upon other pests: rust, sparrows, moth millers, and potato bugs. As the boys came out of school tearing wildly down the street with Apache yells, more than one staid citizen had been seen to cross the road hurriedly as one would get out of the way of fire engines, or molten lava rolling down from Vesuvius.

There were a dozen or more boys in the crowd, but the ringleaders were Runt Perkins, Shorty Marston, and Junior Mason, and the only similarity between charity and Junior was that the greatest of these was Junior.

At home, by the united efforts of the other members of the Mason family, he was kept subdued into something resembling civilized man. Mother ruled him with a firm hand but an understanding heart. The girls made strenuous efforts to assist in his upbringing, but their gratuitous services were not kindly looked upon by the young man, who believed it constituted mere butting-in.

Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of his speech. Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who immediately corrected him. Mother sometimes thought Katherine a little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run. There were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.

For arithmetic Junior showed such an aptitude that Father was wont to say encouragingly, "You'll be working in the bank one of these days, Son." At which "Son" would glow with a legitimate pride that quickly faded before the sight of a certain dull red book entitled Working Lessons in English Grammar. Katherine labored patiently many an evening to assist in bringing Junior and the contents of this particular volume somewhere within hailing distance of each other. Painstakingly she would go over the ground with him in preparation for his lessons, to be met with a situation something like this:

"Now we're ready. Read the first sentence, Junior."

And Junior would earnestly and enthusiastically sing-song: "'He took his coat down from the nail without a word of warning.'"

"What's the subject, Junior? Now think!"

"Coat," Junior would answer promptly. Then, seeing Katherine's grieved look, he would change quickly to "Nail." And when the look deepened to disgust he would grow wild and begin guessing frantically: "Warning? Took? From?"

Of the three girls Eleanor was his best friend. Rather boyish herself, she was still not so far removed from the glamour of ball games in the back pasture, the trapping of gophers, and circuses in the barn, but that the two held many things in common.

It was Marcia who was his arch enemy. Not that she committed any serious offenses. It was her attitude that exasperated him. She had a trick of perpetrating a lazy little smile on his every act, a smile that was of a surpassing superiority. And she had a way of always jumping at the conclusion that he was dirty. "Go wash your hands!" was her sisterly greeting whenever he approached. She used it as consistently toward him as she used "How do you do?" to other people. Junior would jump into a heated argument over his perfect cleanliness, a discussion that consumed more time than an entire bath would have taken.

With catalogue-like completeness this finishes the list of the Mason family members who were still at home, for Bob and his young wife, Mabel, and the new baby girl who had recently arrived, lived two blocks away. Like a supplement to the register, however, there still remains Tillie who was as much a part of the household as Father or the kitchen sink.

Tillie Horn--her church letter and bank book said Matilda Horn--had lived in the Mason household for eighteen years. Accordingly to present-day standards her position there was hard to define. Guest? No. Mother silently put a check on the kitchen clock shelf every Saturday morning, and Tillie as surreptitiously removed it sometime during the day. It was one of Tillie's forty odd characteristics that she disliked to speak of her wages. Several times in the eighteen years, as the H. C. of L. thrust itself with nightmare ferocity on an unwary world, the amount on the check had been voluntarily raised by Mother, to which Tillie had made grateful and appreciative response, "Wha'd you do that silly thing for?"

Domestic servant? The day the new doctor's wife returned Mother's call, she asked affably, "Do you find your servant satisfactory?" As smooth as lubricating oil, Mother answered, "I have none. My old friend Miss Horn lives with us and helps me." Then she called pleasantly, "Come in, Tillie, and meet Mrs. Cummings." Which of course was not at all according to Hoyle. But then Mother did not do things by footrules and yardsticks. She did them by friendly instinct. And when you stop to think about it, that is a fairly good definition of a lady and a Christian.

No, Tillie was not a servant. For those eighteen years she had alternately worked like a Trojan or "slicked up" and gone comfortably to Mite Societies and Missionary Meetings with Mother.

