A droll look came into her rosy Irish face, and a funny little touch of brogue into her voice.
"I"d think if he loved me the way he ought to, Miss Privet, he"d be willing to take a whack himself now and then, just in the way of love.
Besides," she added, "I"d come it round Ranny when it was anything I really wanted. Any man"s soft enough if a woman knows how to treat him right."
I abandoned the discussion, as I am always forced to abandon a talk of this sort with Rosa. I suppose in her cla.s.s the crude doctrine that it is the right of the man to take and the duty of the woman to give still exists with a good deal of simplicity and force, but it almost stops my breath to hear Rosa state it. It is like a bit of primeval savagery suddenly thrust into my face in the midst of nineteenth-century civilization. The worst of it all is, moreover, to feel the habits of old generations buzzing dizzily in my ears until I have a confused sensation as if in principle the absurd vagaries of Rosa might be right.
I am tinglingly aware that fibres which belonged to some remote progenitress, some barbaric woman captured by force, perhaps, after the marriage customs of primitive peoples, retain the instinct of submission to man and respond to Rosa"s uncivilized theories. I have a sort of second sense that if a man I loved came and a.s.serted a brutal sovereignty over me, it would appeal to these inherited instincts as right and proper, according to the order appointed by nature. I know what nonsense this is. The sense of justice has in the modern woman displaced the old humiliating subjection,--although if one loved a man the subjection would not be humiliating, but just the highest pleasure.
I can conceive of a woman"s being so fond of a man that to be his abject slave would be so much the happiest thing in the world that to serve him to her very utmost would be so great a delight as almost to be selfishness.
How Father would have shouted over a page like this! I would not have supposed even Rosa could have spurred me into such an attempt at philosophy, and I hardly believed I knew so many long words. After all I doubt if Rosa and I are so far apart in our instincts; only she has the coolness to put them into words I only imitate, and cannot pretend to rival.
September 24. It is delightful to see how really fond Tom is becoming of baby. I came home from a walk this afternoon, and there in the parlor was Tom down on the floor with Tomine, shaking his head at her like a bear, and making her laugh. Rosa beamed from the background with the most complete approval. He sprang up when I appeared, but I ignored all the strangeness, and only said how glad I was to see him. I think he liked my taking as a matter of course his being there, and very likely this was what made him confess he had been in two or three times to play with baby when he knew that I was not at home.
"I saw you going down the other side of the river," he said, "so I came to keep Thomasine from being lonesome."
I returned that it was not very complimentary to tell me he had tried to avoid me, but that I appreciated how much more fascinating baby was than I, so he need not apologize; and the end of it was that after this nonsense had broken the ice we sat on the floor together to entertain her ladyship. She was pleased to be in the most sunny mood imaginable, and responded to our fooling most graciously. With truly feminine preference, however, she bestowed most of her attention upon the man.
She is a more entrancing creature every day; and she certainly has her father"s eyes. I compared them this afternoon.
September 26. The reading-room seems really at last to be coming into being. I have found a place for it. It is a kind of square box over the post-office, but with furniture and pictures it can be made rather attractive. I have made out a list of periodicals, and sent to Boston for framed photographs for the walls. To-day I went to talk over the plan with Deacon Richards.
The mill was fragrant with its sweet mealy smell, and Deacon Daniel was as dusty as a moth-miller. As I stood in the doorway waiting for him to come down from the wheel, where he was doing something or other about the hopper, I fell to humming the old rhyme we sang as children when we went by the mill:--
""Miller, miller, musty-poll, How many bags of wheat you stole?"
"One of wheat and one of rye."
"You naughty miller, you must die!""
"That isn"t very polite," Deacon Daniel said, coming up behind me before I knew he had left his perch.
I turned and greeted him smilingly, repeating the last line:--
"You naughty miller, you must die!"
"I suppose I must," he a.s.sented; "but it won"t be for stealing, Miss Ruth."
I love the old mill, with its great beams and its continual sound of dashing water and the chirruping of the millstones grinding away at the corn like an insatiate monster that can never have enough. The smell of the meal, too, is so pleasant, and even the abundant dust is so clean and fresh it seems to belong there. The mellow light through the dim windows and the shadows hiding in every corner have always from childhood appealed to my imagination. I find there always a soothing and serene mood.
"I want your advice, Deacon Richards," I said.
"So as not to follow it?" he demanded. "That"s what women generally want of advice."
I a.s.sured him I was ready to follow his advice if it were good, and so we talked about the reading-room. I told him it seemed to me that if it was to go on properly it should have a head; somebody to manage it and be responsible for the way in which it was carried on.
"But you will do that yourself," he said.
I answered that it must be a man, for it was nonsense to think of a woman"s running a reading-room for men. He looked at me for a moment with his droll grin, and then he was pleased to say that for a woman I had a remarkable amount of common sense. I thanked him for the compliment to my s.e.x, and then asked if he would undertake the business, and promise not to freeze the readers out the way he did the prayer-meetings.
"I"m not the sort of person you want," he answered, chuckling at my allusion to the fire question. "I"ve sense enough to know that without being a woman. Why don"t you ask Tom Webbe?"
I confessed that I had thought of Tom, but--And there I stuck, for I could hardly tell the deacon how I thought gossip had already said enough about Tom and myself without my giving folk any more to talk about.
"I don"t know what that "but" means," he remarked, grinning more than ever, as if he did know perfectly. "Anyway, there"s n.o.body in town who could do it so well. All the men and boys like him, and he has a level head. He"s the only one of the young fellows that"s been to college, and he ought to know more about books than any of the rest of them. Besides, he needs something to take up his mind."
