Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - By the Light of the Soul

M >> Mary E. Wilkins Freeman >> By the Light of the Soul

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Mrs. Amelia Ramsey and George, who had suffered somewhat in their
feelings, in spite of the poetical adjustment of the difference, had
no note-paper. They were poor, else Amity might never have been. They
lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the
Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had
been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for
years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with
its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards,
its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the
perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda.
When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the old house had
undergone a transformation. She gazed at it with amazement out of the
sitting-room window, which faced it, on the afternoon of her arrival.

"Why, what has happened to the old Ramsey house?" she asked her aunt
Maria.

"Well, in the first place, a cousin died and left them some money,"
replied Aunt Maria. "It was a matter of ten thousand dollars. Then
Amelia and George went right to work and fixed up the house. It was
none of my business, but it seemed dreadful silly to me. If I had
been in their place, I'd have let that old ramshackle of a place go
to pot and bought a nice little new house. There was one they could
have got for fifteen hundred dollars, on this side of the river; but
no, they went to work, and they must have laid out three thousand
clear on that old thing."

"It is beautiful!" said Maria, regarding it with admiration.

"Well, I don't think it's very beautiful, but everybody to their
liking," replied Aunt Maria, with a sniff of her high, transparent
nostrils. "For my part, I'd rather have a little, clean new house
before all the old ones, that folks have died in and worried in, in
creation."

But Maria continued to regard the renovated Ramsey house with
admiration. It stood close to the street, as is the case with so many
old houses in rural New England. It had a tiny brick strip of yard in
front, on which was set, on either side of the stoop, a great
century-plant in a pot. Above them rose a curving flight of steps to
a broad veranda, supported with Corinthian pillars, which were now
upright and glistening with white paint, as was the entire house.

"They had it all fixed up, inside and out," said Aunt Maria. "There
wasn't a room but was painted and papered, and a good many had to be
plastered. They did not get much new furniture, though. I should have
thought they'd wanted to. All they've got is awful old. But I heard
George Ramsey say he wouldn't swap one of those old mahogany pieces
for the best new thing to be bought. Well, everybody to their taste.
If I had had my house all fixed up that way, I should have wanted new
furniture to correspond."

"What is George Ramsey doing?" asked Maria, with a little, conscious
blush of which she was ashamed. Maria, all her life, would blush
because people expected it of her. She knew as plainly as if she had
spoken, that her aunt Maria was considering suddenly the advantages
of a possible match between herself and George Ramsey. What Aunt
Maria said immediately confirmed this opinion. She spoke with a sort
of chary praise of George. Aunt Maria had in reality never liked the
Ramseys; she considered that they felt above her, and for no good
reason; still, she had an eye for the main chance. It flashed swiftly
across her mind that her niece was pretty, and George might lose his
heart to her and marry her, and then Mrs. Amelia Ramsey might have to
treat her like an equal and no longer hold her old, aristocratic head
so high.

"Well," said she, "I suppose George Ramsey is pretty smart. They say
he is. I guess he favors his grandfather. His father wasn't any too
bright, if he was a Ramsey. George Ramsey, they say, worked his way
through college, used to be bell-boy or waiter or something in a
hotel summers, unbeknown to his mother. Amelia Ramsey would have had
a conniption fit if she had known that her precious boy was working
out. She used to talk as grand as you please about George's being
away on his vacation. Maybe she did know, but if she did she never
let on. I don't know as she let on even to herself. Amelia Ramsey is
one of the kind who can shut their eyes even when they look at
themselves. There never was a lookin'-glass made that could show
Amelia Ramsey anything she didn't want to see. I never had any
patience with her. I believe in being proud if you've got anything to
be proud of, but I don't see any sense in it otherwise. Anyhow, I
guess George is doing pretty well. A distant relation of his mother,
an Allen, not a Ramsey, got a place in a bank for him, they say, and
he gets good pay. I heard it was three thousand a year, but I don't
believe it. He ain't much over twenty, and it ain't likely. I don't
know jest how old he is. He's some older than you."

"He's a good deal older than I," said Maria, remembering sundry
confidences with the tall, lanky boy over the garden fence.

"Well, I don't know but he is," said Aunt Maria, "but I don't believe
he gets three thousand a year, anyhow."

