Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man

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"Jerome he's worked smart, if I have had to drive him to it
sometimes. He's wed and dug potatoes everywhere he could git a
chance; he's helped 'bout hayin', an' he's split wood. He's sold some
herbs and roots, too, over to Dale. Jake Noyes he put him up to that.
He come in here one night an' talked to him real sensible. 'There's
money 'nough layin' round loose right under your face an' eyes,' says
he; 'all the trouble is you're apt to walk right past, with your nose
up in the air. The scent for work an' wages ain't up in the air,'
says he; 'it's on the ground.' Jerome he listened real sharp, an'
the next day he went off an' got a good passel of boneset an'
thoroughwort an' hardback, an' carried it over to Dale, an' sold it
for a shilling.

"Elmira has done some spinnin', too; I can't spin much, but she's
done well enough. Your wife wants some linen pillow-shifts. Elmira
can do the weavin', I guess, an' we can make 'em up together. I've
got a job to make some fine shirts for you, too. Your wife come over
to see about it this week. I dun'no' but she was gettin' kind of
afraid you wouldn't git your interest money no other way; but she
needn't have been exercised about it, if she was. We got this
interest together without your shirts, an' I guess we can the next.
It's been harder work than many folks in this town know anything
about, but we've done it." Ann tossed her head with indescribable
pride and bitterness. There was scorn of fate itself in the toss of
that little head, with its black lace cap and false front, and her
speech also was an harangue, reproachful and defiant, against fate,
not against her earthly creditor; that she would have disdained.

Squire Eben, however, fully appreciating that, and taking the
pictures of pitiful feminine and childish toil which she brought
before his fancy as a shame to his great stalwart manhood, spending
its strength in hunting and fishing and card-playing, looked at the
woman binding shoes with painful jerks of little knotted hands--for
she ceased not her work one minute for her words--and took the bitter
reproach and triumphant scorn in her tone and gesture for himself
alone.

He felt ashamed of himself, in his great hunting-boots splashed with
swamp mud, his buckskins marred with woodland thorn and thicket, but
not a mark of honest toil about him. Had he been in fine broadcloth
he would not have felt so humiliated; for the useless labor of play
cuts a sorrier figure in the face of genuine work for the great ends
of life than idleness itself. He would not have been half so
disgraced by nothing at all in hand as by that bag of game; and as
for the money in that old stocking under the feather-bed, it seemed
to him like the fruits of his own dishonesty.

The impulse was strong upon him, then and there, to declare that he
would take none of that hoard.

"Now look here, Mrs. Edwards," said he, fairly coloring like a girl
as he spoke, and smiling uneasily, "I don't want that money."

Ann looked at him with the look of one who is stung, and yet
incredulous. Elmira gave a little gasp of delight. "Oh, mother!" she
cried.

"Keep still!" ordered her mother. "I dun'no' what you mean," she said
to Squire Merritt.

The Squire's smile deepened, but he looked frightened; his eyes fell
before hers. "Why, what I say--I don't want this money, this time. I
have all I need. Keep it over till the next half."

Squire Eben Merritt had a feeling as if something actually tangible,
winged and clawed and beaked, and flaming with eyes, pounced upon
him. He fairly shrank back, so fierce was Ann's burst of indignation;
it produced a sense of actual contact.

"Keep it till next half?" repeated Ann. "Keep it till next half? What
should we keep it till next half for, I'd like to know? It's your
money, ain't it? We don't want it; we ain't beggars; we don't need
it. I see through you, Squire Eben Merritt; you think I don't, but I
do."

"I fear I don't know what you mean," the Squire said, helplessly.

"I see through you," repeated Ann. She had reverted to her first
suspicion that his design was to gain possession of the whole
property by letting the unpaid interest accumulate, but that poor
Squire Eben did not know. He gave up all attempts to understand this
woman's mysterious innuendoes, and took the true masculine method of
departure from an uncomfortable subject at right angles, with no
further ado.

He opened his game-bag and held up a brace of fat partridges. "Well,"
he said, laughing, "I want you to see what luck I've had shooting,
Mrs. Edwards. I've bagged eight of these fellows to-day."

But Ann could not make a mental revolution so easily. She gave a
half-indifferent, half-scornful squint at the partridges. "I dun'no'
much about shootin'," said she, shortly. Ann had always been, in her
own family, a passionate woman, but among outsiders she had borne
herself with dignified politeness and formal gentility, clothing, as
it were, her intensity of spirit with a company garb. Now, since her
terrible trouble had come upon her, this garb had often slipped
aside, and revealed, with the indecency of affliction, the struggling
naked spirit of the woman to those from whom she had so carefully
hidden it.

