The Romance of a Plain Man. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
alone, she could discern nothing except sermons.
"To think of yo' havin' the brazen impudence to come here arter the harm you've done that po' defenceless darling boy," she said, with a noble dignity which obscured somehow her slovenly figure and her dirty kitchen. Peering out from under the staircase, I could see that my father stood quite humbly before her, twirling his hatbrim nervously in his hands.
"I ax you to believe, mum, what is the gospel truth," he replied, "that I wa'nt meanin' any harm to Benjy."
"Not meanin' any harm an' you brought him a stepmother befo' six months was up?" she cried. "Well, that ain't my way of lookin' at it, for I've a mother's heart and it takes a mother's heart to stand the tricks of children," she added, glancing down at the gravy stains on her bosom, "an' it ain't to be supposed – is it? – that a stepmother should have a mother's heart? It ain't natur – is it? – I put it to you, that any man or woman should be born with a natchel taste for screamin' an' kickin' an' bein' splashed with gravy, an' the only thing that's goin' to cultivate them tastes in anybody is bringin' ten or eleven of 'em into the world. Lord, suh, I wa'nt born with the love of dirt an' fussin' any mo' than you. It just comes along o' motherhood like so much else. Now it stands to reason that you ain't goin' to enjoy the trouble a child makes unless that child is your own. Why, what did my baby do this mornin' when he was learnin' to walk, but catch holt of the dish an' bring all the gravy down over me. Is thar any livin' soul, I ax you plainly, expected to see the cuteness in a thing like that except a mother? An' what I say is that unless you can see the cuteness in a child instead of the badness, you ain't got no business to bring 'em up – no, not even if you are the President himself! – "
Just here I distinctly heard my father murmur in his humble voice something about having named an infant after the office and not the man. But so brief was the pause in Mrs. Chitling's flow of remonstrance that his interjection was overwhelmed almost before it was uttered. Her very slovenliness, expressing as it did what she had given up rather than what she was, served in a measure to increase the solemn majesty with which she spoke; and I gathered easily that my father's small wits were vanquished by the first charge of her impassioned rhetoric.
"I thank you kindly, mum, it is all jest as you say," he replied, with the submissiveness of utter defeat, "but, you see, a man has got to give a thought to his washin'. It stands to reason – don't it?" – he concluded with a flash of direct inspiration, "that thar ain't any way to get a woman to wash free for you except to marry her."
The logic of this appeared to impress even Mrs. Chitling, for she hesitated an instant before replying, and when she finally spoke, I thought her tone had lost something of its decision.
"An' to make it worse you took a yaller-headed one an' they're the kind that gad," she retorted feebly.
My father shook his head, while a stubborn expression settled on his sheepish features.
"Thar's the cookin' an' the washin' for her to think of," he said. "I ain't got any use for a woman that ain't satisfied with the pleasures of home."
"The moral kind are, Mr. Starr," rejoined Mrs. Chitling, who had relapsed into a condition of placid indolence. "An' as far as I am concerned since the first of my eleven came, I've never wanted to put on my bonnet an' set foot outside that do'. My kitchen is my kingdom," she added, with dignity, "an' for my part, I ain't got any use for those women who are everlastingly standin' up for thar rights. What does a woman want with rights, I say, when she can enjoy all the virtues? What does she want to be standin' up for anyway as long as she can set?"
"Thar's no doubt that it is true, mum," rejoined my father; and when he took his leave a few minutes afterwards, their relations appeared to have become extremely friendly, – not to say confidential. For an instant I trembled in my hiding-place, half expecting to be delivered into his hands. But he departed at last without discovering me, and I emerged from the darkness and stood before Mrs. Chitling, who had begun absent-mindedly to take down her curl papers.
"Most likely it ain't his fault arter all," she observed, for her judgment of him had already become a part of the general softness and pliability of her criticism of life; "he seems to be a nice sensible body with proper ideas about women. I like a man that knows a woman's place, an' I like a woman that knows it, too. Yo' ma was a decent, sober, hard-workin' person, wa'nt she, Benjy?"
I replied that she was always in her kitchen and generally in her washtub, except when she went to funerals.
"Well, I ain't any moral objection to a funeral now an' then, or some other sober kind of entertainment," returned Mrs. Chitling, removing her curl papers in order to put on fresh ones, "but what I say is that the woman who wants pleasure outside her do' ain't the woman that she ought to be, that's all. What can she have, I ax, any mo' than she's got? Ain't she got everything already that the men don't want? Ain't sweetness an' virtue, an' patience an' long suffering an' childbearin' enough for her without her impudently standin' up in the face of men an' axin' for mo'? Had she rather have a vote than the respect of men, an' ain't the respect of men enough to fill any honest female's life?"
In the beginning of her discourse, she had turned aside to slap a portion of cornmeal into a cracked yellow bowl, and after pouring a little water out of a broken dipper, she began whipping the dough with a long, irregular stroke that scattered a shower of fine drops at every revolution of her hand. Two of the children had got into a fight over a basin of apple parings, and she left her yellow bowl and separated them with a hand that bestowed a patch of wet meal on the hair of one and on the face of another. Not once did she hasten her preparations or relinquish the cheerful serenity which endowed her large, loose figure with a kind of majesty.
The next day I started in as general assistant and market boy to John Chitling, and when I was not sorting over ripe vegetables or barrels of apples fresh from the orchard, I was toiling up the long hill, with a split basket, containing somebody's marketing, on my arm. By degrees I learned the names of John Chitling's patrons, the separate ways to their houses, which always seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat, smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon the customers I served was largely coloured by his narratives, but when at last he dropped off and went on a new job at the butcher's, I arrived gradually at a more correct, and certainly a more charitable, point of view. By the end of the winter I had ceased to believe that John Chitling was a skinflint and his customers all vipers.
In the bright soft weather of that spring the city opened into a bloom of faint pink and white, which comes back to me like a delicate fragrance. The old gardens are gone now, with their honeysuckle arbours, their cleanly swept walks, bordered by rows of miniature box, their deep, odorous bowers of microphylla and musk cluster roses. Yet I can look back still through the gauzy shadows of elms and sycamores; I can hear still the rich, singing call of the negro drivers, as the covered wagons from country farms passed sleepily through the hot sunshine which fell between the arching trees; and I can smell again the air steeped in a fragrance that is less that of flowers than of the subtle atmosphere of an unforgettable youth. To-day the city is the same city no longer, nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening in brain and heart.
The morning that I remember best is the one on which I carried the day's marketing to an old grey house, with beds of wallflowers growing close against the stuccoed bricks, and a shrub that flowered bright yellow glancing through the tall gate at the rear. I had passed the wallflowers as was my custom, and entering the gate at the back, had delivered my basket at the kitchen door, when, as I turned to retrace my steps, I was detained by the scolding voice of the pink-turbaned negro cook.
"Hi! if you ain' clean furgit de car'ots!" she cried.
Now the carrots had been placed in the basket, as I had seen with my own eyes, by the hands of John Chitling himself, and I had been cautioned at the time not to drop them out in my ascent of the steep hill. There was a lady in the grey house, he had informed me, who was supposed to subsist upon carrots alone, and who was in consequence extremely particular as to their size and