The next morning Maria, on her way to school in the rain, passing
under the unconquerable golden glow of the maples, cast a
surreptitious glance at the old Ramsey house as she passed. It had
been wonderfully changed for the better. Even the garden at the side
next her aunt's house was no longer a weedy enclosure, but displayed
an array of hardy flowers which the frost had not yet affected.
Marigolds tossed their golden and russet balls through the misty wind
of the rain, princess-feathers waved bravely, and chrysanthemums
showed in gorgeous clumps of rose and yellow and white. As she
passed, a tidy maid emerged from the front door and began sweeping
out the rain which had lodged in the old hollows of the stone stoop,
worn by the steps of generations. The rain flew before her plying
broom in a white foam. The maid wore a cap and a wide, white apron.
Maria reflected that the Ramseys had indeed come into palmier days,
since they kept a maid so attired. She thought of George Ramsey with
his patched trousers, and again the old feeling of repulsion and
wonder at herself that she could have had romantic dreams about him
came over her. Maria felt unutterably old that morning, and yet she
had a little, childish dread of her new duties. She was in reality
afraid of the school-children, although she did not show it. She got
through the day very creditably, although that night she was tired as
she had never been in her life, and, curiously enough, her sense of
smell seemed to be the most affected. Many of her pupils came from
poor families, the families of operatives in the paper-mills, and
their garments were shabby and unclean. Soaked with rain, they gave
out pungent odors. Maria's sense of smell was very highly developed.
It seemed to her that her very soul was permeated, her very thoughts
and imagination, with the odor of damp, unclean clothing, of draggled
gowns and wraps and hats and wet leather. She could not eat her
supper; she could not eat the luncheon which her aunt had put up for
her, since the school being a mile away, it was too far to walk home
for the noonday dinner in the rain.

"You 'ain't eat hardly a mite of luncheon," Aunt Maria said when she
opened the box.

"I did not feel very hungry," Maria replied, apologetically.

"If you don't eat, you'll never hold out school-teaching in the
world," said Aunt Maria.

She repeated it when Maria scarcely tasted her supper, although it
was a nice one--cold ham, and scrambled eggs, scrambled with cream,
and delicious slabs of layer-cake. "You'll never hold out in the
world if you don't eat," said she.

"To tell the truth," replied Maria, "I can smell those poor
children's wet clothes so that it has taken away all my appetite."

"Land! you'll have to get over that," said Aunt Maria.

"It seems to me that everything smells and tastes of wet, dirty
clothes and shoes," said Maria.

"You'll have to learn not to be so particular," said Aunt Maria, and
she spoke with the same affectionate severity that Maria remembered
in her mother. "Put it out of your mind," she added.

"I can't," said Maria, and a qualm of nausea came over her. It was as
if the damp, unclean garments and the wet shoes were pressed close
under her nostrils. She looked pale.

"Well, drink your tea, anyhow," said Aunt Maria, with a glance at her.

After supper Aunt Maria, going into the other side of the house to
borrow some yeast, said to her brother Henry that she did not believe
that Maria would hold out to teach school. "She has come home sick on
account of the smells the very first day," said she, "and she hasn't
eat her supper, and she scarcely touched her luncheon."

Henry Stillman laughed, a bitter, sardonic laugh which he had
acquired of late years. "Oh, well, she will get used to it," he
replied. "Don't you worry, Maria. She will get used to it. The smell
of the poor is the smell of the world. Heaven itself must be full of
it."

His wife eyed him with a half-frightened air. "Why, don't talk so,
Henry!" she said.

Henry Stillman laughed, half sardonically, half tenderly. "It is so,
my dear," he said, "but don't you worry about it."

