We Cant Have Everything | Page 5

shyster lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last penny. One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantalizingly waved in front of his victim while he breathed proverbs about the delayful courts.
This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising that his habit of mind gave pennies a grave importance. Of course, he carried his mind home with him from the office, and every demand of his wife or children for money was again a test of ability in claim-agency tactics. He fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his dependents felt that it was generally better to go without things than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for them with Pa.
For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the "light bread," and made the clothes and washed them and mended them till they vanished. She cut the boys' hair; she schooled the girls to help her in the kitchen and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve-jars. Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her darning-needle. It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun started his fire on the eastern hills.
She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak. She made home a region of everlasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children, merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on earth but of nothing in heaven.
Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse. Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother could not account for it. She could scold them well, but she could not scold them good.
The daughter on the train, the youngest--named Kedzie after an aunt who was the least poor of the relatives--was just growing up into a similar career. Her highest prayer was that her path might lead her to a clerkship in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father announced that he was going to New York.
Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had never traveled far. To undertake New York was hardly less remarkable than to run over to the moon for a few days.
When he brought the news home he could hardly get up the front steps with it. When he announced it at the table, and tried to be careless, his hand trembled till the saucerful of coffee at his quivering lips splashed over on the clean red-plaid table-cloth.
The occasion of Thropp's call to New York was this: he had joined a "benevolent order" of the Knights of Something-or-other in his early years and had risen high in the chapter in his home town. When one of the members died, the others attended his funeral in full regalia, consisting of each individual's Sunday clothes, enhanced with a fringed sash and lappets. Also there was a sword to carry. The advantage of belonging to the order was that the member got the funeral for nothing and his wife got the further consolation of a sum of money.
Mrs. Thropp bore her neighbors no more ill-will than they deserved, but she did enjoy their funerals. They gave her husband an excuse for his venerable silk hat and his gilded glave. Sometimes as she took her hands out of the dough and dried them on her apron to fasten his sash about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval countess buckling the armor on her doughty earl. She had never heard of such persons, but she knew their epic uplift.
Now, Mr. Thropp had paid his dues and his insurance premiums for years and years. They were his one extravagance. Also he had persuaded Mrs. Thropp's brother Sol to do the same. Sol had died recently and left his insurance money to Mrs. Thropp. Sol's own wife, after cherishing long-deferred hopes of spending that money herself, had been hauled away first. She never got that insurance money. Neither did any one else; the central office in New York failed to pay up.
The annual convention was about to be held in the metropolis, and there was to be