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V

JANET 

OLD Janet Davidson — it took me a minute or two to recall the surname: we always called her Janet — had been a widow for many a long year, and the task of raising her large family had proved just about as much as she could manage. They were always golden hours in which I strolled across the fields from the Mosgiel manse to sit with her for awhile when her rheumatism was worse than usual or her cough more than ordinarily troublesome. And often, on such occasions, she would lift the veil that concealed the past and let me peer into some phases of her long, brave, patient struggle to keep the wolf from the door. And yet nobody who knew Janet at all well, or who had even seen her face, would have suspected that she was aware of a wolf’s existence. She dwelt in a crazy old weather-board cottage, lying a long way back from the road. In the days of their courtship Alec and she had walked proudly up this road one summer’s evening — it was all fields then — and had selected the quarter-acre section on which they were to build their nest. 

‘We’ll put oor bit cottage right awa’ back,’ Alec had said, ‘and then, if things go weel wi’ us, we may be able to put up a fine place in front some day!’ 

But it was not to be. During the twelve years of Janet’s happy wedded life seven little children came stealing into her heart and home. The cottage had to be twice enlarged. And then, one terrible day, the very thought of which brought to Janet’s face a shadow, like the shadow of a cloud sweeping across a sunlit cornfield, Alec was smitten down. In the heyday of their happiness, in the prime of his lusty manhood, he was taken from her; and poor Janet was left to maintain the desperate struggle alone. During the ‘sair years,’ as she called them, she worked half-time in the woollen mills, leaving the younger children with a neighbour. And you should have seen her garden! That strip of land between the cottage and the road was a picture all the year round. What Janet did not know about the succession of crops was not worth knowing. Occasionally one of Alec’s old mates would look in on Saturday afternoon and do the hard digging for her; but Janet did all the rest. Very rarely could you see an inch of soil lying idle; she worked it for all it was worth. Later on, of course, the boys shared the burden with her. She lived in the cottage to the last. I am not sure that she would have left it even if fortune had poured its favours into her lap. But no such alternatives presented themselves, and, although it is years ago, I recall distinctly the sadness that overcame me as I walked behind her coffin up the long straight path from the porch to the front gate over the site of that grander home of which she and Alec had so often dreamed. 

It was one evening in the early winter that she first opened her heart to me. I had been visiting among the farms all the afternoon, and was making my way back across the fields in the dusk. I had not intended calling on Janet; but I saw her standing in the porch, taking off her apron and sunbonnet, and I did not like to pass. Her sorrow was then some years old; the elder children were at work; her youngest boy was eleven; and the worst of her struggle was over. She told me that she had just come out to fasten the shutters. 

‘Ah, yes,’ I said, perhaps with an unconscious tinge of sadness in my voice, ‘the sunshine doesn’t last long now, Janet. The sun goes down over the back of the mountain, and the day comes to an end.’ 

‘An end!’ she exclaimed, and her face was illumined by one of her radiant smiles. ‘An end! Why, my best time comes after I have put up the shutters. The sunshine is all in the evening. I light the lamp and make up the fire and, one by one, Jessie and Mary and the boys come home. And we have tea, and all their tongues seem to be going at once ; they chatter about the things they have seen and the things they have heard: and whilst we wash up the dishes the girls laugh and the boys argue; and then we settle down for the evening.’

‘And how do you spend it?’ I inquired. 

She was silent for a moment, and the old shadow swept her face. 

‘Would you like me to tell you a secret?’ she asked. 

I said that I should. 

‘Well, you see,’ she went on, ‘it was like this. When my poor Alec left me, I had all the children on my hands, and there was still a mortgage on this wee bit place of ours; and I saw that I should have to work hard and be very careful. And yet I remembered a talk that Alec and I had together when Jessie, the first baby, was born. He was sitting beside my bed with the wee lassie in his arms,’ Janet’s voice faltered for a moment, and I pretended to be interested in a passer-by. Then she collected herself and went on with her story. 

‘“Well,” he said to me as he sat there looking into Jessie’s wee face, “I didn’t have much fun myself when I was a boy. It was fetching and carrying from early morning until late at night, and I always got more kicks than ha’pence. I’ve heard some folks say that what was good enough for them is good enough for their children; but I should like my bairns to look back upon their childhood with pleasanter thoughts than come to me when I look back on mine.”

‘“That’s strange, Alec,” I said, “for before you came into the room I was lying here looking at the wee mite and thinking what a happy girlhood mine was. I am afraid they spoilt me. I had all that heart could wish. It seems like a beautiful dream. And I was thinking that I would do all that a mother can do to make baby’s childhood as happy as mine was. It would be lovely to think that in years to come she would look back upon her girlish days as I look back on mine, and bless us as I bless my father and mother.”

‘And in that very room’ — her eye strayed pensively towards an inner door — ‘we promised each other that we would give our children just the happiest, merriest childhood that any parents could contrive. We did our best,’ Janet went on, ‘and then, when we had got all our children round —’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’ 

She paused for a moment, and then continued her story. 