In these days Henry Stillman, although always maintaining his gentle
manner towards children and women, had become, in the depths of his
long-suffering heart, a rebel against fate. He had borne too long
that burden which is the heaviest and most ignoble in the world, the
burden of a sense of injury. He knew that he was fitted for better
things than he had. He thought that it was not his own personal fault
that he did not have them, and his very soul was curdling with a
conviction of wrong, both at the hands of men and God. In these days
he ceased going to church. He watched his wife and sister set out
every Sunday, and he stayed at home. He got a certain satisfaction
out of that. All who realize an injury have an amount of childishness
in acts of retaliation. He, Henry Stillman, actually had a conviction
that he was showing recrimination and wounding fate, which had so
injured him, if only with a pin-prick, by staying away from church.
After Maria came to live with them, she, too, went to church, but he
did not view her with the same sardonic air that he did the older
women, who had remained true to their faith in the face of disaster.
He looked at Maria, in her pretty little best gowns and hats, setting
forth, and a sweet tenderness for her love of God and belief
sweetened his own agnosticism. He would not for the world have said a
word to weaken the girl's faith nor to have kept her away from
church. He would have urged her to go had she manifested the
slightest inclination to remain at home. He was in a manner jealous
of the girl's losing what he had himself lost. He tried to refrain
from airing his morbid, bitter views of life to his wife, but once in
a while he could not restrain himself as now. However, he laughed so
naturally, and asked Maria, who presently came in, how many pupils
had been present, and how she liked school-teaching, that his wife
began to think that he had not been in earnest.

"They are such poor, dirty little things," Maria said, "and their
clothes were wet, and--and--" A look of nausea overspread her face.

"You will get used to that," said her uncle, laughing pleasantly.
"Eunice, haven't we got some cologne somewhere?"

Eunice got a bottle of cologne, which was seldom used, being a
luxury, from a closet in the sitting-room, and put some on Maria's
handkerchief. "You won't think anything about it after a little,"
said she, echoing her husband.

"I suppose the scholars in Lowe Academy were a different class," said
Aunt Maria, who had seated herself as primly as ever, with her hands
crossed but not touching the lap of her black gown. The folds of the
skirt were carefully arranged, and she did not move after having once
seated herself, for fear of creasing it.

"They were clean, at least," said Maria, with a little grimace of
disgust. "It does seem as if people might be clean, if they are poor."

"Some folks here are too poor to buy soap and wash-cloths and
towels," her uncle said, still not bitterly. "You must take that into
account, Maria. It takes a little extra money even to keep clean;
people don't get that into their heads, generally speaking, but it is
so."

"Well, I haven't had much money," said Aunt Maria, "but I must say I
have kept myself in soap and wash-rags and towels."

"You might not have been able to if you had had half a dozen children
and a drinking husband, or one who was out of work half the time,"
her brother said.

An elderly blush spread over his sister's face. "Well, the Lord knows
I'd rather have the soap and towels and wash-rags than a drunken
husband and half a dozen dirty children," she retorted, sharply.

"Lucky for you and the children that you have," said Henry. Then he
turned again to his niece, of whom he was very fond. "It won't rain
every day, dear," he said, "and the smells won't be so bad. Don't
worry."

Maria smiled back at him bravely. "I shall get used to it," she said,
sniffing at the cologne, which was cheap and pretty bad.

Maria was in reality dismayed. Her experience with children--that is,
her personal experience--had been confined to her sister Evelyn.
She compared dainty little Evelyn with the rough, uncouth,
half-degenerates which she had encountered that morning, sitting
before her with gaping mouths of stupidity or grins of impish
impudence, in their soiled, damp clothing, and her heart sank. There
was nothing in common except youth between these children, the
offspring of ignorance and often drunken sensuality, and Evelyn. At
first it seemed to her that there was absolutely no redeeming quality
in the whole. However, the next morning the sun shone through the
yellow maple boughs, and was reflected from the golden carpet of
leaves which the wind and rain of the day before had spread beneath.
The children were dry; some of them had become ingratiating, even
affectionate. She discovered that there were a number of pretty
little girls and innocent, honest little boys, whose mothers had made
pathetic attempts to send them clean and whole to school. She also
discovered that some of them had reasonably quick intelligence,
especially one girl, by name Jessy Ramsey. She was of a distant
branch of the old Ramseys, and had a high, spiritual forehead, from
which the light hair was smoothly combed in damp ridges, and a
delicate face with serious, intent blue eyes, under brows strangely
pent for a child. Maria straightway took a fancy to Jessy Ramsey.
When, on her way home at night, the child timidly followed in her
wake, she reached out and grasped her tiny hand with a warm pressure.

"You learned your lessons very well, Jessy," she said, and the
child's face, as she looked up at her, grew positively brilliant.

When Maria got home she enthused about her.

"There is one child in the school who is a wonder," said she.