Once Ann would not have believed that she would have so borne herself
towards Squire Merritt. The Squire laid the partridges on the table.
"I am going to leave these for your supper, Mrs. Edwards," he said,
easily; but he quaked a little, for this woman seemed to repel gifts
like blows.

"Thank ye," said Ann, dryly, "but I guess you'd better take 'em home
to your wife. I've got a good deal cooked up."

Elmira made a little expressive sound; she could not help it. She
gave one horrified, wondering look at her mother. Not a morsel of
cooked food was there on the bare pantry shelves. By-and-by a little
Indian meal and water would be boiled for supper. There were some
vegetables in the cellar, otherwise no food in the house. Ann lied.

Squire Eben Merritt then displayed what would have been tact in a
keenly calculating and analytic nature. "Oh, throw them out for the
dogs, if you don't want them, Mrs. Edwards," he returned, gayly.
"I've got more than my wife can use here. We are getting rather tired
of partridges, we have had so many. I stopped at Lawyer Means's on my
way here and left a pair for him."

A sudden change came over Ann's face. She beamed with a return of her
fine company manners. She even smiled. "Thank ye," said she; "then I
will take them, if you are sure you ain't robbing yourself."

"Not at all," said the Squire--"not at all, Mrs. Edwards. You'd
better baste them well when you cook them." Then he took his leave,
with many exchanges of courtesies, and went his way, wondering what
had worked this change; for a simple, benevolent soul can seldom
gauge its own wisdom of diplomacy.

Squire Eben did not dream that his gift to one who was not needy had
enabled him to give to one who was, by establishing a sort of
equality among the recipients, which had overcome her proud scruples.
On the way home he met Jerome, scudding along in the early dusk,
having finished his task early. "Hurry home, boy," he called out, in
that great kind voice which Jerome so loved--"hurry home; you've got
something good for supper!" and he gave the boy, ducking low before
him with the love and gratitude which had overcome largely the fierce
and callous pride in his young heart, a hearty slap on the shoulder
as he went past.

Chapter XIII

There was a good district school in the village, and Jerome, before
his father's disappearance, had attended it all the year round; now
he went only in winter. Jerome rose at four o'clock in the dark
winter mornings, and went to bed at ten, getting six hours' sleep. It
was fortunate that he was a hardy boy, with a wirily pliant frame,
adapting itself, with no lesions, to extremes of temperature and
toil, even to extremes of mental states. In spite of all his
hardships, in spite of scanty food, Jerome thrived; he grew; he began
to fill out better his father's clothes, to which he had succeeded.
The first time Jerome wore his poor father's best coat to school--Ann
had set in the buttons so it folded about him in ludicrous fashion,
bringing the sleeves forward and his arms apparently into the middle
of his chest--one of the big boys and two big girls at his side
laughed at him, the boy with open jeers, the girls with covert
giggles behind their hands. They were standing in front of the
school-house at the top of the long hill when Jerome was ascending it
with Elmira. It was late and cold, and only these three scholars were
outside. The girls, who were pretty and coquettish, had detained this
great boy, who was a man grown.

Jerome went up the long hill under this fire of covert ridicule.
Elmira, behind him, began to cry, holding up one little shawled arm
like a wing before her face. Jerome never lowered his proud head; his
unwinking black eyes stared straight ahead at the three; his face was
deadly white; his hands twitched at his sides.

The great boy was 'Lisha Robinson; the girls were the pretty twin
daughters of a farmer living three miles away, who had just brought
them to school on his ox-sled. Their two sweet, rosy faces, full of
pitiless childish merriment for him, and half-unconscious maiden
wiles towards the young man at their side, towards whom they leaned
involuntarily as they tittered, aroused Jerome to a worse frenzy than
'Lisha's face with its coarse leer.

All three started back a little as he drew near; there was something
in his unwinking eyes which was intimidating. However, 'Lisha had his
courage to manifest before these girls. "Say, Jerome," he
shouted--"say, Jerome, got any room to spare in that coat? 'cause
Abigail Mack is freezin'."

"Go 'long, 'Lisha," cried Abigail, sputtering with giggles, and
giving the young man a caressing push with her elbow.

'Lisha, thus encouraged, essayed further wit. "Say, Jerome, s'pose
you can fill out that coat of yours any quicker if I give ye half my
dinner? Here's a half a pie I can spare. Reckon you don't have much
to eat down to your house, 'cept chicken-fodder, and that ain't very
fat'nin'."

