Hempfield Part 4

"I'll see that you get the address of--my uncle in California."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER III

ANTHY

It is one of the strange things in our lives--interesting, too--what tricks our early memories play us. What castles in fairyland they build for us, what never-never s.h.i.+ps they send to sea! To a single flaming incident imprinted upon our consciousness by the swift shutter of the soul of youth they add a little of that-which-we-have-heard-told, spice it with a bit of that-which-would-be-beautiful-if-it-could-have-happened, and throw in a rosy dream or two--and the compound, well warmed in the fecund soil of the childish imagination, becomes far more real and attractive to us than the drab incidents of our grown-up yesterdays.

Long afterward, when we had become much better acquainted, Anthy told me one day, very quietly, of the greatest memory of her childhood. It was of something that never could have happened at all; and yet, to Anthy, it was one of the treasured realities of her life, a memory to live by.

She was standing at the bedside of her mother. She remembered, she said, exactly how her mother looked--her delicate, girlish face, the big clear eyes, the wavy hair all loose on the pillow. They had just placed the child in her arms, and she was drawing the small bundle close up to her, and looking down at it, and crying. It was the crying that Anthy remembered the best of all.

And the child that Anthy saw so clearly was Anthy herself--and this was the only memory she ever had of her mother. That poor lady, perhaps a little tired of a world too big and harsh for her, and disappointed that her child was not a son whom she could name Anthony, after its father, tarried only a week after Anthy was born.

"You see," said Anthy, "I was intended to be a boy."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the stairs]

After that, Anthy remembered a little girl, a very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the stairs. There were curious urns filled with flowers on the wall paper, and her two friends, Richard and Rachel, came out of the wall near the dining-room door and looked through the stair spindles at her. Rachel had lovely curly hair and Richard wore s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s b.u.t.tons on his jacket, and made faces. She used to whisper to them between the spindles, and whenever any one came they went back quickly through the wall. She liked Rachel better than Richard.

There was a time later when her hero was Ivanhoe--just the name, not the man in the book. She read a great deal there in the lonely house, and her taste in those years ran to the gloomy and mysterious. The early chapters of an old book called "Wuthering Heights" thrilled her with fascinated interest, and she delighted in "Peter Ibbetson." Sometimes she would take down the volume of Tennyson in her father's library and, if the light was low, read aloud:

I _hate_ the _dreadful_ hollow behind the little wood.

As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, and old-fas.h.i.+oned]

Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fas.h.i.+oned, and she did not like the iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the parlour.

Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friends.h.i.+ps in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to a.s.sume the omniscience of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office through the golden haze of later events.

It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.

Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper: "John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."

Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events, just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep way--for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the ideal--these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she loved with all the devotion of her young soul.

He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life well--all of it--and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.

"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.

He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was of an odd a.s.sortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.

As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wis.h.i.+ng her father had written them).

"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving the nation," or "Pa.s.s this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."

He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by the window in his long ap.r.o.n, a composing stick in his hand, with the tears rolling unheeded down his face.

I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, pa.s.sed through the fire of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier--he was too young at the time--the most impressionable years of his boyhood were saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them, the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination.

There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and another over the mantel in the dining-room--the one that played so important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.

Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his throat:

_You_ lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier; You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complaisant British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to s.h.i.+ne, or art to please....

When he had finished reading, he would take off his spectacles and wipe them, and say to Anthy:

"Lincoln was the greatest man this country has ever produced."

He was a curious combination of hardheadedness, of ironical wisdom, and of humour, and somewhere, hidden deep within, of molten sentiment. He was a regular Yankee.

One night he got more than ordinarily tired, and just stopped. They found him in bed the next morning, his legs drawn up under the coverlet, a volume of Don Quixote open on his knees, his empty pipe fallen from his lips, the lamp dying out on a table near him. At his elbow were two of the inevitable yellow slips:

Squire Baker of Arnoville was a visitor at Lawyer Perkins's on Monday.

Apples stopped yesterday at Banks's store at 30 cents a peck--on their way up (adv).

He never knew what a hero he was: he had made a living for thirty years out of a country newspaper.

Anthy came home from college to the forlorn and empty and ugly house--and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. This period of loneliness made a deep impression upon her later years. When at last she could bear to open the envelope labelled: "To Anthy--in case of my death," she found this letter:

DEAR ANTHY: I am leaving the _Star_ to you. There is nothing else except the homestead--and the debts. Do what you like with all of them--but look after your Uncle Newt.

Now, Anthy's earliest memories were bound up with the printing-office.

There was never a time that she did not know the smell of printer's ink.

As a child she had delighted to tip over the big basket and play with the paper ribbons from the cutting machine. Later, she had helped on press days to fold and label the papers. She was early a pastmaster in the art of making paste, and she knew better than any one else the temperamental eccentricities of the old-fas.h.i.+oned d.i.c.k labeller. She could set type (pa.s.sably) and run the hand press. But as for taking upon herself the activities of her tireless father--who was at once editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, advertising solicitor, and father confessor for the community of Hempfield--she could not do it. There is only a genius here and there who can fill the high and difficult position of country editor.

The responsibility, therefore, fell upon the Captain, who for so many years had been the t.i.tular and ornamental editor of the _Star_. It was the Captain who wrote the editorials, the obituaries, and the "write-ups," who attended the political conventions, and was always much in demand for speeches at the Fourth of July celebrations.

But, strangely enough, although the _Star_ editorials sparkled with undimmed l.u.s.tre, although the obituaries were even longer and more wonderful than ever before--so long as to crowd out some of the items about Johnny Gorman's pigs and Mrs. Hopkins's visits to her sister, although the fine old Captain worked harder than ever, the light of the luminary of Hempfield grew steadily dimmer. Fergus saw it early and it distressed his Scotch soul. Anthy felt it, and soon the whole town knew of the decay of the once thrifty inst.i.tution in the little old printing-office back from the street. Brother Kendrick, of that nefarious rag, the Sterling _Democrat_, even dared to respond to one of the Captain's most powerful and pungent editorials with a witticism in which he referred to the _Weakly Star_ of Hempfield, and printed "Weakly" in capital letters that no one might miss his joke.

It was at this low stage in the orbit of the _Star_ that I came first to the printing-office, trying to discover the man who could shout "Fudge"

with such fine enthusiasm--and found myself, quite irresistibly, hitching my wagon to the _Star_.

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