"Who?" asked Aunt Maria. She was in her heart an aristocrat. She
considered the people of Amity--that is, the manufacturing people
(she exempted her own brother as she might have exempted a prince of
the blood drawn into an ignoble pursuit from dire necessity)--as
distinctly below par. Maria's school was across the river. She
regarded all the children below par. "I do wish you could have had a
school this side of the river," she added, "but Miss Norcross has
held the other ten years, and I don't believe she will ever get
married, she is so mortal homely, and they like her. Who is the child
you are talking about?"

"Her name is Ramsey, Jessy Ramsey."

Aunt Maria sniffed. "Oh!" said she. "She belongs to that Eugene
Ramsey tribe."

"Any relation to the Ramseys next door?" asked Maria.

"About a tenth cousin, I guess," replied Aunt Maria. "There was a
Eugene Ramsey did something awful years ago, before I was born, and
he got into state-prison, and then when he came out he married as low
as he could. They have never had anything to do with these Ramseys.
They are just as low as they can be--always have been."

"This little girl is pretty, and bright," said Maria.

Aunt Maria sniffed again. "Well, you'll see how she'll turn out," she
said. "Never yet anything good came of that Eugene Ramsey tribe. That
child's father drinks like a fish, and he's been in prison, and her
mother's no better than she should be, and she's got a sister that
everybody talks about--has ever since she was so high."

"This seems like a good little girl," said Maria.

"Wait and see," said Aunt Maria.

But for all that Maria felt herself drawn towards this poor little
offspring of the degenerate branch of the Ramseys. There was
something about the child's delicate, intellectual, fairly noble cast
of countenance which at once aroused her affection and pity. It was
in December, on a bitterly cold day, when Maria had been teaching in
Amity some two months, when this affection and pity ripened into
absolute fondness and protection. The children were out in the bare
school-yard during the afternoon recess, when Maria, sitting huddled
over the stove for warmth, heard such a clamor that she ran to the
window. Out in the desolate yard, a parallelogram of frozen soil
hedged in with a high board fence covered with grotesque, and even
obscene, drawings of pupils who had from time to time reigned in
district number six, was the little Ramsey girl, surrounded by a
crowd of girls who were fairly yelping like little mongrel dogs. The
boys' yard was on the other side of the fence, but in the fence was a
knot-hole wherein was visible a keen boy-eye. One girl after another
was engaged in pulling to the height of her knees Jessy Ramsey's
poor, little, dirty frock, thereby disclosing her thin, naked legs,
absolutely uncovered to the freezing blast. Maria rushed bareheaded
out in the yard and thrust herself through the crowd of little girls.

"Girls, what are you doing?" she asked, sternly.

"Please, teacher, Jessy Ramsey, she 'ain't got nothin' at all on
under her dress," piped one after another, in accusing tones; then
they yelped again.

Tears of pity and rage sprang to Maria's eyes. She caught hold of the
thin little shoulder, which was, beyond doubt, covered by nothing
except her frock, and turned furiously upon the other girls.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" said she; "great girls like
you making fun of this poor child!"

"She had ought to be ashamed of herself goin' round so," retorted the
biggest girl in school, Alice Sweet, looking boldly at Maria. "She
ain't no better than her ma. My ma says so."

"My ma says I mustn't go with her," said another girl.

"Both of you go straight into the school-house," said Maria, at a
white heat of anger as she impelled poor little Jessy Ramsey out of
the yard.

"I don't care," said Alice Sweet, with quite audible impudence.

The black eye at the knot-hole in the fence which separated the
girls' yard from the boys' was replaced by a blue one. Maria's
attention was attracted towards it by an audible titter from the
other side.

"Every one of you boys march straight into the school-house," she
called. Then she led Jessy into a little room which was dedicated to
the teacher's outside wraps. The room was little more than a closet,
and very cold. Maria put her arm around Jessy and felt with horror
the little, naked body under the poor frock.

"For Heaven's sake, child, why are you out with so little on such a
day as this?" she cried out.

Jessy began to cry. She had heretofore maintained a sullen silence of
depression under taunts, but a kind word was too much for her.

"I 'ain't got no underclothes, teacher; I 'ain't, honest," she
sobbed. "I'd outgrowed all my last year's ones, and Mamie she's got
'em; and my mother she 'ain't got no money to buy any more, and my
father he's away on a drunk. I can't help it; I can't, honest,
teacher."

