Hempfield

As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.

Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the parlour.

Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office through the golden haze of later events.

It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.

Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper: "John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."

Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events, just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep way – for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the ideal – these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she loved with all the devotion of her young soul.

He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life well – all of it – and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.

"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.

He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.

As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her father had written them).

"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."

He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by the window in his long apron, a composing stick in his hand, with the tears rolling unheeded down his face.

I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, passed through the fire of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier – he was too young at the time – the most impressionable years of his boyhood were saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them, the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's assassination.

There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and another over the mantel in the dining-room – the one that played so important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.

Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his throat:

You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier;
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complaisant British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,
His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,
His lack of all we prize as debonair,
Of power or will to shine, or art to please…

When he had finished reading, he would take off his spectacles and wipe them, and say to Anthy:

"Lincoln was the greatest man this country has ever produced."

He was a curious combination of hardheadedness, of ironical wisdom, and of humour, and somewhere, hidden deep within, of molten sentiment. He was a regular Yankee.

One night he got more than ordinarily tired, and just stopped. They found him in bed the next morning, his legs drawn up under the coverlet, a volume of Don Quixote open on his knees, his empty pipe fallen from his lips, the lamp dying out on a table near him. At his elbow were two of the inevitable yellow slips:

Squire Baker of Arnoville was a visitor at Lawyer Perkins's on Monday

Apples stopped yesterday at Banks's store at 30 cents a peck – on their way up (adv)

He never knew what a hero he was: he had made a living for thirty years out of a country newspaper.

Anthy came home from college to the forlorn and empty and ugly house – and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. This period of loneliness made a deep impression upon her later years. When at last she could bear to open the envelope labelled: "To Anthy – in case of my death," she found this letter:

Dear Anthy: I am leaving the Star to you. There is nothing else except the homestead – and the debts. Do what you like with all of them – but look after your Uncle Newt.

Now, Anthy's earliest memories were bound up with the printing-office. There was never a time that she did not know the smell of printer's ink. As a child she had delighted to tip over the big basket and play with the paper ribbons from the cutting machine. Later, she had helped on press days to fold and label the papers. She was early a pastmaster in the art of making paste, and she knew better than any one else the temperamental eccentricities of the old-fashioned Dick labeller. She could set type (passably) and run the hand press. But as for taking upon herself the activities of her tireless father – who was at once editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, advertising solicitor, and father confessor for the community of Hempfield – she could not do it. There is only a genius here and there who can fill the high and difficult position of country editor.

The responsibility, therefore, fell upon the Captain, who for so many years had been the titular and ornamental editor of the Star. It was the Captain who wrote the editorials, the obituaries, and the "write-ups," who attended the political conventions, and was always much in demand for speeches at the Fourth of July celebrations.

But, strangely enough, although the Star editorials sparkled with undimmed lustre, although the obituaries were even longer and more wonderful than ever before – so long as to crowd out some of the items about Johnny Gorman's pigs and Mrs. Hopkins's visits to her sister, although the fine old Captain worked harder than ever, the light of the luminary of Hempfield grew steadily dimmer. Fergus saw it early and it distressed his Scotch soul. Anthy felt it, and soon the whole town knew of the decay of the once thrifty institution in the little old printing-office back from the street. Brother Kendrick, of that nefarious rag, the Sterling Democrat, even dared to respond to one of the Captain's most powerful and pungent editorials with a witticism in which he referred to the Weakly Star of Hempfield, and printed "Weakly" in capital letters that no one might miss his joke.

It was at this low stage in the orbit of the Star that I came first to the printing-office, trying to discover the man who could shout "Fudge" with such fine enthusiasm – and found myself, quite irresistibly, hitching my wagon to the Star.

