The Brown Mouse Part 9

"Nothing to wear!"

I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim Irwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty, and the a.s.sociation of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure--but his mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues, neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made.

Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned back--but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fas.h.i.+oned into the garments in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companions.h.i.+p with Carlyle, Th.o.r.eau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H.

Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are derived in a transcendental manner from _Sartor Resartus_ and the agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and Feeding.

"Why, mother," said he, "I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!"

Was a woman ever quite without a costume?

Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress--a dress which Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body, once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart--under the arms, and at some of the seams--and she handled it as one deals with something very precious.

"I never thought I'd wear it again," said she, "but once. I've been saving it for my last dress. But I guess it won't hurt to wear it once for the benefit of the living."

Jim kissed his mother--a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by the established custom between them.

"Don't think of that, mother," said he, "for years and years yet!"

CHAPTER X

HOW JIM WAS LINED UP

There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they were a queer couple. They weren't like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of a different pattern. To be sure, Jim's clothes were not especially noteworthy, being just s.h.i.+ny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the inability of a New York sweatshop to antic.i.p.ate the prodigality of Nature in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often enjoyed Jim's presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of the land. Jim's queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his personality.

On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin's queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white and red and green--tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike's Peak. Jennie felt that it must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs.

Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story--a story in which the stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with knowledge that her dress didn't fit, and with the difficulty of behaving naturally--like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years'

term--that she took on a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so have blotted out his record as her father's field-hand, he would have seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course, but the sort people look after--and follow.

"Come to dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the other fixings of a Christmas dinner. "It's good enough, what there is of it, and there's enough of it such as it is--but the dressing in the turkey would be better for a little more sage!"

The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family melted away in a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie.

The colonel, in stiff starched s.h.i.+rt, black tie and frock coat, carved with much empress.e.m.e.nt, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of the value of manner.

"I had bigger turkeys," said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, "but I thought it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat."

"One of the hens would 'a' been plenty," replied Mrs. Irwin. "How much did they weigh?"

"About fifteen pounds apiece," was the answer. "The gobbler would 'a'

weighed thirty, I guess. He's pure Mammoth Bronze."

"I wish," said Jim, "that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild bronze turkeys from Mexico."

"Why?" asked the colonel.

"They're the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys," said Jim, "and they're bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even.

They're a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our common birds originated."

"Where do you learn all these things, Jim?" asked Mrs. Woodruff. "I declare, I often tell Woodruff that it's as good as a lecture to have Jim Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here, Jim."

There came into Jim's eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause--and the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more plainly wherein his queerness lay.

"There's an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of Mexico----"

"What's chaparral?" asked Jennie, as a diversion. "It's one of the words I have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it--but after all it's just a word, and nothing more."

"Ain't that the trouble with our education, Jim?" queried the colonel, cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.

"They are not even living words," answered Jim, "unless we have clothed them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. 'Chaparral'

to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard."

Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase--and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim's development was not so rapid, but Jennie's perception of it was. She began to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical notions seem so plausible--and who was clearly fired with some sort of evangelistic fervor--had kissed her, once or twice, on bringing her home from the spelling school.

"I think we lose so much time in school," Jim went on, "while the children are eating their dinners."

"Well, Jim," said Mrs. Woodruff, "every one but you is down on the human level. The poor kids have to eat!"

"But think how much good education there is wrapped up in the school dinner--if we could only get it out."

Jennie grew grave. Here was this Brown Mouse actually introducing the subject of the school--and he ought to suspect that she was planning to line him up on this very thing--if he wasn't a perfect donkey as well as a dreamer. And he was calmly wading into the subject as if she were the ex-farm-hand country teacher, and he was the county superintendent-elect!

"Eating a dinner like this, mother," said the colonel gallantly, "is an education in itself--and eating some others requires one; but just how 'larnin' is wrapped up in the school lunch is a new one on me, Jim."

"Well," said Jim, "in the first place the children ought to cook their meals as a part of the school work. Prior to that they ought to buy the materials. And prior to that they ought to keep the accounts of the school kitchen. They'd like to do these things, and it would help prepare them for life on an intelligent plane, while they prepared the meals."

"Isn't that looking rather far ahead?" asked the county superintendent-elect.

"It's like a lot of other things we think far ahead," urged Jim. "The only reason why they're far off is because we think them so. It's a thought--and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever be."

"I guess that's so--to a wild-eyed reformer," said the colonel. "But go on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing."

"Thanks, I believe I will," said Jim. "And a little more of the cranberry sauce. No more turkey, please."

"I'd like to see the school cla.s.s that could prepare this dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff.

"Why," said Jim, "you'd be there showing them how! They'd get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner--and they'd bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their cla.s.ses. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve.

The setting of the table would come in as a study--flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!"

"I'd take on that cla.s.s," said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. "The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children."

"And when the food came on the table," Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, "just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it--well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now," said he, referring to the remains on his plate. "That's physiology. The cranberry-sauce--that's botany, and commerce, and soil management--do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil--which would kill alfalfa or clover?"

"Read something of it," said the colonel, "but it didn't interest me much."

"And the difference between the types of fowl on the table--that's breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut--that's geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents--and they're mathematics."