I felt the deacon was right, and I began to ask myself whether my personal feelings should be allowed to count in such a matter. Still I could hardly make up my mind to take the responsibility of putting Tom at the head of a reading-room I had started. If nothing else were to be considered I did not want my connection with the plan to be too prominent, and gossip about Tom would be just the thing to keep my name always to the front.
"I hope you are sensible enough to do one thing," Deacon Daniel went on, "and that is to have everybody who uses the room pay for it. It needn"t be much, but they"ll respect it and themselves more if they pay something, and it"ll give them the right to grumble."
"I don"t want them to grumble," I returned.
"Oh, n.o.body cares much for anything he can"t grumble about," was his reply, with a laugh; "but really they are twice as likely to grumble if you pay for everything than if they help. That"s the way we are made."
I told him that he was an old cynic, but I saw in a moment he was right about the value that would be put on a thing which was paid for. If the men feel they are helping to support the reading-room they will take a good deal more interest in it.
"Tom Webbe will manage them all right," the deacon declared. "He"ll let them grumble just enough, and make them so contented they"ll think they"re having their own way while he"s going ahead just the way he thinks best. He"s the only man for the place."
Perhaps he is; and indeed the more I think about it, the more I see the deacon is right. It would certainly be good for Tom, and that is a good deal. I wonder what I ought to do?
What Deacon Daniel said about the way in which Tom would manage the men has been running through my mind. I wonder that I, who have known Tom so well, never thought before of how great his power is to control people.
It showed itself when he was a boy; and if he had carried out his plan to study law it would have been--I do wonder if Tom is working by himself, and if that is the reason he borrowed those law-books?
September 27. Old lady Andrews has solved the question for me. I am so glad I thought to go to her for advice. She suggests that we have a committee, and make Deacon Richards chairman. Then Tom can be put on, and really do the work.
"It wouldn"t do at all for you to put Tom Webbe at the head alone, my dear," she said. "It would make talk, and Aunt Naomi would have you married to him a dozen times before the week was over; but this way it will be all right."
I asked her if committees did not usually have three on them, and she answered that Deacon Richards would know.
"I belong to an old-fashioned generation, my dear, and I never can feel that it"s quite respectable for a woman to know about committees and that sort of thing. I"m sure in my day it wouldn"t have been thought well-bred. But Deacon Daniel will know. He"s always on committees at church conferences and councils."
Once more I visited the mill, and told Deacon Daniel of old lady Andrews" suggestion. He agreed at once, and declared the plan was better than that of having one man at the head.
"It"ll be much the same thing as far as managing the reading-room goes,"
he observed, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "but somehow folks like committees, and they generally think they have a better show if three or four men are running things than if there"s only one. Of course one man always does manage, but a committee"s more popular."
Deacon Daniel was very sure that the committee should have three on it, and when I asked who should be the other man he said:--
"If it were anybody else but you, Miss Ruth, I shouldn"t think it was any use to say it, but you"ll see what I mean. I think Cy Turner is the man for the third place."
"The blacksmith?" I asked, a good deal surprised. "I"m afraid I don"t see what you mean. I don"t even know him."
The deacon grinned down on me from his height, and made me a characteristic retort.
"He doesn"t look as if he"d kept awake nights on that account."
The blacksmith"s jolly round face and twinkling eyes as I had seen him on the street now and then came up before my mind, and I felt the full force of the deacon"s irony. I told him that he was impertinent, and asked why he named Mr. Turner.
"Because," he answered, seriously, "what you want is for the folks that haven"t any books at home and don"t have a chance to read to get interested in the reading-room. If Cy Turner takes hold of it, he"ll do more than anybody else in town could do to make it go among just those folks. He"s shrewd and good-natured, and everybody that knows him likes him. He"ll have all the boys in the reading-room if he has to take them there by the collar, and if he does they"ll think it"s fine."
I could see at once the wisdom of the deacon"s idea. I asked how Tom and the blacksmith would work together, and was a.s.sured that Mr. Turner has a most unlimited admiration for Tom, so that the two would agree perfectly. I made up my mind on the spot, and decided to go at once to interview the blacksmith, from whose shop I could hear above the whirring of the mill the blows on the anvil. I had no time on the little way from the mill to the blacksmith shop to consider what I should say to Mr. Turner, and I pa.s.sed the time in hoping there would be no men about. It made no difference; he was so straightforward and simple, so kindly and human, that I felt at ease with him from the first. He was luckily alone, so I walked in boldly as if I were in the habit of visiting the forge every day of my life. He looked surprised to see me, but not in the least disconcerted. The self-respecting coolness of a New England workingman is something most admirable. Mr. Turner was s.m.u.tty and dressed in dirty clothes, leather ap.r.o.n and all, but his manners were as good as those of the best gentleman in the land. There is something n.o.ble in a country where a common workingman will meet you with no servility and without any self-consciousness. I liked Mr. Turner from the moment I saw his face and heard his voice, rich and cheery, and I was won by his merry eyes, which had all the time a twinkling suggestion of a smile ready to break out on the slightest occasion. I went straight to my errand, and nothing could have been better than the way in which he received my proposition. He had no false modesty, and no over-a.s.surance. He evidently knew that he could do what was required, he was undisguisedly pleased to be asked, and he was troubled by no doubts about social proprieties or improprieties.