The two had known each other years before in the more or less pleasant intimacy of a cross-roads schoolhouse, where Tillie's education had abruptly ceased. Mother had gone away to school, taught, been married, and was in the midst of the triple-ringed circus act of trying to raise three babies at once when Tillie dropped in one day between trains to call upon her. That call had lasted eighteen years, broken only by two intervals.

In appearance Tillie was all that any enterprising movie director could desire. She was tall, angular, homely. Her long neck, rising from the habitually worn, dull gray kitchen dress, was slightly crooked, like a Hubbard squash's. Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes with bulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins. Her eyes were small and nondescript in color, her mouth and nose large, and her teeth of a glaring china-white falseness. Altogether, it was a lucky thing for Tillie that while man looketh on the outward appearance the Lord looketh on the heart. For Tillie's heart was as good as gold, and was buried under just about the same proportion of crusty exterior as the yellow metal under the earth.

Tillie's sense of humor, or lack of it, was not an understandable thing to the fun-loving Masons. The ancient author who copyrighted most of the wise sayings of the world once stated that there was a time to weep and a time to laugh. Tillie seemed never to know when that time was. Over things that the whole family shouted about, she maintained a dignified and critical silence. On the other hand, she would occasionally break out into a high, weird, hen-like cackle over the most trivial thing imaginable. If the Masons laughed then, it was not at the trifling joke but because Tillie herself was so odd.

"My stars! Listen to Tillie!" one of the girls would say. "I'll bet a nickel she's just found out it's Thursday morning instead of Friday."

"Or picked up the egg beater instead of the potato masher," another would guess.

No, in spite of the long association with a family whose chief delight in life was the foolish little fun extracted by the way, Tillie's sense of humor was almost negligible. And it is easier for the keeper of five cinnamon bears to control his charges without chains and a prodding pole, than it is for any member of a household that contains five hilarious young people to exist comfortably with them, minus a highly developed sense of humor.

A buffer being any contrivance that serves to deaden the concussion caused by the impact of two bodies, it became apparent, when the children were growing up, that such an apparatus was needed between them and Tillie. And with that clear perception with which some people see their duty, Mother very early discovered that she, herself, must be that device. During all these years she had stood between her noisy, merry brood and this old friend, whose ideas of life were invoiced in terms of sweeping and scrubbing.

With that capacity for sinking herself in another's personality, Mother could clearly see both sides of a situation, and as for the diplomatic handling of it, she was an able ambassador to the Court of the Kitchen. So she had tactfully handled each affaire d'honneur from the days when Bob's kites littered up the back porch, through the period of the girls messing around with dough, down to Junior's high jinks. Firmly had she made a stand for Tillie's right to have certain hours in the day to herself, and stanchly had she defended the children's legitimate desires for picnic lunches and other childish necessities. Yes, Mother certainly deadened the concussion caused by the impact of two bodies.

The two intervals in which Tillie had not worked for the Masons were occasions when she had become vaguely dissatisfied and gone away to live permanently with her own relatives. The first time, after being gone two months, she wrote Mother and asked if she might come back, that she couldn't abide her sister's husband and would die happy if she could only put him in her mop stick and scrub the kitchen floor with him.

The other time she had gone to a cousin's, returning in three weeks with the information that her cousin's daughters both had beaus, and they made her sick with what she chose to call their "lally-gagging" around. Aversion to the display of sentiment being another of Tillie's characteristics, no one was surprised.

If she ever had a romance of her own, no one knew of it. It was often recalled in the family that Hod Beeson, erstwhile a drayman by profession and a widower by Providence, had once come to the back door on a Sunday night, dressed in his best. To the unsuspecting Tillie who opened the door this smiling Lochinvar had ventured jauntily, "It's a nice evening, Miss Horn." But, unlike Ellen of Netherby Hall, Tillie had snapped out, "Maybe so. I ain't noticed it," and peremptorily shut the door.

With this intimate view of the Mason family whose members form the cast of characters--the stage the comfortable, commodious home of a middle-west country banker--the little plays are ready. And let only those of you who can sense the fun and tragedy in the everyday ups-and-down of the ordinary American family, the kind of folks that live next door to you and me--read on.