New lives for old

It was the middle of August when we moved into our new home, and on the second Saturday following we gave a house warming. When we left our tenement we told our friends that instead of saying good-by to them there we meant to say howdy at the new home. And so this party was principally for them, although through the local paper we sent out a general invitation to everyone in the neighborhood.

We swept up the barn floor and set a long table there, improvised out of boards and saw horses. Ruth decorated it with green and with wild flowers. We served cold meats, bread and butter, ice cream and cake, coffee and milk, to some seventy-five grown-ups and Lord knows how many children. The latter made the whole country-side spring to life as though by magic. If a happier, more enthusiastic group than our former neighbors ever gathered together under one roof I’d like to see them. Ruth, Dick, and myself acted as waiters, with plenty of assistance from everyone, and saw to it that all had as much as they could eat.

The village people came more out of curiosity than anything else, I imagine. Ed Barclay, the auctioneer, was there and I liked him even better than at first on further acquaintance. Seth, Josh and Jim turned up in spite of their aversion to Dagoes. Then the Reverend Percy Cunningham, pastor of the Methodist Church, came with his wife. He was a slight, very serious man, dressed in black like an undertaker. Deacon Weston, said to be the richest man in town, also dropped in for a minute and bade me welcome. He had a thin, hard face that hinted as to how he had acquired his wealth, and later I found out that my guess was sound. Horatio Moulton, who kept the village store, was another who stopped to shake hands.

But the fellow out of the whole lot who interested me most was Giuseppe Dardoni, the landed proprietor of whom Tony had spoken to me. In spite of the fact that financially he was one of the strongest men in town he was never called anything but Joe—not so much in a spirit of good fellowship as with the easy familiarity people speak to a Chinaman or a no-account Indian. He never resented the slight openly, but I had long since learned that these people appreciate being given the dignity of their full name.

Signor Dardoni was a man of forty-five, I should judge. He was slight and wiry of build, with a kindly face and smiling eyes. His hair was turning gray and he was extremely courteous and gentle mannered. Neither in dress nor speech did he betray the fact that he was any more prosperous than most of his fellow citizens. I noticed, however, that he drove up with his daughter behind a very good horse and in a well-kept sulky. He greeted everyone with a good-natured smile, and Seth who happened to be standing near introduced us.

“Joe,” he said, “let me make ye ’quainted with Bill Carleton who’s figgerin’ on settlin’ here.”

“I’ve heard much of you,” I said to him, speaking in Italian, to Seth’s disgust.

“And I have heard much of Signor Carleton. But you have traveled in Italy?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, “in Little Italy.”

He laughed at that and I took him to meet Ruth. Later we adjourned into the house where, over a bottle of smuggled Italian wine, which one of the boys had given me, I learned more about him. We passed a pleasant half hour and when he left I told him that I wanted to come over and visit him.

“I want to see how you manage your farm,” I said.

“I shall be honored,” he said with the sincere but exaggerated politeness of his race. “But it is not much, just a few acres.”

It was not until midnight that the last of our guests left, for Pelletti, who had brought along his fiddle, furnished music for a dance. It would have done your heart good to watch those people dance—especially the girls. The fiddle seemed to become part of them. Before we knew it Ruth and I were on the floor and Dick had seized Lucia, Dardoni’s oldest daughter, and followed at our heels.

It was right after this that I began to plan the development of my farm. It was of course much too late in the season for me to attempt to plant anything. However, there were many other things about the place that needed attention. I hired Hadley by the month to help me and started in at once clearing up generally. I had him repair the walls and fences, cut bushes, trim the trees, and do the chores around the house. I bought a cow for the sake of having our own milk for the kiddies, and so he also had her to look after. I paid him forty dollars a month and it was all he was worth. Dick and I used to do as much every Saturday afternoon as he did through the week.

I made one other investment this season; I bought a second-hand automobile. This made me independent of trains and allowed me many an odd hour at home which otherwise I would have lost. I could make the run from my office to the house in thirty-five minutes, but the thing cost me first and last a good deal of money. It didn’t take me a month to learn that anyone who figures on saving car fare with one of them makes a mistake. However, I figured that we would save enough in other ways to make up for this added expense. Here again I soon learned I was mistaken, and that brought me face to face with a new revelation which knocked sky high some of my preconceived notions. We found when we came to settle our first month’s store bill that it was costing as much and in some cases more for our food stuffs than it had cost in the city. When Ruth came to me with the bills and I looked them over I was astonished to find that the prices even for eggs and butter were those current in town; that such staples as sugar and flour and lard were if anything a little higher and that for vegetables we were actually paying more than we did at the city market when Ruth was doing her own marketing.

