New lives for old

During this first winter Ruth and I made the most of every opportunity to get acquainted with our fellow townsmen. We went to church regularly and attended all the sociables and concerts and fairs and we met some very fine people. But a large part of them, however, were not so representative of the new generation in whom I was most interested as they were of the old generation. I found that most of the comfortable and well-to-do were among those who had inherited small fortunes, where the accumulations of several branches of one family had finally settled in a single individual. Much of this money I also found had been made outside the village. Then of course there was another prosperous element consisting of a half dozen local business men who were doing well; the hardware merchant, the druggist, the grain and hay merchant, the local lawyers and doctors. I might have seen more of these men if I had been a member of the fraternal organizations, but somehow I never took to them. I found that there were a half dozen branches of various secret societies in this small village and a good many men belonged to them all.

Another significant fact was that I didn’t meet at any of these gatherings any of my foreign-born friends. I never saw Dardoni there, or Tony or any of the other dozen families who as far as enterprise and worldly success go were important members of the community. One reason was their difference in religious belief, but another and stronger was the fact that they were held to be on an inferior social plane. In many ways they were. There’s no denying this, but they had, to my mind, enough sterling qualities to offset that. Anyway, I hadn’t looked to find social lines drawn in a country village, but when I expressed my views even to Cunningham, the minister, I didn’t receive much encouragement. It made me mad to see such snobbishness in an American village and several times I spoke from the shoulder. After I had visited Dardoni’s farm I felt more strongly than ever.

Signor Dardoni had some forty acres and there wasn’t a square foot which wasn’t under cultivation. Ten of them were in an apple orchard—the only orchard in town that produced commercially. He had taken native trees when they weren’t more than half alive with their clutter of dead limbs, and trimmed them up, grafted them, and made them pay. That one accomplishment alone ought to have distinguished him in the village. It ought to have set an example if nothing else. And yet I found orchard after orchard going to waste and producing nothing but cider apples. Even these weren’t picked, and Dardoni made another neat income every fall buying them on the trees for a song and turning them into new cider and vinegar. He had done this for five years and everyone knew that it paid and yet no one thought of following his example and making the same use of their own waste apples. That’s a fair illustration of the difference in spirit between the two races.

Another ten or fifteen acres he kept for hay, raising enough for his own use and sometimes enough to sell. On another strip he raised his own corn and wheat for fodder, being the only man in town who didn’t spend his good money at the hay and grain store where corn went at times way over the dollar mark. Here again the natives had a working example before their very eyes and yet took no advantage of it.

Another ten acres Dardoni devoted to garden truck for the near-by market, reaping every spring a handsome profit. There wasn’t a native in the whole village who tried even to raise more than enough for himself and many didn’t do that even when they had back door yards big enough to supply them for the year.

The rest of his land he used for his chicken and egg business, although he had some fifty pigs which ran loose most everywhere. Of course he also kept cows—a half dozen of them, selling the cream to the local creamery (which, incidentally, was not owned by local capital) and using the buttermilk for his pigs and chickens. The pigs kept his orchard in good condition and the cows and horses furnished him with dressing for his other land.

Now I want to make a point here: Dardoni was not a scientific farmer. He didn’t know anything about the science of farming. He was not reviving worn-out soil by the use of modern cultivation. He was not applying laboratory methods; he was applying horse sense. He didn’t know any more about farming, or as much perhaps, as every mother’s son of those who had been born and brought up here and their fathers before them. But he did know enough to work his land and he had learned to do that in a country where a single acre means something. The only difference between him and these others was that he got up early in the morning and worked—worked all day long. The one thing in his favor was that he also had a business instinct and appreciated the value of his city market. But principally his success lay in the fact that he used every single advantage and made the most of it.

He lived in a large old-fashioned Colonial house which had once been owned by a local politician who had succeeded in being elected to Congress for a single term in Civil War days, and who had never found it necessary to do anything afterwards. His son dissipated his fortune and the place came on the market about the time Dardoni happened along. Dardoni hadn’t improved its appearance any but he had added a big barn and several out houses. His family consisted of a wife and six children, the oldest being Lucia who was eighteen and who had been educated at the local high school, and the youngest being Joe, now three years old. The rest of his household included a half dozen young men, all relatives, to whom he paid an average of ten dollars a week. They were good workers and seldom remained with him longer than three years before buying a place of their own. Through him, directly and indirectly, some forty families had already settled in the village.

Personally I found Dardoni a most interesting and agreeable fellow, and the more I saw him the better I liked him. He had become thoroughly Americanized in the sense that he had really made America his home with the expectation of spending his life here and having his sons and daughters live here after him. He had been naturalized and was a heavy taxpayer but he took no interest in the affairs of the town. For one thing his home was his castle and for another his habit of thought was to accept conditions as they were and make the best of them without any attempt to change them. But whenever I suggested any needed improvement, such as in the matter of better roads, I found him alive and willing to do his share.

One other incident that winter set me to thinking and made me feel more than ever the need of some radical revolution in this old town. Hadley came to me in January and wanted to borrow fifty dollars.

“Show me that you really need it and I’ll let you have it,” I said.

“I’ve got a note comin’ due,” he answered.

“Who holds it?” I asked.

“Dardoni,” he answered.

“What did you borrow from him for?” I asked.

“Well, there was considerable sickness in the family last year and I got hard up.”

“You own your house all clear?”

“Yes—except that Dardoni took a first mortgage on it for the note.”

“And you have five acres of land?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s only you and your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Then how—”

“Doctors and medicines cost something,” he broke in, rather resenting my further questioning.

Now here was a concrete example of a man without any bad habits in the ordinary meaning of the word, who had lived here fifty years in a house and on land which came to him by inheritance, who had worked with a fair amount of industry and raised three children, all now away from home and self supporting, who in a crisis had been forced to borrow money from an immigrant who hadn’t been in this country ten years and who started without a cent. On the face of it there was something wrong here, but what was it? In a nutshell, lack of thrift, lack of industry, lack of enterprise. Hadley was doing here on a farm exactly what I had done in the suburbs; he was living and always had lived up to the last cent he made. Even at this time, when he was earning forty dollars a month from me, he didn’t save a cent. He bought hay and corn for his horse; he bought expensive meats for his table; instead of mending old harnesses, he bought new harnesses; he subscribed for a daily paper and had a telephone in his house which he didn’t need any more than he needed a safe deposit vault. In the meanwhile he had five acres of idle land at his back. He was in a state of lethargy as the whole town was in a state of lethargy. He was stagnant—half-dead. A dozen things which had been luxuries to his father had become necessities to him. The price of everything had increased and he hadn’t kept pace with it. What was true of him was true of the whole town. I loaned him the money, but that night I had a talk with Ruth.

“Ruth,” I said, “I’m going to give this old town the biggest shaking up it’s had since the glacial period.”

“Why, Billy, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Everything’s the matter,” I said. “This village isn’t sleeping, but dead. It’s time someone blew the resurrection trumpet. I’m going to blow it; I’m going to play Gabriel.”

She looked up from her sewing with a laugh, but when she saw I was in earnest she put aside her work and came over and put her arms around me.