But Ralph heard no more. The buckwheat-cakes had lost their flavor. He remembered that the colt had not yet had his oats, and so, in the very midst of Aunt Matilda’s affecting allusion to his mother, like a stiff-necked reprobate that he was, Ralph Hartsook rose abruptly from the table, put on his hat, and went out toward the stable.
“I declare,” said Mrs. White, descending suddenly from her high moral standpoint, “I declare that boy has stepped right on the threshold of the back door,” and she stuffed her white handkerchief into her pocket, and took down the floor-cloth to wipe off the imperceptible blemish left by Ralph’s boot-heels. And Mr. White followed his nephew to the stable to request that he would be a little careful what he did about anybody in the poorhouse, as any trouble with the Joneses might defeat Mr. White’s nomination to the judgeship of the Court of Common Pleas.
XXIII
A Charitable Institution
When Ralph got back to Miss Nancy Sawyer’s, Shocky was sitting up in bed talking to Miss Nancy and Miss Semantha. His cheeks were a little flushed with fever and the excitement of telling his story; theirs were wet with tears. “Ralph,” whispered Miss Nancy, as she drew him into the kitchen, “I want you to get a buggy or a sleigh, and go right over to the poorhouse and fetch that boy’s mother over here. It’ll do me more good than any sermon I ever heard to see that boy in his mother’s arms tomorrow. We can keep the old lady over Sunday.”
Ralph was delighted, so delighted that he came near kissing good Miss Nancy Sawyer, whose plain face was glorified by her generosity.
But he did not go to the poorhouse immediately. He waited until he saw Bill Jones, the Superintendent of the Poorhouse, and Pete Jones, the County Commissioner, who was still somewhat shuck up, ride up to the courthouse. Then he drove out of the village, and presently hitched his horse to the poorhouse fence, and took a survey of the outside. Forty hogs, nearly ready for slaughter, wallowed in a pen in front of the forlorn and dilapidated house; for though the commissioners allowed a claim for repairs at every meeting, the repairs were never made, and it would not do to scrutinize Mr. Jones’s bills too closely, unless you gave up all hope of renomination to office. One curious effect of political aspirations in Hoopole County, was to shut the eyes that they could not see, to close the ears that they could not hear, and to destroy the sense of smell. But Ralph, not being a politician, smelled the hog-pen without and the stench within, and saw everywhere the transparent fraud, and heard the echo of Jones’s cruelty.
A weak-eyed girl admitted him, and as he did not wish to make his business known at once, he affected a sort of idle interest in the place, and asked to be allowed to look round. The weak-eyed girl watched him. He found that all the women with children, twenty persons in all, were obliged to sleep in one room, which, owing to the hill-slope, was partly under ground, and which had but half a window for light, and no ventilation, except the chance draft from the door. Jones had declared that the women with children must stay there—“he warn’t goin’ to have brats a-runnin’ over the whole house.” Here were vicious women and good women, with their children, crowded like chickens in a coop for market. And there were, as usual in such places, helpless, idiotic women with illegitimate children. Of course this room was the scene of perpetual quarreling and occasional fighting.
In the quarters devoted to the insane, people slightly demented and raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while there were also those utter wrecks which sat in heaps on the floor, mumbling and muttering unintelligible words, the whole current of their thoughts hopelessly muddled, turning around upon itself in eddies never ending.
“That air woman,” said the weak-eyed girl, “used to holler a heap when she was brought in here. But Pap knows how to subjue ’em. He slapped her in the mouth every time she hollered. She don’t make no furss now, but jist sets down that way all day, and keeps a-whisperin’.”
Ralph understood it. When she came in she was the victim of mania; but she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy. Indeed this state of incurable imbecility seemed the end toward which all traveled. Shut in these bare rooms, with no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food, cases of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy.
One young woman, called Phil, a sweet-faced person, apparently a farmer’s wife, came up to Ralph and looked at him kindly, playing with the buttons on his coat in a childlike simplicity. Her blue-drilling dress was sewed all over with patches of white, representing ornamental buttons. The womanly instinct toward adornment had in her taken this childish turn.
“Don’t you think they ought to let me go home?” she said with a sweetness and a wistful, longing, homesick look, that touched Ralph to the heart. He looked at her, and then at the muttering crones, and he could see no hope of any better fate for her. She followed him round the barn-like rooms, returning every now and then to her question. “Don’t you think I might go home now?”
The weak-eyed girl had been called away for a moment, and Ralph stood looking into a cell, where there was a man with a gay red plume in his hat and a strip of red flannel about his waist. He strutted up and down like a drill-sergeant.
“I am General Andrew Jackson,” he began. “People don’t believe