“Well,” I said, “what do you make out of this?”

“I don’t understand about the butter and eggs,” she said, “but of course I don’t have the chance here that I used to have to get cut prices on the other things.”

“I know,” I said, “but these men don’t have to pay high rents or an expensive staff of clerks. They don’t even advertise. It looks to me as though our friend Moulton was taking advantage of us. Probably he thinks we’re city folks and don’t care what we pay.”

This was in September and there wasn’t an item on our bill that did not equal or exceed town prices for the best. Taking into account the fact that, as Ruth said, there were no bargain sales, it is easy to see that where we had looked for a reduction in living expenses we had really met with a substantial increase. Not only this, but in most cases the goods we received were inferior to those we secured in town. As for meats, the prices charged were exorbitant.

Now neither Ruth nor I had reached, or ever will I trust, a point where we didn’t care how much we were paying. The lesson of the ginger jar was too firmly implanted for us to accept without a question, as we did when we were living in the suburbs, whatever we might be charged. But aside from this I was genuinely interested in the economic side of the matter. I wanted to know how this condition of things happened to exist. It looked to me on the face of it as though there was something wrong in having to pay as much in the country for butter, eggs, vegetables and poultry as we had to pay in the city. So I went down to the village and had an interview with my fat friend Moulton. He welcomed me cordially and listened to my questions with a smile.

“I’m not kicking on your making a fair profit,” I told him, “but I simply can’t figure out why it’s necessary for you to charge so much in order to do it. If you can show me, I’ll trade with you; if you can’t I’m going to trade in town after this.”

“That’s right,” he nodded, “I hear your kick every year from summer folks. They come up here to save money and go away sore because they don’t.”

“But why don’t they?” I demanded.

“’Cause I have to make a profit in order to live,” he answered. “Now look a-here, I ain’t so big a corporation that I have to hide my books to steer clear of an investigation from Congress. If you’ve got a spare hour I’ll show you some things that city folks don’t reckon on.”

And he did. I’ll give him credit for making the whole business clear to me in less than an hour. He opened my eyes to a few facts that I’ve never seen mentioned in any fairy dreams about the simple life that I’ve ever read. And what is more they were cold facts that don’t seem to get into even the heavier treatises on New England life.

In the first place, he proved to me with his books, that he bought not only his staples from the city market, but even his produce.

“I can’t buy a pound of decent butter here,” he said. “The farmer’s butter you hear so much about isn’t made any more; what little is made is loaded down with salt to a point where you couldn’t pay ’em twenty cents a pound for it. I can’t buy a decent chicken. All they bring in here are the old fowls that you couldn’t cut up with a broad ax.”

“What do they do with their chickens?” I asked.

“They don’t raise many to start with.”

“Why not?”

“Too lazy for one thing, and then they say they have to pay too much for corn.”

“Why don’t they raise their own corn?”

“Don’t ask me,” he answered. “The fact is they buy western corn for all their stock.”

“Won’t corn grow here?”

“I reckon it would grow if they planted it,” he answered. “Seems t’ me I recollect something about the Injuns growing it. But I guess that maybe the Injuns didn’t have to plant theirs. Maybe it just growed. I s’pose it’s hard work to plant corn and hoe it.”

He laughed to himself at a story this suggested. All these people had Lincoln’s gift of pointing a fact with a story.

“They tell about Josh Whiting who lived in that old house down to the lower end of the village where Horatio Sampson lives now. Josh was so all-fired lazy that he wouldn’t do no work at all and like to starved to death. So the neighbors after feeding him for a while allowed that so long as he warn’t no good he might just as well be buried. A committee of ’em went down to his house one day and took him out and put him in a hearse and started for the graveyard. When they were nighing the gate a stranger came along and inquired what was up. They told him and it seemed to him like such hard lines that he offered to do something.

“‘I’ll give the corpse a bag of corn anyhow,’ says he.

“‘All right,’ they says.

“So he went to the hearse and opened the door and looked in.

