Part 9 (1/2)

”Nothing to wear!”

I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim Irwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty, and the a.s.sociation of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure--but his mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which made 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 the rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned back--but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fas.h.i.+oned into the garments in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companions.h.i.+p with Carlyle, Th.o.r.eau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H.

Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are derived in a transcendental manner from _Sartor Resartus_ and the agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and Feeding.

”Why, mother,” said he, ”I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in the 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. From the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress--a dress which Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed out 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 something very precious.

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

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

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

CHAPTER X

HOW JIM WAS LINED UP

There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they were a queer couple. They weren't like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of a different pattern. To be sure, Jim's clothes were not especially noteworthy, being just s.h.i.+ny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the inability of a New York sweatshop to antic.i.p.ate the prodigality of Nature in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often enjoyed Jim's presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of the land. Jim's queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his personality.

On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin's queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white and red and green--tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike's Peak. Jennie felt that it must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs.

Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story--a story in which the stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with knowledge that her dress didn't fit, and with the difficulty of behaving naturally--like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years'

term--that she took on a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so have blotted out his record as her father's field-hand, he would have seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course, but the sort people look after--and follow.

”Come to dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the other fixings of a Christmas dinner. ”It's good enough, what there is of it, and there's enough of it such as it is--but the dressing in the turkey would be better for a little more sage!”

The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family melted away in a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie.

The colonel, in stiff starched s.h.i.+rt, black tie and frock coat, carved with much empress.e.m.e.nt, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of the value of manner.

”I had bigger turkeys,” said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, ”but I thought it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat.”

”One of the hens would 'a' been plenty,” replied Mrs. Irwin. ”How much did they weigh?”

”About fifteen pounds apiece,” was the answer. ”The gobbler would 'a'

weighed thirty, I guess. He's pure Mammoth Bronze.”

”I wish,” said Jim, ”that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild bronze turkeys from Mexico.”

”Why?” asked the colonel.

”They're the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys,” said Jim, ”and they're bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even.

They're a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our common birds originated.”