Homespun Tales Part 18

"Do you write to her, father?"

"Yes, I write twice a week," John answered, thinking drearily of the semi-weekly notes posted in Susanna's empty worktable upstairs. Would she ever read them? He doubted it, unless he died, and she came back to settle his affairs; but of course he would n't die, no such good luck.

Would a man die who breakfasted at eight, dined at one, supped at six, and went to bed at ten? Would a man die who worked in the garden an hour every afternoon, with half a day Sat.u.r.day; that being the task most disagreeable to him and most appropriate therefore for penance?

Susanna loved flowers and had always wanted a garden, but John had been too much occupied with his own concerns to give her the needed help or money so that she could carry out her plans. The last year she had lost heart in many ways, so that little or nothing had been accomplished of all she had dreamed. It would have been laughable, had it not been pathetic, to see John Hathaway dig, delve, grub, sow, water, weed, transplant, generally at the wrong moment, in that dream-garden of Susanna's. He asked no advice and read no books. With feverish intensity, with complete ignorance of Nature's laws and small sympathy with their intricacies, he dug, hoed, raked, fertilized, and planted during that lonely summer. His absentmindedness caused some expensive failures, as when the wide expanse of Susanna's drying ground, which was to be velvety lawn, "came up" curly lettuce; but he rooted out his frequent mistakes and patiently planted seeds or roots or bulbs over and over and over and over, until something sprouted in his beds, whether it was what he intended or not. While he weeded the brilliant orange nasturtiums, growing beside the magenta portulacca in a friendly proximity that certainly would never have existed had the mistress of the house been the head-gardener, he thought of nothing but his wife. He knew her pride, her reserve, her sensitive spirit; he knew her love of truth and honor and purity, the standards of life and conduct she had tried to hold him to so valiantly, and which he had so dragged in the dust during the blindness and the insanity of the last two years.

He, John Hathaway, was a deserted husband; Susanna had crept away all wounded and resentful. Where was she living and how supporting herself and Sue, when she could not have had a hundred dollars in the world?

Probably Louisa was the source of income; conscientious, infernally disagreeable Louisa!

Would yet the rumor of his changed habit of life reach her by some means in her place of hiding, sooner or later? Would she not yearn for a sight of Jack? Would she not finally give him a chance to ask forgiveness, or had she lost every trace of affection for him, as her letter seemed to imply? He walked the garden paths, with these and other unanswerable questions, and when he went to his lonely room at night, he held the lamp up to a bit of poetry that he had cut from a magazine and pinned to the looking-gla.s.s. If John Hathaway could be brought to the reading of poetry, he might even glance at the Bible in course of time, Louisa would have said. It was in May that Susanna had gone, and the first line of verse held his attention.

May comes, day comes, One who was away comes; All the earth is glad again, Kind and fair to me.

May comes, day comes, One who was away comes; Set her place at hearth and board As it used to be.

May comes, day comes, One who was away comes; Higher are the hills of home, Bluer is the sea.

The Hathaway house was in the suburbs, on a rise of ground, and as John turned to the window he saw the full moon hanging yellow in the sky.

It shone on the verdant slopes and low wooded hills that surrounded the town, and cast a glittering pathway on the ocean that bathed the beaches of the nearby sh.o.r.e.

"How long shall I have to wait," he wondered, "before my hills of home look higher, and my sea bluer, because Susanna has come back to 'hearth and board'!"

V. The Little Quail Bird

Susanna had helped at various household tasks ever since her arrival at the Settlement, for there was no room for drones in the Shaker hive; but after a few weeks in the kitchen with Martha, the herb-garden had been a.s.signed to her as her particular province, the Sisters thinking her better fitted for it than for the preserving and pickling of fruit, or the basket-weaving that needed special apprentices.h.i.+p.

The Shakers were the first people to raise, put up, and sell garden seeds in our present-day fas.h.i.+on, and it was they, too, who began the preparation of botanical medicines, raising, gathering, drying, and preparing herbs and roots for market; and this industry, driven from the field by modern machinery, was still a valuable source of income in Susanna's day. Plants had always grown for Susanna, and she loved them like friends, humoring their weakness, nouris.h.i.+ng their strength, stimulating, coaxing, disciplining them, until they could do no less than flourish under her kind and hopeful hand.