Jerome came up. All at once through the glow of his black eyes
flashed that spiritual lightning, evident when purpose is changed to
action. The girls screamed and fled. 'Lisha swung about in a panic,
but Jerome launched himself upon his averted shoulder. The girls,
glancing back with terrified eyes from the school-house door, seemed
to see the boy lift the grown man from the ground, and the two whirl
a second in the air before they crashed down, and so declared
afterwards. Jerome clung to his opponent like a wild-cat, a small but
terrific body all made up of nerves and muscles and electric fire. He
wound his arms with a violent jerk as of steel around 'Lisha's neck;
he bunted him with a head like a cannon-ball; he twisted little wiry
legs under the hollows of 'Lisha's knees. The two came down together
with a great thud. The teacher and the scholars came rushing to the
door. Elmira wailed and sobbed in the background. The slight boy was
holding great 'Lisha on the ground with a strength that seemed
uncanny.

'Lisha's nose was bleeding; he breathed hard; his eyes, upturned to
Jerome, had a ghastly roll. "Let me--up, will ye?" he choked,
faintly.

"Will you ever say anything like that again?"

"Let me up, will ye?" 'Lisha gave a convulsive gasp that was almost
a sob.

"Jerome!" called the teacher. She was a young woman from another
village, mildly and assentingly good, virtue having, like the moon,
only its simply illuminated side turned towards her vision. Weakly
blue-eyed and spectacled, hooked up primly in chaste drab woollen and
capped with white muslin, though scarcely thirty, she stood among her
flock and eyed the fierce combatants with an utter lack of command of
the situation. She was a country minister's daughter, and had never
taught until her father's death. This was her first school, and to
its turbulent elements she brought only the precisely limited lore of
a young woman's seminary of that day, and the experiences of early
piety.

Looking at the struggling boys, she thought vaguely of that hymn of
Isaac Watts's which treats of barking and biting dogs and the
desirability of amity and concord between children, as if it could in
some way be applied to heal the breach. She called again fruitlessly
in her thin treble, which had been raised in public only in
neighborhood prayer-meetings: "Jerome! Jerome Edwards!"

"Will you say it again?" demanded Jerome of his prostrate adversary,
with a sharp prod of a knee.

After a moment of astonished staring there was a burst of mirth among
the pupils, especially the older boys. 'Lisha was not a special
favorite among them--he was too good-looking, had too much money to
spend, and was too much favored by the girls. In spite of the
teacher's half-pleading commands, they made a rush and formed a ring
around the fighters.

"Go it, J'rome!" they shouted. "Give it to him! You're a fighter, you
be. Look at J'rome Edwards lickin' a feller twice his size. Hi! Go
it, J'rome!"

"Boys!" called the teacher. "Boys!"

Some of the smaller girls began to cry and clung to her skirts; the
elder girls watched with dilated eyes, or laughed with rustic
hardihood for such sights. Elmira still waited on the outskirts.
Jerome paid no attention to the teacher or the shouting boys. "Will
you say it again?" he kept demanding of 'Lisha, until finally he got
a sulky response.

"No, I won't. Now lemme up, will ye?"

"Say you're sorry."

"I'm sorry. Lemme up!"

Jerome, without appearing to move, collected himself for a spring.
Suddenly he was off 'Lisha and far to one side, with one complete
bound of his whole body, like a cat.

'Lisha got up stiffly, muttering under his breath, and went round to
the well to wash off the blood. He did not attempt to renew the
combat, as the other boys had hoped he might. He preferred to undergo
the ignominy of being worsted in fight by a little boy rather than
take the risk of being pounced upon again with such preternatural
fury. When he entered school, having washed his face, he was quite
pale, and walked with shaking knees. Rather physical than moral
courage had 'Lisha Robinson, and it was his moral courage, after all,
which had been tested, as it is in all such unequal combats.

As for Jerome, he had to stand in the middle of the floor, a
spectacle unto the school, folded in his father's coat, which had,
alas! two buttons torn off, and a three-cornered rag hanging from one
tail, which fluttered comically in the draught from the door; but
nobody dared laugh. There was infinite respect, if not approbation,
for Jerome in the school that day. Some of the big boys scowled, and
one girl said out loud, "It's a shame!" when the teacher ordered him
to stand in the floor. Had he rebelled, the teacher would have had no
support, but Jerome took his place in the spot indicated, with a
grave and scornful patience. The greatness of his triumph made him
magnanimous. It was clearly evident to his mind that 'Lisha Robinson
and not he should stand in the floor, and that he gained a glory of
martyrdom in addition to the other.

