He Fell In Love With His Wife - Edward Payson Roe (the speed reading book .txt) 📗
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taken advantage of his need and induced him to assume the burden through false
representation. To a man of Holcroft’s simple, straightforward nature, any
phase of trickery was intensely repugnant, and the fact that he had been
overreached in a matter relating to his dearest hopes galled him to the quick.
He possessed the strong common sense of his class; his wife had been like him
in this respect, and her influence had intensified the trait. Queer people
with abnormal manners excited his intense aversion. The most charitable view
that he could take of Mrs. Mumpson was that her mind—such as she had—was
unbalanced, that it was an impossibility for her to see any subject or duty in
a sensible light or its right proportions.
Her course, so prejudicial to her own interests, and her incessant and stilted
talk, were proof to his mind of a certain degree of insanity, and he had heard
that people in this condition often united to their unnatural ways a wonderful
degree of cunning. Her child was almost as uncanny as herself and gave him a
shivering sense of discomfort whenever he caught her small, greenish eyes
fixed upon him.
“Yet, she’ll be the only one who’ll earn her salt. I don’t see how I’m going
to stand ‘em—I don’t, indeed, but suppose I’ll have to for three months, or
else sell out and clear out.”
By the time he reached town a cold rain had set in. He went at once to the
intelligence office, but could obtain no girl for Mrs. Mumpson to
“superintend,” nor any certain promise of one. He did not much care, for he
felt that the new plan was not going to work. Having bartered all his eggs
for groceries, he sold the old stove and bought a new one, then drew from the
bank a little ready money. Since his butter was so inferior, he took it to
his friend Tom Watterly, the keeper of the poorhouse.
Prosperous Tom slapped his old friend on the back and said, “You look awfully
glum and chopfallen, Jim. Come now, don’t look at the world as if it was made
of tar, pitch, and turpentine. I know your luck’s been hard, but you make it
a sight harder by being so set in all your ways. You think there’s no place
to live on God’s earth but that old up-and-downhill farm of yours that I
wouldn’t take as a gift. Why, man alive, there’s a dozen things you can turn
your hand to; but if you will stay there, do as other men do. Pick out a
smart, handy woman that can make butter yaller as gold, that’ll bring gold,
and not such limpsy-slimsy, ghostly-looking stuff as you’ve brought me. Bein’
it’s you, I’ll take it and give as much for it as I’d pay for better, but you
can’t run your old ranch in this fashion.”
“I know it, Tom,” replied Holcroft ruefully. “I’m all at sea; but, as you say,
I’m set in my ways, and I’d rather live on bread and milk and keep my farm
than make money anywhere else. I guess I’ll have to give it all up, though,
and pull out, but it’s like rooting up one of the old oaks in the meadow lot.
The fact is, Tom, I’ve been fooled into one of the worst scrapes I’ve got into
yet.”
“I see how it is,” said Tom heartily and complacently, “you want a practical,
foresighted man to talk straight at you for an hour or two and clear up the
fog you’re in. You study and brood over little things out there alone until
they seem mountains which you can’t get over nohow, when, if you’d take one
good jump out, they’d be behind you. Now, you’ve got to stay and take a bite
with me, and then we’ll light our pipes and untangle this snarl. No backing
out! I can do you more good than all the preachin’ you ever heard. Hey,
there, Bill!” shouting to one of the paupers who was detailed for such work,
“take this team to the barn and feed ‘em. Come in, come in, old feller!
You’ll find that Tom Watterly allus has a snack and a good word for an old
crony.”
Holcroft was easily persuaded, for he felt the need of cheer, and he looked up
to Tom as a very sagacious, practical man. So he said, “Perhaps you can see
farther into a millstone than I can, and if you can show me a way out of my
difficulties you’ll be a friend sure enough.”
“Why, of course I can. Your difficulties are all here and here,” touching his
bullet head and the region of his heart. “There aint no great difficulties in
fact, but, after you’ve brooded out there a week or two alone, you think
you’re caught as fast as if you were in a bear trap. Here, Angy,” addressing
his wife, “I’ve coaxed Holcroft to take supper with us. You can hurry it up a
little, can’t you?”
Mrs. Watterly gave their guest a cold, limp hand and a rather frigid welcome.
But this did not disconcert him. “It’s only her way,” he had always thought.
“She looks after her husband’s interests as mine did for me, and she don’t
talk him to death.”
This thought, in the main, summed up Mrs. Watterly’s best traits.
She was a commonplace, narrow, selfish woman, whose character is not worth
sketching. Tom stood a little in fear of her, and was usually careful not to
impose extra tasks, but since she helped him to save and get ahead, he
regarded her as a model wife.
Holcroft shared in his opinion and sighed deeply as he sat down to supper.