Oh, that sweet, honest, comforting little garden of herbs, with its wholesome fragrances! Healing lay in every root and stem, in every leaf and bud, and the strong aromatic odors stimulated her flagging spirit or her aching head, after the sleepless nights in which she tried to decide her future life and Sue's.

The plants were set out in neat rows and clumps, and she soon learned to know the strange ones--chamomile, lobelia, bloodroot, wormwood, lovage, boneset, lemon and sweet balm, lavender and rue, as well as she knew the old acquaintances familiar to every country-bred child--pennyroyal, peppermint or spearmint, yellow dock, and thoroughwort.

There was hoeing and weeding before the gathering and drying came; then Brother Calvin, who had charge of the great press, would moisten the dried herbs and press them into quarter- and half-pound cakes ready for Sister Martha, who would superintend the younger Shakeresses in papering and labeling them for the market. Last of all, when harvesting was over, Brother Ansel would mount the newly painted seed-cart and leave on his driving trip through the country. Ansel was a capital salesman, but Brother Issachar, who once took his place and sold almost nothing, brought home a lad on the seed-cart, who afterward became a s.h.i.+ning light in the Community. ("Thus," said Elder Gray, "does G.o.d teach us the diversity of gifts, whereby all may be unashamed.")

If the Albion Shakers were honest and ardent in faith, Susanna thought that their "works" would indeed bear the strictest examination. The Brothers made brooms, floor and dish-mops, tubs, pails, and churns, and indeed almost every trade was represented in the various New England Communities. Physicians there were, a few, but no lawyers, sheriffs, policemen, constables, or soldiers, just as there were no courts or saloons or jails. Where there was perfect equality of possession and no private source of gain, it amazed Susanna to see the cheery labor, often continued late at night from the sheer joy of it, and the earnest desire to make the Settlement prosperous. While the Brothers were hammering, nailing, planing, sawing, ploughing, and seeding, the Sisters were carding and spinning cotton, wool, and flax, making kerchiefs of linen, straw Shaker bonnets, and dozens of other useful marketable things, not forgetting their famous Shaker apple sauce.

Was there ever such a busy summer, Susanna wondered; yet with all the early rising, constant labor, and simple fare, she was stronger and hardier than she had been for years. The Shaker palate was never tickled with delicacies, yet the food was well cooked and sufficiently varied.

At first there had been the winter vegetables: squash, yellow turnips, beets, and parsnips, with once a week a special Shaker dinner of salt codfish, potatoes, onions, and milk gravy. Each Sister served her turn as cook, but all alike had a wonderful hand with flour, and the wholewheat bread, cookies, ginger cake, and milk puddings were marvels of lightness. Martha, in particular, could wean the novitiate Shaker from a too riotous devotion to meat-eating better than most people, for every dish she sent to the table was delicate, savory, and attractive.

Dear, patient, devoted Martha! How Susanna learned to love her as they worked together in the big sunny, s.h.i.+ning kitchen, where the cooking-stove as well as every tin plate and pan and spoon might have served as a mirror! Martha had joined the Society in her mother's arms, being given up to the Lord and placed in "the children's order" before she was one year old.

"If you should unite with us, Susanna," she said one night after the early supper, when they were peeling apples together, "you'd be thankful you begun early with your little Sue, for she's got a natural attraction to the world, and for it. Not but that she's a tender, loving, obedient little soul; but when she's among the other young ones, there's a flyaway look about her that makes her seem more like a fairy than a child."

"She's having rather a hard time learning Shaker ways, but she'll do better in time," sighed her mother. "She came to me of her own accord yesterday and asked: 'Bettent I have my curls cut off, Mardie?'"

"I never put that idea into her head," Martha interrupted. "She's a visitor and can wear her hair as she's been brought up to wear it."

"I know, but I fear Sue was moved by other than religious reasons. 'I get up so early, Mardie,' she said, 'and it takes so long to unsnarl and untangle me, and I get so hot when I'm helping in the hayfield, and then I have to be curled for dinner, and curled again for supper, and so it seems like wasting both our times!' Her hair would be all the stronger for cutting, I thought, as it's so long for her age; but I could n't put the shears to it when the time came, Martha. I had to take her to Eldress Abby. She sat up in front of the little looking-gla.s.s as still as a mouse, while the curls came off, but when the last one fell into Abby's ap.r.o.n, she suddenly put her hands over her face and cried: 'Oh, Mardie, we shall never be the same togedder, you and I, after this!'--She seemed to see her 'little past,' her childhood, slipping away from her, all in an instant. I did n't let her know that I cried over the box of curls last night!"

