Hillsboro People Part 33

"You don't often go."

Miss Abigail shouted out, "Why, my grandfather was minister in that church!" Mr. Horton received this as a statement of fact. "Indeed? I didn't realize the building was so old. I wonder if the foundations are still in good shape." He went on, explanatorily, "I really don't know why I hadn't thought of the plan before. The number who attend church in that great barn of a place could easily be put into someone's parlor, and save the trustees the expense of heating. One of them whom I saw the other day seemed quite pleased with the notion--said they'd been at a loss to know what to do about conditions here." He glanced at his watch. "Well, I must be going or I shall miss the train to Johnsonville. Thank you very much for the hint about the blight."

He went down the street, humming a cheerful little tune.

To Miss Abigail it was the bugle call of "Forward, charge!" She had been, for the last few weeks, a little paler than usual. Now her powerful old face flushed to an angry red. She dashed her trowel to the garden path and clenched her fists. "What's coming to Greenford!" she shouted. It was no longer a wail of despair. It was a battle-cry of defiance.

II

She had no time to organize a campaign, forced as she was to begin fighting at once. Reaching wildly for any weapon at hand, she rushed to the front, as grim-visaged a warrior as ever frightened a peaceable, s.h.i.+ftless non-combatant "Joel Barney!" she cried, storming up his front steps. "You're a trustee of the church, aren't you? Well, if you don't vote against selling the church, I'll foreclose the mortgage on your house so quick you can't wink. And you tell 'Lias Bennett that if he doesn't do the same, I'll pile manure all over that field of mine near his place, and stink out his summer renters so they'll never set foot here again."

She s.h.i.+fted tactics as she encountered different adversaries and tried no blackmail on stubborn Miles Benton, whom she took pains to see the next time he came back to Greenford for a visit. Him she hailed as the Native-Born. "How would you like to have brazen models and nasty statues made in the building where your own folks have always gone to church?"

But when the skirmish was over, she realized ruefully that the argument which had brought her her hard-won victory had been the one which, for a person of such very moderate means as hers, reflected the least hope for future battles. At the last, in desperation, she had guaranteed in the name of the Ladies' Aid Society that the church, except for the minister's salary, should thereafter be no expense to the trustees. She had invented that source of authority, remembering that Molly Leonard had said she belonged to the Ladies' Aid Society, "and I can make Molly do anything,"

she thought, trusting Providence for the management of the others.

As a matter of fact, when she came to investigate the matter, she found that Molly was now the sole remaining member. Her dismay was acute, Molly's finances being only too well known to her, but she rallied bravely. "They don't do much to a church that costs money," she thought, and, when Molly went away, she made out her budget unflinchingly. Wood for the furnace, kerosene for the lamps, wages to the janitor, repairs when needed--"Well, Abigail Warner," she told herself, "it means nothing new bought for the garden, and no new microscope--the roof to the library costing more than they said 'twould and all."

But the joy of triumphant battle was still swelling her doughty old heart, so that even these considerations did not damp her exultation over her artist neighbor the next time he came to see her. He listened to her boasting with his pleasant, philosophic smile, and, when she finished, delivered himself of a quiet little disquisition or the nature of things which was like ice-water in the face of the hot-blooded old fighter.

"My dear Miss Abigail, your zeal does your heart credit, and your management of the trustees proves you an unsuspected diplomat; but as a friend, and, believe me, a disinterested friend, let me warn you that you are contending against irresistible forces. You can no more resuscitate your old Greenford than you can any other dead body. You have kept the church from my clutches, it is true, though for that matter I wouldn't have offered to buy it if I hadn't thought no one cared about it--but what do you mean to do with it now you have it? You cannot bring back the old Greenford families from their well-paid work in Johnsonville to sit in those rescued pews, or read in your deserted library, or send their children to your empty schoolhouse. You tell me they are loyal to their old home, and love to come back here for visits. Is that strange?

Greenford is a charming village set in the midst of beautiful mountains, and Johnsonville is a raw factory town in a plain. But they cannot live on picturesque scenery or old a.s.sociations. The laws of economics are like all other laws of nature, inevitable in their action and irresistible in--"

Miss Abigail gave the grampus snort which had been her great-grandfather's war-cry. "Hoo! You're like all other book folks! You give things such long names you scare yourselves! I haven't got anything to do with economics, nor it with me. It's a plain question as to whether the church my ancestors built and wors.h.i.+pped in is to be sold. There's nothing so inevitable in _that_, let me tell you. Laws of nature--fiddlesticks! How about the law of gravity? Don't I break that every time I get up gumption enough to raise my hand to my head!"

Mr. Horton looked at the belligerent old woman with the kindest smile of comprehension. "Ah, I know how hard it is for you. In another way I have been through the same bitter experience. My home, my real home, where my own people are, is out in a wind-swept little town on the Nebraska prairies. But I cannot live there because it is too far from my world of artists and art patrons. I tried it once, but the laws of supply and demand work for all alike. I gave it up. Here I am, you see. You can't help such things. You'd better follow on to Johnsonville now and not embitter the last of your life with a hopeless struggle."

