Mrs. Farrell. William Dean Howells
with the substantial handsomeness which a farmer could afford who two generations ago sent his boys to the academy. It was large and square, with ample halls crossing each other from side to side, and dividing it into four spacious rooms below and answering chambers overhead, some of which, after a season or two of summer boarders, Mrs. Woodward was able to cut in two and still leave large enough for single beds. In time a series of very habitable chambers grew out over the one-story wing; a broad new piazza invited the breeze and shade around two sides of the house, from whose hilltop perch you could look out over a sea of rolling fields and woods, steeply shored on the south by the long flank of Scatticong Mountain. The air was a luxury, the water was delicious; the walks and drives through the white-birch groves were lovely beyond compare; and long before the summer of which I write, the fame of Mrs. Woodward’s abundant table and educated kitchen had made it a privilege to be her boarders for which people endeavored by engaging her rooms a year beforehand. Whoever abode there reported it a house flowing with unstinted cream and eggs; peas, beans, squash, and sweet corn in their season, of a flavor that the green grocery never knew; blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, after their kind; and bread with whose just praise one must hesitate to tax the credulity of one’s hearer.
Mrs. Woodward not only knew how to serve her guests well, but how to profit by serving them well. She made it her business, and mixed no sentiment of any sort with it. She abolished herself socially and none of her boarders offered her slight at the point to which she retreated from association with them. She left them perfect freedom in the house, but she kept them rigidly distinct from her own family, whom she devoted each in his or her way to the enterprise she had undertaken. The family ate at their own table, and never appeared in the guests’ quarter except upon some affair connected with their comfort; but they were all willing in serving. Even Nehemiah himself, under the discipline centering in his wife, showed a sort of stiff-jointed readiness in hitching up the horse for the ladies when the boys happened to be out of the way; and he had thus late in life discovered a genius for gardening. It was to his skill and industry that the table owed its luxury of vegetables; and he was wont to walk out at twilight, and stand, bent-kneed and motionless, among the potatoes, and look steadfastly upon the peas, in serene emulation of the simulacrum posted in a like attitude in another part of the patch. He was the most approachable member of the family, and would willingly have talked with one, no doubt, if he could have found anything in the world to say. The others were civil, but invisibly held aloof by the mother’s theory of business, or secret pride, which, whatever it was, interfered with no one’s rights or pleasures, and so was generally accepted by amiable newcomers after a few good-natured attempts to overcome it. There was only one of them who had succeeded in breaking the circle of this reserve, and her intimacy with the Woodwards seemed rather another of her oddities than anything characteristic of them.
The household of the boarders displayed that disparity between the sexes which is one of the sad problems of the New England civilization, and perhaps enforced it a little more poignantly than was just. They were not all single ladies; a good third of the fifteen were married; of the rest, some were yet too young to think or to despair of marrying, and it could not be confidently said of others that they wished to change their state. Nevertheless, one’s first sense of their condition was vaguely compassionate. It seemed a pity that for six days in the week they should have to talk to one another and dress only for their own sex. Not that their toilettes were elaborate; they all said that they liked to come to the Woodwards’ because you did not have to dress there, but could go about just as you pleased; yet, having the taste of all American women in dress, they could not forbear making themselves look charming, and were always appearing in some surprising freshness and fragrance of linen, or some gayety of flannel walking costume. The same number of men would have lapsed into unshaven chins and unblacked boots in a single week; but these devoted women had their pretty looks on their consciences, and never failed to honor them. Some of them even wore flowers in their hair at dinner—Heaven knows why; and the young girls were always coming home from the woods with nodding plumes of bracken in their hats, and walking out in the dusk with coquettish headgear on, to be seen by no one more important than some barefooted, half-grown, bashful farm boy driving home his cows. The mothers started their children out every morning in clean, whole clothes, and patiently put aside at night the grass-stained, battered, dusty, dishonored fragments. Even one or two old ladies who were there for the country air were zealous to be neatly capped. The common sentiment seemed to be that as you never knew what might happen, you ought to be prepared for it. What actually happened was the occasional arrival of the stage with an express package for one of the boarders, and a passenger for some farmhouse beyond, who at very rare and exciting intervals was a man. Once a day the young ladies went down to the village after the mail, and indulged themselves with the spectacle of gentlemen dismounting from the stage at the hotel, which at such moments poured forth on piazza and gallery a disheartening force of lady boarders. Regularly, also, at ten o’clock on Saturday night, when everybody had gone to bed, this conveyance drove up to the door of the farmhouse, and set down the five husbands of five of the married ladies, for whom it called again on Monday morning, before anybody was up. These husbands were almost as unfailing as the fish-balls at the Sunday breakfast; and when any one of them was kept in Boston it made a great talk; his wife had got word from him why he could not come; or she had not got word: it was just as exciting in either case. The ladies all made some attractive difference in their dress, which the wives when they went to their rooms asked the husbands if they had noticed, and which the husbands had not noticed, to a man. After breakfast, each husband took by the hand the child or two which his wife had scantly provided him (a family of four children was thought pitiably large, and a marvel of responsibility to the mother), and went off to the woods, whence he returned an hour before dinner, and read the evening papers which he had brought up in his pocket. In the afternoon he was reported asleep, being fatigued by the ride from town the day before, or he sat and smoked, or sometimes went driving with his family. His voice as the household heard it next morning at dawn had a gayer note than at any other time in the last thirty-eight hours, and his wife, coming down to breakfast, met the regulation jest about her renewed widowhood with a cheerfulness that was apparently sincere.
It may not have been so dull a life for the ladies as men would flatter themselves; they all seemed to like it, and not a woman among them was eager to get back to her own house and its cares. Perhaps the remembrance of these cares was the secret of her present content; perhaps women, when remanded to a comparatively natural state, are more easily satisfied then men. It is certain that they are always enduring extremes of ennui that appear intolerable to the other sex. Here at Woodward farm they had their own little world, which I dare say was all the better and kindlier for being their own. They were very kind to one another, but preferences and friendships necessarily formed themselves. Certain ladies were habitually visiting, as they called it, in one another’s rooms, and one lady on the ground floor was of a hospitable genius that invited the other boarders to make her room the common lounging and gossiping place. Whoever went in or out stopped there; and the mail, when it was brought from the post-office, was distributed and mostly read and talked over, there.
Till a bed was put into the parlor, one of the young ladies used to play a very little on the organ after breakfast on rainy days. One of the married ladies, who had no children, painted; she painted cat-tail rushes, generally; not very like, and yet plainly recognizable. Another embroidered; she sat with her work in the wide doorway, and those passing her used to stop and take up one edge of it as it hung from her fingers, and talk very seriously about it, and tell what they had seen of the kind. Some of them were always writing letters; two or three had a special gift of sleep, both before and after dinner, which distinguished them from several nervous ladies, who never could sleep in the daytime. The young girls went up the mountain a good deal whenever they could join a party; twice when one of their brothers came from the city they camped out on the mountain; it was a great thing to see their camp fire after dusk; once they came home in a rain, and that was talk for two days, and always a joke afterward. They had a lot of novels, not very new to our generation, which they read aloud to one another sometimes; they began to write a novel of their own, each contributing a chapter, but I believe they never finished it; the youngest kept a journal, but she did not write in it much. She could also drive; and her timid elders who rode out with her said they felt almost as safe with her as with a man. All the ladies said that the air was doing them a great deal of good,