CHAPTER IV

ENTER MR. ED SMITH

It is only with difficulty thus far in my narrative that I have kept Norton Carr out of it. When you come to know him you will understand why. He is inseparably bound up with every memory I have of the printing-office. The other day, when I was describing my first visit to the establishment of Doane & Doane, I kept seeing the figure of Nort bending over the gasoline engine. I kept hearing him whistle in the infectious low monotone he had, and when I spoke of the printing press I all but called it "Old Harry" (Nort christened the ancient Hoe press, Old Harry, which every one adopted as being an appropriate name). I even half expected to have him break out in my pages with one of his absurd remarks, when I knew well enough that he had no business to be in the story at all. He hadn't come yet, and Anthy and Fergus and the old Captain were positively the only ones there.

But Nort, however impatient he may be getting, will have to wait even a little while yet, for notable events were to occur in the printing-office just before he arrived, without which, indeed, he never could have arrived at all. If it had not been for the ploughing and harrowing of Ed Smith, painful as it was to that ancient and sedate institution, the Hempfield Star, there never would have been any harvest for Norton Carr, nor for me, nor for Anthy. So good may come even out of evil.

As I narrate these preliminary events, however, you will do well to keep in your thought a picture of Nort going about his pleasures – I fear, at that time, somewhat unsteadily – in the great city, not knowing in the least that chance, assisted by a troublesome organ within called a soul, was soon to deposit him in the open streets of a town he had never heard of in all his life, but which was our own familiar town of Hempfield.

The thought of Nort looking rather mistily down the common – he was standing just in front of the Congregational Church – and asking, "What town am I in, anyhow?" lingers in my memory as one of the amusing things I have known.

Late in June I began to feel distinctly the premonitory rumblings and grumblings of the storm which was now rapidly gathering around the Star. It was a very clever Frenchman, I believe – though not clever enough to make me remember his name – who, upon observing certain disturbances in the farther reaches of the solar system, calculated by sheer mathematical genius that there was an enormous planet, infinitely distant from the sun, which nobody had yet discovered.

It was thus by certain signs of commotion in one of its issues that I recognized a portentous but undiscovered Neptune, which was plainly disturbing the course of the Star. A big new advertisement stared at me from the middle of the first page, and there was a certain crisp quality in some of the reading notices – from which the letters "adv" had been suspiciously omitted – the origin of which I could not recognize. The second week the change was even more marked. There were several smart new headings: "Jots and Tittles from Littleton," I remember, was one of them, and even the sanctity of the editorial column had been invaded with an extraordinary production quite foreign to the Captain's pen. It was entitled:

"All Together Now! Boost Hempfield!"

I can scarcely describe how I was affected by these changes; but I should have realized that any man bold enough to hitch his wagon to a star must prepare himself for a swift course through the skies, and not take it amiss if he collides occasionally with the heavenly bodies.

I think it was secretly amusing to Harriet during the weeks that followed my first great visit to the printing-office to watch the eagerness with which I awaited the postman on the publication days of the Star. I even went out sometimes to meet him, and took the paper from his hand. I have been a devoted reader of books these many years, but I think I have never read anything with sharper interest than I now began to read the Star. I picked out the various items, editorials, reading notices, and the like, and said to myself: "That's the old Captain's pungent pen," or "Anthy must have written that," or "I warrant the Scotchman, Fergus, had a finger in that pie." As I read the editorials I could fairly see the old Captain at his littered desk, the cat rubbing against his leg, the canary singing in the cage above him, and his head bent low as he wrote. And I was disturbed beyond measure by the signs of an unknown hand at work upon the Star.

"I thought, David, you did not care for country newspapers," said my sister.

She wore that comfortably superior smile which becomes her so well. The fact is, she is superior.

"Well," said I, "you may talk all you like about Browning and Carlyle – "

"I have not," said my sister, "referred to Browning or Carlyle."

"You may talk all you like" – I disdained her pointed interruption – "but for downright human nature here in the country, give me the Hempfield Star."

Once during these weeks I paid a short obligatory visit to the printing-office, and gave Anthy the name of my uncle in California and got the envelopes that had been printed for me. I also took in a number of paragraphs relating to affairs in our neighbourhood, and told Anthy (only I did not call her Anthy then) that if agreeable I would contribute occasionally to the Star. She seemed exceedingly grateful, and I liked her better than ever.