more like a city man, or rather a villager, a compromise between city and country.”
“Yes, I’m a countryman through and through, I suppose,” said Seth, with something very like a sigh.
“John has seen a good deal of the world they tell me, and been on papers in large cities. I wonder how he can content himself with that little weekly in Thessaly after that.”
“I don’t think John has much ambition,” answered Seth, meditatively. “He doesn’t seem to care much how things go, if he only has the chance to say what he wants to say in print. It doesn’t make any difference to him, apparently, whether all New York State reads what he writes, or only thirty or forty fellows in Dearborn County—he’s just as well satisfied. And yet he’s a very bright man, too. He might have gone to the Assembly last fall, if he could have bid against Elhanan Pratt. He will go sometime, probably.”
“Why, do you have an auction here for the Assembly?”
“Oh, no, but the man who’s willing to pay a big assessment into the campaign fund can generally shut a poor candidate out John didn’t seem to mind much about being frozen out though—not half so much as I did, for him. Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.”
“And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel.
They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope.
“Oh, I’m picked out to be a countryman all the days of my life I suppose.” There was the sigh again, and a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as well.
“Oh, I hope not—that is, if you don’t want to be. Oh, it must be such a dreary life! The very thought of it sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them—that is, if they don’t become sour old maids. I don’t wonder you hate it all, Seth.”
“You talk like a book,” said Seth, in tones of unmistakable admiration. “I didn’t suppose any woman could talk like that.”
“I talk as I feel always, when I come into contact with country life, and I get, angry with people who maunder about its romantic and picturesque side. Where is it, I should, like to know?”
“Oh, it isn’t all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——“—here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kin all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——” here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kind o’ run down.”
“No, Seth, it isn’t that; the trail of the serpent is over it all—rich and poor, big and little. The Nineteenth century is a century of cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age—and the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul, but this isn’t the century.”
“But Webster was a farm boy, and so was Lincoln and Garfield and Jackson—almost all our great men. Hardly any of them are born in cities, you will find.”
“Oh, the country is just splendid to be born in, no doubt of that; but after you are born, get out of it as soon as you can.”
“I don’t know as I can leave Father very well,” said Seth slowly, and as if in deep thought.
They walked to the end of the pasture beyond the orchard, to within view of the spot where all the Fairchilds for three generations had been laid, and where, among the clustering sweet-briars and wild-strawberry vines Milton had only yesterday dug a new grave. The sight recalled to both another subject, and no more was said of country life as they returned to the house. Indeed, little was said of any sort, for Seth had a thinking mood on. Nothing was very clear in his mind perhaps, but more distinctly than anything else he felt that existence on the farm had all at once become intolerable.
CHAPTER V.—THE FUNERAL.
The American farm-house funeral is surely, of all the observances with which civilized man marks the ending of this earthly pilgrimage, the most pathetic. The rural life itself is a sad and sterile enough thing, with its unrelieved physical strain, its enervating and destructive diet, its mental barrenness, its sternly narrowed groove of toil and thought and companionship—but death on the farm brings a desolating gloom, a cruel sense of the hopelessness of existence, which one realizes nowhere else. The grim, fatalist habit of seizing upon the grotesque side, which a century of farm life has crystallized into what the world knows as American humor, is not wanting even in this hour; and the comforting conviction of immortality, of the shining reward to follow travail and sorrow, is nowhere more firmly insisted upon than among our country people. But the bleak environment of the closed life, the absence of real fellowship among the living, the melancholy isolation and vanity of it all, oppress the soul here with an intolerable weight which neither fund of sardonic spirits nor honest faith can lighten.
Something of this Isabel felt, as the mid-day meal was hurried through, on Alvira’s sharp intimation that the room couldn’t be cleared any too soon, for the crowd would begin coming now, right along. There were three strangers at the table—though they seemed to be scarcely more strangers than the members of her husband’s family—of whom two were clergymen.
One of these, who sat next to her, was the Episcopalian minister at Thessaly, a middle-aged, soft sort of man, with short hair so smooth and furry that she was conscious of an impulse to stroke it like a seal-skin, and little side-whiskers which reminded her of a baby brush. He impressed her as a stupid man, but in that she was mistaken. He was nervous and ill at ease, first because he could not successfully or gracefully use the narrow three-tined steel fork with a bone handle that had been given him, and second, because he did not understand the presence of the Rev. Stephen Bunce, who sat opposite him, offensively smacking his lips, and devoting to loud discourse periods which it seemed might better have been employed in mastication.
If quiet Mr. Turner was ill at ease, the Rev. Stephen was certainly not. He bestrode the situation like a modern Colossus. The shape of his fork did not worry him, since he used it only as a humble and lowly adjunct to his knife. The presence of Mr. Turner too, neither puzzled nor pained him. In fact, he was rather pleased than otherwise to have him there, where he could talk to him before sympathetic witnesses, and make him realise how the man of the people who had a genuine call towered innately superior to mere beneficed gentility. “Beneficed gentility”—that was a good phrase,