Jerome had never felt so proud in his life as when he stood there, in
his father's old coat, having established his right to wear it
without remark by beating the biggest boy in school. He stood erect,
equally poised on his two feet, looking straight ahead with a grave,
unsmiling air. He looked especially at no one, except once at his
sister Elmira. She had just raised her head from the curve of her
arm, in which she had been weeping, and her tear-stained eyes met her
brother's. He looked steadily at her, frowning significantly. Elmira
knew what it meant. She began to study her geography, and did not cry
again.

At recess the teacher went up to Jerome, and spoke to him almost
timidly. "I am very sorry about this, Jerome," she said. "I am sorry
you fought, and sorry I had to punish you in this way."

Jerome looked at her. "She's a good deal like mother," he thought.
"You had to punish somebody," said he, "an'--_I'd_ licked _him_."

The teacher started; this reasoning confused her a little, the more
so that she had an uneasy conviction that she had punished the lesser
offender. She looked at the proud little figure in the torn coat, and
her mild heart went out to him. She glanced round; there were not
many scholars in the room. Elmira sat in her place, busy with her
slate; a few of the older ones were in a knot near the window at the
back of the room. The teacher slipped her hand into her pocket and
drew out a lemon-drop, which she thrust softly into Jerome's hand.
"Here," said she.

Jerome, who treated usually a giver like a thief, took the
lemon-drop, thanked her, and stood sucking it the rest of the recess.
It was his first gallantry towards womankind.

This teacher remained in the school only a half-term. Some said that
she left because she was not strong enough to teach such a large
school. Some said because she had not enough government. This had
always been considered a man's school during the winter months, but a
departure had been made in this case because the female teacher was
needy and a minister's daughter.

The place was filled by a man who never tempered injustice with
lemon-drops, and ruled generally with fair and equal measure. He was
better for the school, and Jerome liked him; but he felt sad, though
he kept it to himself, when the woman teacher went away. She gave him
for a parting gift a little volume, a treasure of her own childhood,
purporting to be the true tale of an ungodly youth who robbed an
orchard on the Sabbath day, thereby combining two deadly sins, and
was drowned in crossing a brook on his way home. The weight of his
bag of stolen fruit prevented him from rising, but he would not let
go, and thereby added to his other crimes that of greediness. There
was a frontispiece representing this froward hero, in a tall hat and
little frilled trousers, with a bag the size of a slack balloon
dragging on the ground behind him, proceeding towards the neighbor's
apple-tree, which bore fruit as large as the thief's head upon its
unbending boughs.

"There's a pretty picture in it," the teacher said, when she
presented the book; she had kept Jerome after school for that
purpose. "I used to like to look at it when I was a little girl."
Then she added that she had crossed out the inscription, "Martha
Maria Whittaker, from her father, Rev. Enos Whittaker," on the
fly-leaf, and written underneath, "Jerome Edwards, from his teacher,
Martha Maria Whittaker," and displayed her little delicate scratch.

Then the teacher had hesitated a little, and colored faintly, and
looked at the boy. He seemed to this woman--meekly resigned to
old-age and maidenhood at thirty--a mere child, and like the son
which another woman might have had, but the missing of whom was a
shame to her to contemplate. Then she had said good-bye to him, and
bade him be always a good boy, and had leaned over and kissed him. It
was the kiss of a mother spiritualized by the innocent mystery and
imagination of virginity.

Jerome kept the little book always, and he never forgot the kiss nor
the teacher, who returned to her native village and taught the school
there during the summer months, and starved on the proceeds during
the winter, until she died, some ten years later, being of a delicate
habit, and finding no place of comfort in the world.

Jerome walked ten miles and back to her funeral one freezing day.

Chapter XIV

Jerome's mother never knew about the rent in his father's best coat,
nor the fight. To do the boy justice, he kept it from her, neither
because of cowardice nor deceit, but because of magnanimity. "It will
just work her all up if she knew 'Lisha Robinson made fun of father's
best coat, and it's tore," Jerome told Elmira, who nodded in entire
assent.

Elmira sat up in her cold chamber until long after midnight, and
darned the rent painfully by the light of a tallow candle. Then it
was a comparatively simple matter, when one had to deal with a woman
confined to a rocking-chair, to never give her a full view of the
mended coat-tail. Jerome cultivated a habit of backing out of the
room, as from an audience with a queen. The sting from his wounded
pride having been salved with victory, he was unduly important in his
own estimation, until an unforeseen result came from the affair.