"You did wrong," rebuked Martha. "You should n't make an idol of your child or your child's beauty."

"You don't think G.o.d might put beauty into the world just to give His children joy, Martha?"

Martha was no controversialist. She had taken her opinions, ready-made, from those she considered her superiors, and although she was willing to make any sacrifice for her religion, she did not wish to be confused by too many opposing theories of G.o.d's intentions.

"You know I never argue when I've got anything baking," she said; and taking the spill of a corn-broom from a table-drawer, she opened the oven door and delicately plunged it into the loaf. Then, gazing at the straw as she withdrew it, she said: "You must talk doctrine with Eldress Abby, Susanna, not with me; but I guess doctrine won't help you so much as thinking out your life for yourself.

"No one can sing my psalm for me, Reward must come from labor, I'll sow for peace, and reap in truth G.o.d's mercy and his favor!"

Martha was the chief musician of the Community, and had composed many hymns and tunes--some of them under circ.u.mstances that she believed might ent.i.tle them to be considered directly inspired. Her clear full voice filled the kitchen and floated out into the air after Susanna, as she called Sue and, darning-basket in hand, walked across the road to the great barn.

The herb-garden was one place where she could think out her life, although no decision had as yet been born of those thoughtful mornings.

Another spot for meditation was the great barn, relic of the wonderful earlier days, and pride of the present Settlement. A hundred and seventy-five feet long and three and a half stories high, it dominated the landscape. First, there was the cellar, where all the refuse fell, to do its duty later on in fertilizing the farm lands; then came the first floor, where the stalls for horses, oxen, and cows lined the walls on either side. Then came the second floor, where hay was kept, and to reach this a bridge forty feet long was built on stone piers ten feet in height, sloping up from the ground to the second story. Over the easy slope of this bridge the full haycarts were driven, to add their several burdens to the golden haymows. High at the top was an enormous grain room, where mounds of yellow corn-ears reached from floor to ceiling; and at the back was a great window opening on Ma.s.sabesic Pond and Knights' Hill, with the White Mountains towering blue or snow-capped in the distance. There was an old-fas.h.i.+oned, list-bottomed, straight-backed Shaker chair in front of the open window, a chair as uncomfortable as Shaker doctrines to the daughter of Eve, and there Susanna often sat with her sewing or mending, Sue at her feet building castles out of corncobs, plaiting the husks into little mats, or taking out basting threads from her mother's work.

"My head feels awfully undressed without my curls, Mardie," she said.

"I'm most afraid Fardie won't like the looks of me; do you think we ought to have asked him before we s.h.i.+ngled me?--He does _despise_ unpretty things so!"

"I think if we had asked him he would have said, 'Do as you think best.'"

"He always says that when he does n't care what you do," observed Sue, with one of her startling bursts of intuition. "Sister Martha has a printed card on the wall in the children's diningroom, and I've got to learn all the poetry on it because I need it worse than any of the others:--

"What we deem good order, we're willing to state, Eat hearty and decent, and clear out your plate; Be thankful to heaven for what we receive, And not make a mixture or compound to leave.

"We often find left on the same China dish, Meat, apple sauce, pickle, brown bread and minced fish: Another's replenished with b.u.t.ter and cheese, With pie, cake, and toast, perhaps, added to these."

"You say it very nicely," commended Susanna.

"There's more:--

"Now if any virtue in this can be shown, By peasant, by lawyer, or king on the throne; We freely will forfeit whatever we've said, And call it a virtue to waste meat and bread.

"There's a great deal to learn when you're being a Shaker," sighed Sue, as she finished her rhyme.

"There's a great deal to learn everywhere," her mother answered. "What verse did Eldress Abby give you today?"

"For little tripping maids may follow G.o.d Along the ways that saintly feet have trod,"

quoted the child. "Am I a tripping maid, Mardie?" she continued.

"Yes, dear." "If I trip too much, might n't I fall?"

"Yes, I suppose so."