“‘I can’t see a man die for lack of food,’ says he. ‘So I’ll give ye a bag of corn.’

“Josh, he hitched up on one elbow to see who was speakin’. ‘Is it shelled?’ says he.

“‘No,’ answered the fellow. ‘But it won’t be much trouble for you to shell it.’

“Josh settled down on his back again with his hands crossed over his chest. ‘Drive on,’ he says.”

“Well,” I said, when I was through laughing, “who gets what chickens they do raise?”

“Dardoni,” he answered. “He buys them for cash and sends them to the wholesaler in town. When I want one I buy from the wholesaler.”

“What about eggs?”

“Same thing. They bring in a few to swap for groceries. But look at ’em.”

He went to a basket and held up one about as large as a robin’s egg.

“That’s the kind they bring in,” he said. “An egg is an egg and I take them ’cause I can sell them back again. But when I want a decent egg I have to pay the market quotation for it. They all take the papers and they charge accordin’ to what they read there.”

“But vegetables—”

“They don’t raise enough for themselves—except Dardoni and a few other Dagoes.”

“What do they raise?” I asked.

“Damfino,” he answered. “Measles mostly. Some rheumatiz and a fine crop of dyspeptsy. You want to know what I make more profit on than anything in my store?”

“What?”

He pointed to three shelves loaded with patent medicine bottles. “That stuff,” he said. “There’s fifty per cent. profit in it and I can’t keep nuff of it.”

“But good Lord, you wouldn’t think that in the country—”

“They live on it,” he answered; “what it says on the bottles is pretty nigh true; ‘Babies cry for it.’ Only they oughter add onto that, ‘And parents die for it.’”

He leaned over towards me and spoke in my ear. “It ain’t nothin’ but dope and whisky. The village is pretty nigh divided even on which they like best. I’ve got a bunch of old maids that get drunk reg’lar on it and don’t know it. The meanest thing I do is to sell it to ’em.”

“Why don’t you cut it out?” I suggested.

“’Cause they’d go to the drug store and buy it there,” he said. “If this was the only place in town where they could get it, I’d take an ax handle and smash every last bottle. That’s honest. Howsomever, that ain’t got anything to do with eggs, an’ then again maybe it has. P’raps it’s that stuff that makes them lazy.”

He turned to his books again.

“You any idee how many of these folks I carry on credit?”

“Ten per cent.,” I said for a guess.

“Say seventy per cent. an’ ye’ll come nearer. Any idee how long I carry most of the accounts?”

“Six months.”

“They’ll average up two years. Any idee how much of that is bad?”

“Five per cent.,” I said with a laugh.

“Say twenty per cent. and ye wouldn’t come nigh enough even to hit the target.”

I was curious enough to examine his books carefully and I saw that every statement he made was true. I settled my bill without another word.

“I don’t see how you keep in business,” I said. “You’ll have my trade from now on even though I could do better buying in town. I’ve come out here to live and I believe in standing my tax, but I’ll be hanged if I can see any reason why things should be this way.”

“After you’ve lived here a year, maybe you’ll see.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, “but I tell you right now that within that time I’ll be raising most of my own stuff.”

He nodded.

“That’s what they all say. But I’d hate to pay you what that’s goneter cost you.”

“What about Dardoni?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s a Dago,” answered Moulton, as though that disposed of the question.

Moulton’s books had summed up conditions in this country town concretely and vividly. His ledger was a tract. Five years’ residence couldn’t have given me such a clear insight into the actual state of things as they existed here. But of course they furnished no explanation either of the apparent degeneracy of the natives or the success of the newcomers. The key to the latter I held myself, but the revelation of the condition of the former came to me as a shock.

Think of it! Here almost within sight of one of the oldest and most prosperous cities in the East lay a village of three or four hundred American families, descendants of the best New England stock, in a condition of such stagnation that they couldn’t pay their store bills. Surrounded by land which had supported their ancestors, they were dependent upon the West for their food stuffs. Born and bred in the open air they were weak and lazy and sick. In ideal surroundings my own kith and kin were actually worse off than many of the penniless immigrants of the slums.

What, in God’s name, was the matter with them? I asked this of myself over and over again and that winter, as I learned still more about them, what had at first been merely an exclamation of surprise became a prayer. What, in God’s name, was the matter with them?