There are many surprising complications from war, even war between
two school-boys. One night, after school, Jerome went to Cyrus
Robinson's for a lot of shoes which had been promised him two days
before, and was told there were none to spare. Cyrus Robinson leaned
over the counter and glanced around cautiously. It was not a busy
time of day. Two old farmers were standing by the stove, talking to
each other in a drone of extreme dialect, almost as unintelligible,
except to one who understood its subject-matter, as the notes of
their own cattle. The clerk, Samson Loud, was at the other end of the
store, cleaning a molasses-barrel from its accumulated sugar.
"Look-a-here," said Cyrus Robinson, beckoning Jerome with a hard
crook of a seamed forefinger. The boy stood close to the counter, and
uplifted to him his small, undaunted, yet piteously wistful face.

"Look-a-here," said Cyrus Robinson, in a whisper of furtive malice,
leaning nearer, the point of his shelving beard almost touching
Jerome's forehead; "I've got something to say to you. I 'ain't got
any shoes to spare to-night; an', what's more, I ain't going to have
any to spare in future. Boys that fight 'ain't got time enough to
close shoes."

Jerome looked at him a moment, as if scarcely comprehending; then a
sudden quiver as of light came over him, and Cyrus Robinson shrank
back before his eyes as if his counter were a bulwark.

"I s'pose if your big boy had licked me 'cause he made fun of my
father's coat, instead of me lickin' him, you'd have given me some
more shoes!" cried the boy, with the dauntlessness of utter scorn,
and turned and walked out of the store.

"You'd better take care, young man!" called Cyrus Robinson, in open
rage, for the boy's clear note of wrath had been heard over the whole
store. The two old farmers looked up in dull astonishment as the door
slammed after Jerome, stared questioningly at the storekeeper and
each other, then the thick stream of their ideas returned to its
course of their own affairs, and their husky gabble recommenced.

Samson Laud raised his head, covered with close curls of light red
hair, and his rasped red face out of the molasses-barrel, gave one
quick glance full of acutest sarcasm of humor at Cyrus Robinson, then
disappeared again into sugary depths, and resumed his scraping.

Jerome, on his homeward road, did not feel his spirit of defiance
abate. "Wonder how we're going to pay that interest money now? Wonder
how mother 'll take it?" he said; yet he would have fought 'Lisha
Robinson over again, knowing the same result. He had not yet grown
servile to his daily needs.

However, speeding along through the clear night, treading the snow
flashing back the full moonlight in his eyes like a silver mirror, he
dreaded more and more the meeting his mother and telling her the
news. He slackened his pace. Now and then he stood still and looked
up at the sky, where the great white moon rode through the hosts of
the stars. Without analyzing his thoughts, the boy felt the utter
irresponsiveness of all glory and all heights. Mocking shafts of
moonlight and starlight and frostlight seemed glancing off this one
little soul in the freezing solitude of creation, wherein each is
largely to himself alone. What was it to the moon and all those
shining swarms of stars, and that far star-dust in the Milky Way,
whether he, Jerome Edwards, had shoes to close or not? Whether he and
his mother starved or not, they would shine just the same. The
triviality--even ludicrousness--of the sorrow of man, as compared
with eternal things, was over the boy. He was maddened at the sting
and despite of his own littleness in the face of that greatness.
Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost blasphemy seized
him. He clinched a puny fist at a great star. "Wish I could make you
stop shinin'," he cried out, in a loud, fierce voice; "wish I could
do somethin'!"

Suddenly Jerome was hemmed in by a cloud of witnesses. Eliphalet
Means, John Jennings, and Colonel Lamson had overtaken him as he
stood star-gazing. They were on their way to punch and cards at
Squire Merritt's. Jerome felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up
into John Jennings's long, melancholy countenance, instead of the
shining face of the star. He saw the eyes of the others surveying
him, half in astonishment, half in amusement, over the folds of their
camlet cloaks.

"Want to make the star stop shining?" queried John Jennings, in his
sweet drawl.

Jerome made no reply. His shoulder twitched under Mr. Jennings's
hand. He meditated pushing between these interlopers and running for
home. The New England constraint, to which he had been born, was to
him as a shell of defence and decency, and these men had had a
glimpse of him outside it. He was horribly ashamed. "S'pose they
think I'm crazy," he reflected.

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