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Ida Hauchawout
by
He paused and looked up, and I confess that by now my mouth had unconsciously opened a little. The simplicity! The naïf unconsciousness of possible ridicule, of anachronism, of false interpretation on the part of those who could not know! Could a mind be so obtuse to even the most elementary phases of fact as to believe that this was not ridiculous? I stared while he gazed, waiting for some favorable comment.
“Tell me,” I managed to say at last, “did you write all that yourself?”
“Well, you know the papers publish them death-rhymes right along, every week. I see ’em in ‘The Banner,’ an’ I just took some of the lines from them, but most of ’em are mine.”
“You have quite a few lines there,” I volunteered, trying to evade the necessity for comment.”At ten cents a line you are going to have a big bill to pay.”
“That’s so,” he agreed, scratching his head rather ruefully.”I hadn’t thought o’ that. Let’s see,” and he began to count them.
Looking at him as he counted up the cost of his poetic flight, which totaled three dollars and forty cents, as he finally announced, and thinking of his wife, the dreary round of her days, the heavy labor up to the very hour of her death, the carefully exacted agreement as to the ultimate disposition of her property in case of her death, I could not help thinking of the pathos and the futility of so much that we call life and effort, the absolute nonsense that living becomes in so many instances. Above me as I speculated was that great blazing ball we call the “sun” spinning about in space and with its attendant planets. And upon the surface of this thing, “the earth,” we, with our millions of little things we call “homes” and “possessions.” And about and above and beneath us, mysteries, mysteries, mysteries. Not even within miles of a guess as to what we are or what the sun is or the “reason” for our being here for anything. And yet passion and lust and beauty and greed and yearning, this endless pother and bitterness and delight in order to retain this elusive and inexplicable something, “life,” “us,” “ours,” in space. Birds cawing, trees blowing and whispering, fields teeming with mysterious and yet needed things, and then, on every hand, this wealth of tragedy. Life living on life, men and animals plotting and scheming as though there were only so much to be had and all of that in the possession of others.
And yet, despite the mystery and the suffering and the bitterness, here was this golden day, an enormous treasure in itself, and these lovely trees, those mountains blue, this wondrous, soothing panorama. Beauty, beauty, beauty, appealing and consoling to the heart — life’s anodyne. And here, in the very heart of it, Ida Hauchawout, and her father, with hi
s “no enimel gets fet py me,” and his son who threw a pitchfork at him, and this poor clown before me with his death-rhymes and his fear of losing the little that had been left to him. Hislove. Hisloss. Hisgain. Hisdesire to place himselfright before the “world.” This was what he was rhyming about. This was what he was worrying about.
Was he guilty of any wrong before the world? Not a bit that I could see. Was he entitled to what he had come by? As much so as any of us are entitled to anything. But here he was, worrying, worrying, worrying, and trying to decide in the face of his loss or gain whether his verse, this tribute or self-justification, was worth three dollars and forty cents to him as a display in a miserable, meagerly circulated and quickly forgotten country newspaper.