The Brown Mouse Read online

  CHAPTER IX

  JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY

  The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to thelowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shakenoff into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, asthe very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but thereis something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of havingreceived the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region ofhigh average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred squaremiles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Beingsensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some littlesense of increased importance as she drove her father's littleone-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp Decemberweather, just before Christmas.

  The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress inthe management of the little car which her father had offered to lend herfor use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to comeunder her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothedin more or less authority and queening it over her little army ofteachers.

  Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather anagreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talkwith him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexionwhipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.

  "Don't you think father is lovely?" said she. "He is going to let me usethe runabout when I visit the schools."

  "That will be good," said Haakon. "It will save you lots of time. I hopeyou make the county pay for the gasoline."

  "I haven't thought about that," said Jennie. "Everybody's been so nice tome--I want to give as well as receive."

  "Why," said Haakon, "you will yust begin to receive when your salarybegins in Yanuary."

  "Oh, no!" said Jennie. "I've received much more than that now! You don'tknow how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all myold friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls,just as if I amounted to something."

  "And you don't know how proud I feel," said Haakon, "to have in countyoffice a little girl I used to hold on my lap."

  In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earnedthe initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hiredman on Colonel Woodruff's farm. Now he was a rather richer man than thecolonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was amild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, andpossessed of that aptitude for local politics which makes so good acitizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fiftyto sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good partyman and conscious of being entitled to his voice in party matters. Thisseemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.

  "Yennie," said he, "this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up."

  "Lined up! What do you mean?"

  "The way he is doing in the school," said Haakon, "is all wrong. If youcan't line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybodyhas his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble withhim, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for asecond term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention withoutyour home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, everypiece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him upand have him do right."

  "But he is so funny," said Jennie.

  "He likes you," said Haakon. "You can line him up."

  Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarrassment, got out for thepurpose of cranking her machine.

  "But if I can not line him up?" said she.

  "I tank," said Haakon, "if you can't line him up, you will have a chanceto rewoke his certificate when you take office."

  So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing ofthe big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy ofit, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson's suggestion as to"lining up" Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a gooddeal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentmentat Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent thenecessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. Theidea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning ofthe old and tried school methods under which both he and she had beeneducated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored"more practical education," and Jim's farm arithmetic, farm physiology,farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed analysis, corn clubsand the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation thenext summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact thatthey introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make herofficial life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionaryand impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truthalways comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.

  "Father," said she that night, "let's have a little Christmas party."

  "All right," said the colonel. "Whom shall we invite?"

  "Don't laugh," said she. "I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, andnobody else."

  "All right," reiterated the colonel. "But why?"

  "Oh," said Jennie, "I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some ofhis foolishness."

  "You want to line him up, do you?" said the colonel. "Well, that's goodpolitics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim."

  "Rather unlikely," said Jennie.

  "I don't know about that," said the colonel, smiling. "I begin to thinkthat Jim's a Brown Mouse. I've told you about the Brown Mouse, haven'tI?"

  "Yes," said Jennie. "You've told me. But Professor Darbishire's brown micewere simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens toemerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn't prove that theBrown Mouse is any good."

  "Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "And he founded thegreatest breed of horses in the world."

  "You say that," said Jennie, "because you're a lover of the Morganhorse."

  "Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "So was GeorgeWashington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears hechanges things in a little way or a big way."

  "For the better, always?" asked Jennie.

  "No," said the colonel. "The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headedsavagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendeliansegregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. Youmay get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas,by all means."

  In due time Jennie's invitation reached Jim and his mother, like anexplosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling--quiteupsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait forsocial recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself asquite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period,she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings,scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman ofall work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined bythe exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. Atsuch times she sat at the family table and participated in theneighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or otherfemale relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is andalways has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invitedguest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff schoolcould give him in the way of education, found his first job at "making ahand," Mrs. Irwin, at her son's urgent request, ceased going out to workfor a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had neversucceeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered asingle one of the houses in which she had formerly served.

  "I can't go, James," said she; "I can't possibly go."

  "Oh,
yes, you can! Why not?" said Jim. "Why not?"

  "You know I don't go anywhere," urged Mrs. Irwin.

  "That's no reason," said her son.

  "I haven't a thing to wear," said Mrs. Irwin.

  "Nothing to wear!"

  I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which JimIrwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty,and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to hismind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure--but hismother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in thehouse or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things whichmade 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 therules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turnedback--but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thoughtfurther than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonderwhere the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for hismother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garmentsin which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy wholives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companionship with Carlyle,Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H.Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of theexperiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes arederived in a transcendental manner from _Sartor Resartus_ and theagricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter andFeeding.

  "Why, mother," said he, "I think it would be pretty hard to explain to theWoodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you inthe 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. Fromthe bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress--a dress whichJim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off thecombined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothedout 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 somethingvery precious.

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

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

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