Miss Abigail fairly shouted at him her repudiation of his ideas. "Not while there is a breath in me! My folks were all soldiers."

"But even soldiers surrender to overpowering forces."

"Hoo! Hoo! How do they know they're overpowering till they're overpowered!

How do they dare surrender till they're dead! How do they know that if they hold out just a little longer they won't get reenforcements!"

Mr. Horton was a little impatient of his old friend's unreason. "My dear Miss Abigail, you have brains. _Use_ them! What possible reinforcements can you expect?"

The old woman opposed to his arguments nothing but a pa.s.sionately bare denial. "No! No! No! We're different! It's in your blood to give up because you can reason it all out that you're beaten," She stood up, shaking with her vehemence. "It's in my blood to fight and fight and fight--"

"And then what?" asked the sculptor, as she hesitated.

"Go on fighting!" she cried.

III

She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for the next four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against odds that rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had been imperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with it own action. In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because they could get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because the others had gone. Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford because there was so little cobbling to do. After that the butcher went away, then the carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted by the man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same building for sixty years. It was the old story. He had a large family of children who needed education and "a chance."

The well-kept old village still preserved its outer sh.e.l.l of quaintness and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of gra.s.s beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity of their summer retreat.

Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between some self-invited visitors to her wonderful garden. Her heart burned and her face blackened. "You might as well," she told them, "laugh at the funny faces of a person who's choking to death!"

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "How so?"

"Roads aren't for gra.s.s to grow in!" she fulminated.

"They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over to and from their homes."

"Ah, economic conditions," they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws of supply and--"

"Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she had sworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate--a resolution which she was forced to forego as time pa.s.sed on and she became more and more hard pressed for ammunition.

Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer dared afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the beds herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child's express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands.

When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from lack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be near her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly for the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaign soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the minister had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Board for someone to hold services at least once a fortnight. Later the "big meadow" so long coveted by a New York family as a building site was sacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, she hired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation.

Christmas time was the hardest for her. The traditions of old Greenford were for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a huge Christmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of the Sunday-school scholars. Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for the young unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully. By the promise of a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded in getting a few stragglers from the back hills, but the number grew steadily smaller year by year. She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas tree themselves. Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child a regular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present.

The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any children at all for the annual Christmas party.

The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large old schoolhouse for a handful of pupils. Miss Abigail, at her wit's end, guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher.

Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered she had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three years old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. She focused her ac.u.men to the burning point and saw that the only way out of her situation was to earn some money--an impossible thing at her age.

Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, and sat frowning into s.p.a.ce for a long time.

When she rose up, the next development in her campaign was planned. Not in vain had she listened scornfully to the silly talk of city folks about the picturesqueness of her old house and garden. It was all grist to her mill, she perceived, and during the next summer it was a grimly amused old miller who watched the antics of Abigail Warner, arrayed in a pseudo-oldfas.h.i.+oned gown of green-flowered muslin, with a quaintly ruffled cap confining her rebellious white hair, talking the most correct book-brand of down-east jargon, and selling flowers at twenty times their value to automobile and carriage folk. She did not mind sacrificing her personal dignity, but she did blush for her garden, reduced to the most obvious commonplaces of flowers that any child could grow. But by September she had saved the school-teacher's pay, and the Martins and the Allens, who had been wavering on account of their children, decided to stay another winter at least.

That was _something_, Miss Abigail thought, that Christmas, as she and Miss Molly tortured their rheumatic limbs to play games with the six children around the tree. She had held rigorously to the old tradition of having the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartened Miss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g it; but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the tall tree, glittering in all the tinsel finery which was left over from the days when the big hall had rung to the laughter of a hundred children and as many more young people, even Miss Abigail felt a catch in her throat as she quavered through "King _Will_yum was King _James's_ son!"

When the games were over and the children sat about soberly, eating their ice-cream and cake, she looked over her shoulder into the big empty room and s.h.i.+vered. The children went away and she and Miss Molly put out the lights in silence. When they came out into the moonlight and looked up and down the deserted street, lined with darkened houses, the face of the younger woman was frankly tear-stained. "Oh, Miss Abigail," she said; "let's give it up!"

Miss Abigail waited an instant, perceptible instant before answering, but, when she did, her voice was full and harsh with its usual vigor.

"Fiddlesticks! You must ha' been losing your sleep. Go tuck yourself up and get a good night's rest and you won't talk such kind of talk!"

But she herself sat up late into the night with a pencil and paper, figuring out sums that had impossible answers.

That March she had a slight stroke of paralysis, and was in an agony of apprehension lest she should not recover enough to plant the flowers for the summer's market. By May, flatly against the doctor's orders, she was dragging herself around the garden on crutches, and she stuck to her post, smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earned enough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel for the schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Allens stayed over; though they announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas that they were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relatives there, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites always trimmed.

When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lower slope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demanded hotly.

"The _tree_ was all right," they answered, "but the children were so mortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying."

Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the road toward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart as she went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off any acknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, after dwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she sat down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the bare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep, rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb as she realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of the mountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to the end.