<h2><SPAN name="VIII" id="VIII"></SPAN>VIII</h2>
<h3>"A Bundle of Myrrh"</h3>
<p>One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is
the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a
reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of
a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years
writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics,
family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin
that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him,
showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why
certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.</p>
<p>The only person in town who knows all of our kinology—and most of that
in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study—is "Aunt"
Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a
Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and
the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are
over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins
to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt
to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has
spread from them to the rest of the population.</p>
<p>She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children
and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and
most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only
person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history,
and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town
or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or
send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable
truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married,
and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early
days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a
family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house
got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and
opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired
girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt
Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack
underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of
'60.</p>
<p>Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was
her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife—as she called
it—and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write
an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled
"Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging
about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked
mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives
insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is
going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out,
and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.</p>
<p>Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you
could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a
hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was
under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front
room and reads the book-reviews in the <i>Delineator</i>, thinks that she is
cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's
turkey, which was not to their discredit—everyone was poor in those
days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a
day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut
stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it,
until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as
'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say:
'Now <i>why</i> do you suppose papa enjoys it?—We just can't get him to give
it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has
stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies
with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a
beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't
say anything against her for the world."</p>
<p>Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit
to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no
cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so
democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this
town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of
bacon—streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down—it is this
blessed place. Crowds?—why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was
always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up
and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds.
The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper
by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't
dance in the same set."</p>
<p>Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which
crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:</p>
<p>"Oh, child, you needn't look at me—I did both; it depended on who was
looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this
town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five
years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist
preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking
about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke.
"Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the
little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated
Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games.
It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how
bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get
out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out
before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married
they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to
the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't
get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."</p>
<p>In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt
Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the
big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to
cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the
other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it,
they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads
preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not
heard. Aunt Martha continued:</p>
<p>"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots—either
go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I
think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and
gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the
Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs
never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made
up along church lines—except we poor Methodists and Baptists—we have
to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going
after us."</p>
<p>Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on:
"Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel
like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church
and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as
the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young
people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the
big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors
at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes
to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow
older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night
of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over
with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a
point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy
daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick
houses, it's all up with them—they are old married folks, and the next
step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives
and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the
holy of holies in the society of this town."</p>
<p>After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen
people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's
Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church
on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of
the same kind of mud.</p>
<p>"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the
sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing
in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly
and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and
gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt
deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming
of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before
Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the
first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't
break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the
family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After
they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work
and sent the washing out for a year or more."</p>
<p>The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her
photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she
called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old
costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged
men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of
the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the
daguerreotypes—quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed
in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture—her
husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker
taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for
a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome
boy—quite the beau of the State when we were married—Judge of the
District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went
on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed
youth in a captain's uniform—a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she
passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying:
"You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After
the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim
Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let
me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or
more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me
he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers
that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It
doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone
through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even
with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation—as Emerson
says."</p>
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<h3>"Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"</h3>
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<p>Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old
brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and
poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her
mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She
could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it
refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated
vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her
grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's
head.</p>
<p>When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the
question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy
were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he
went away—thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion
put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the
hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was
captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia
returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his
exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until
two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home
again, as one from the dead—all uncertain of the past and unfitted for
the future.</p>
<p>And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she
never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the
Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that
bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They
say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no
one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's
trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the
community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their
little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather
blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as
City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his
pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's
children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way.
She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her
agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the
war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to
remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and
heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.</p>
<p>One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to
Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a
bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house,
and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the
grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be
singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more
distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of
passion the words came forth:</p>
<div class="blockquot"><p>"As I lay my heart on your dead heart,—Douglas, Douglas, Douglas,
tender and true——"</p>
</div>
<p>Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss
Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman
racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her
lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.</p>
<p>The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and
out of the gate.</p>
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