‘Well,’ she said, ‘when that happened, I thought my burden was greater than I could bear. I suppose it was wicked, but I was angry with God for being so hard on us when we were both of us doing our best. And I could not bear to think that now we should all have to be screwing and scraping, and that our dreams could never come true. I threw myself on the bed and had a good cry. And, as I lay there, a strange idea came to me. Once more I let my memory wander back to the days of my own girlhood. How happy I was! Expense was never considered where my pleasure was concerned. And yet when I came to recall the things that were most pleasant to look back upon, I was astonished to find that so few of them were pleasures that had cost money. How I used to love to run out into the fields and hear the lark singing in the blue sky far above me, and the grasshopper chirping in the grass at my feet! How I delighted in watching the changes that the seasons brought — the hawthorn in the lane, all clothed in a single night with a soft suspicion of green! Then there were the fields all gay with clover or with cowslips; the grassy banks twinkling with primroses and violets; the copses carpeted with bluebells; the dazzling glitter of the buttercups; the sight of the rabbit under the gorse and the squirrel up in the beech-tree; the swaying of the corn beneath the caress of the wind, and the flashing of the red, red poppies as the ears bent to and fro. My happiest memories of girlhood were of walks, sometimes with father, sometimes with mother, sometimes with both, and sometimes all by myself, amidst such scenes as these, wandering along the lanes, climbing the hills or poking about in the forest. And I saw, as I lay there sobbing, that, without any burden of expense, I could teach my bairns to love all such things and enjoy them, and to store their minds with memories as happy as those their mother cherished.’

‘Yes, but Janet,’ I expostulated, ‘you can’t do this on winter evenings. You told me, you know, that your best time came after you have put up the shutters.’

‘Oh, to be sure, to be sure; how I do run on! Well, I saw that other people took their children out of an evening to concerts and entertainments and the like, just as, once upon a time, my mother and father took me. And yet, when I came to look back upon the winter evenings of my girlhood, it was not the evenings that I spent at the entertainments, but the evenings that I spent by the fireside, that I recalled with the greatest pleasure. Curled up in the arm-chair, or sprawling on the rug, whilst mother read a book or father told a story, those were my golden hours. And so I got into the way, even before Alec died, of reading to the children or telling them a story before putting them to bed. But after Alec was taken I took more pains with it. I could not bear to think that my lads and lasses might go off by themselves of an evening in search of the pleasures I could not afford to give them.’

It flashed upon me as she spoke that I scarcely ever met any of the Davidsons on the street after dark. 

‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘I had to begin by telling them nursery rhymes and fairy-tales — “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” “The Babes in the Wood,” and all that kind of thing ; and, later on, Jessie would tell these same stories to the little ones whilst I cleared away the tea. And then, after the dishes were all put away, and the little ones were in bed, we got out the book. We began with Christie’s Old Organ and A Peep Behind the Scenes. After that we read Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Captain Cook’s Voyages. It’s just wonderful the number of books we get through, and the fun we have.’ 

She glanced at the rows of old volumes that rested, like honoured pensioners, on a neat but evidently home-made set of bookshelves. 

‘At one time I used to do all the reading, but then, in those days, I bought the book. We used to make a sixpenny book last us a month. But when the elder children grew bigger, we made a new rule. They took it in turns to buy the book; and the buyer had the privilege of selecting and the task of reading it. The boys brought home most of Ballantyne’s stories; and the girls generally choose one of Dickens’s or Scott’s. Of course, they’re getting big now — Jessie’s twenty-two and Davie’s eighteen — and we read now chiefly for the younger ones; but I notice that even Davie hurries down the township for anything he wants so as to be back in time for the reading. You would never believe the fun we’ve all had together. I remember how we laughed over Topsy and Mr. Pickwick and how we cried over Uncle Tom and Little Nell. Oh, yes, my sunshine all comes in the evening, after the shutters are fastened and the lamp lit I But here’s Davie now!’

I turned to greet him, and, a minute or two later, bade them farewell and finished my walk across the fields to the manse. 

Janet was not old when she died, although her long widowhood, her trying cough, and her severe rheumatism made us think of her as venerable. She breathed her last, mourned by all her bairns, in the very bed beside which Alec sat with the baby in his arms. Several of the children had married by this time, and nothing pleased Janet more than to romp with her grandchildren. 

Donald came to see me after the funeral. Donald was her youngest boy. 

‘Well, Donald,’ I said, ‘it’s a great thing to have had such a mother!’

‘My word it is I’ he replied. ‘With next to nothing to come and go upon she made up her mind to give us all a good time, and, goodness knows, she did it! If ever a lot of children were happier than we were, I should like to have known them!’

But I could see that this was not the business that had brought him. 

‘I want to join the church,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Mother always led us in family worship every night after reading, and she always prayed that we might all be members of the church and adorn our membership by lives lived in the fear of God. I’m the only one whose name is not on the church roll. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I promised mother last week I’d join.’

He did; and in the work and worship of that church, and in the organizations and activities of that little town, there were very few movements in which one or other of the Davidsons did not play a prominent and honourable part.