Maria gazed at the little thing in a sort of horror. "Do you mean to
say that you have actually nothing to put on but your dress, Jessy
Ramsey?" said she.

"I can't help it, honest, teacher," sobbed Jessy Ramsey.

Maria continued to gaze at her, then she led her into the school-room
and rang the bell furiously. When the scholars were all in their
places, she opened her lips to express her mind to them, but a
second's reflection seemed to show her the futility of it. Instead,
she called the geography class.

After school that night, Maria, instead of going home, went straight
to Jessy Ramsey's home, which was about half a mile from the
school-house. She held Jessy, who wore a threadbare little cape over
her frock, by the hand. Franky Ramsey and Mamie Ramsey, Jessy's
younger brother and sister, tagged timidly behind her. Finally, Maria
waited for them to come up with her, which they did with a cringing
air.

"I want to know," said Maria to Mamie, "if you are wearing all your
sister's underclothes this winter?"

Mamie whimpered a little as she replied. Mamie had a habitual whimper
and a mean little face, with a wisp of flaxen hair tied with a dirty
blue ribbon.

"Yes, ma'am," she replied. "Jessy she growed so she couldn't git into
'em, and mummer--"

The boy, who was very thin, almost to emaciation, and looked
consumptive, but who was impishly pert, cut in.

"I had to wear Jessy's shirts," he said. "Mamie she couldn't wear
them 'ere."

"So you haven't any flannel shirts?" Maria asked of Mamie.

"I'm wearin' mummer's," said Mamie. "Mummer's they shrunk so she
couldn't wear 'em, and Jessy couldn't nuther."

"What is your mother wearing?" asked Maria.

"Mr. John Dorsey he bought her some new ones," replied Mamie, and a
light of evil intelligence came into the mean little face.

"Who is Mr. John Dorsey?" asked Maria.

"Oh, he's to our house considerable," replied Mamie, still with that
evil light, which grew almost confidential, upon her face.

The boy chuckled a little and dug his toes into the frozen earth,
then he whistled.

The Ramsey house was the original old homestead of the family. It was
unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate. The old
house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and
loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its
inmates--to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with
unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of
a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front
portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof
hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there upon the
walls, which seemed like stains of sin rather than of old rains.
Maria marched straight to the house, leading Jessy, with Mamie and
Franky at her heels. She knocked on the door; there was no bell, of
course. But Franky pushed past her and opened the door, and sang out,
in his raucous voice:

"Hullo, mummer! Mummer!"

Mamie echoed him in her equally raucous voice, full of dissonances.
"Mummer! Mummer!"

A woman, large and dirty, but rather showily clad, with a brave
display of cheap jewelry, appeared in the doorway of a room on the
right, from which also issued a warm, spirituous odor, mingled with
onions and boiling meat. The woman, who had at one time been weakly
pretty, and even now was not bad-looking, stared with a sort of
vacant defiance at Maria.

"It's teacher, mummer," volunteered Mamie.

Franky chuckled again, and again whistled. Franky's chuckles and
whistles were characteristic of him. He often disturbed the school in
such fashion.

Maria had a vision of a man in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside a
red-hot stove, on which boiled the meat and onions. She began at once
upon her errand.

"How do you do, Mrs. Ramsey?" said she.

The woman mumbled something inarticulate and backed a little. The man
in the room leaned forward and rolled bloodshot eyes at her. Maria
began at once. She had much of her mother's spirit, which, when it
was aroused, balked at nothing. She pointed at Jessy, then she
extended her small index-finger severely at Mrs. Ramsey.

"Mrs. Ramsey," said she, and she stood so straight that she looked
much taller, her blue eyes flashed like steel at the slinking ones of
the older woman, "I want to inquire why you sent this child to school
such a day as this in such a condition?"

Mrs. Ramsey again murmured something inarticulate and backed still
farther. Maria followed her quite into the room. A look of insolent
admiration became evident in the bloodshot eyes of the man beside the
stove. Maria had no false modesty when she was righteously incensed.
She would have said just the same before a room full of men.

"That child," she said, and she again pointed at Jessy, shivering in
her little, scanty frock--"that child came to school to-day without
any clothing under her dress; one of the coldest days of the year,
too. I don't see what you are thinking of, you, her own mother, to
let a child go out in such a condition! You ought to be ashamed of
yourself!"

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