“Ah, Tom!” he said, “you’re a lucky man. You’ve got a wife that keeps
everything indoors up to the mark, and gives you a chance to attend to your
own proper business. That’s the way it was with mine. I never knew what a
lopsided, helpless creature a man was until I was left alone. You and I were
lucky in getting the women we did, but when my partner left me, she took all
the luck with her. That aint the worst. She took what’s more than luck and
money and everything. I seemed to lose with her my grit and interest in most
things. It’ll seem foolishness to you, but I can’t take comfort in anything
much except working that old farm that I’ve worked and played on ever since I
can remember anything. You’re not one of those fools, Tom, that have to learn
from their own experience. Take a bit from mine, and be good to your wife
while you can. I’d give all I’m worth—I know that aint much—if I could say
some things to my wife and do some things for her that I didn’t do.”
Holcroft spoke in the simplicity of a full and remorseful heart, but he
unconsciously propitiated Mrs. Watterly in no small degree. Indeed, she felt
that he had quite repaid her for his entertainment, and the usually taciturn
woman seconded his remarks with much emphasis.
“Well now, Angy,” said Tom, “if you averaged up husbands in these parts I
guess you’d find you were faring rather better than most women folks. I let
you take the bit in your teeth and go your own jog mostly. Now, own up, don’t
I?”
“That wasn’t my meaning, exactly, Tom,” resumed Holcroft. “You and I could
well afford to let our wives take their own jog, for they always jogged steady
and faithful and didn’t need any urging and guiding. But even a dumb critter
likes a good word now and then and a little patting on the back. It doesn’t
cost us anything and does them a sight of good. But we kind of let the
chances slip by and forget about it until like enough it’s too late.”
“Well,” replied Tom, with a deprecatory look at his wife, “Angy don’t take to
pettin’ very much. She thinks it’s a kind of foolishness for such middle-aged
people as we’re getting to be.”
“A husband can show his consideration without blarneying,” remarked Mrs.
Watterly coldly. “When a man takes on in that way, you may be sure he wants
something extra to pay for it.”
After a little thought Holcroft said, “I guess it’s a good way to pay for it
between husband and wife.”
“Look here, Jim, since you’re so well up on the matrimonial question, why in
thunder don’t you marry again? That would settle all your difficulties,” and
Tom looked at his friend with a sort of wonder that he should hesitate to take
this practical, sensible course.
“It’s very easy for you to say, ‘Why don’t you marry again?’ If you were in
my place you’d see that there are things in the way of marrying for the sake
of having a good butter maker and all that kind of thing.”
“Mr. Watterly wouldn’t be long in comforting himself,” remarked his
wife.—“His advice to you makes the course he’d take mighty clear.”
“Now, Angy!” said Tom reproachfully. “Well,” he added with a grin, “you’re
forewarned. So you’ve only to take care of yourself and not give me a
chance.”
“The trouble is,” Holcroft resumed, “I don’t see how an honest man is going to
comfort himself unless it all comes about in some natural sort of way. I
suppose there are people who can marry over and over again, just as easy as
they’d roll off a log. It aint for me to judge ‘em, and I don’t understand
how they do it. You are a very practical man, Tom, but just you put yourself
in my shoes and see what you’d do. In the first place, I don’t know of a
woman in the world that I’d think of marrying. That’s saying nothing against
the women,—there’s lots too good for me,—but I don’t know ‘em and I can’t go
around and hunt ‘em up. Even if I could, with my shy, awkward ways, I
wouldn’t feel half so nervous starting out on a bear hunt. Here’s difficulty
right at the beginning. Supposing I found a nice, sensible woman, such as I’d
be willing to marry, there isn’t one chance in a hundred she’d look at an old
fellow like me. Another difficulty: Supposing she would; suppose she looked
me square in the eyes and said, ‘So you truly want a wife?’ what in thunder
would I say then?—I don’t want a wife, I want a housekeeper, a butter maker,
one that would look after my interests as if they were her own; and if I could
hire a woman that would do what I wish, I’d never think of marrying. I can’t
tell a woman that I love her when I don’t. If I went to a minister with a
woman I’d be deceiving him, and deceiving her, and perjuring myself
promiscuously. I married once according to law and gospel and I was married
through and through, and I can’t do the thing over again in any way that would
seem to me like marrying at all. The idea of me sitting by the fire and
wishing that the woman who sat on the t’other side of the stove was my first
wife! Yet I couldn’t help doing this any more than breathing. Even if there
was any chance of my succeeding I can’t see anything square or honest in my
going out and hunting up a wife as a mere matter of business. I know other
people do it and I’ve thought a good deal about it myself, but when it comes
to the point of acting
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