Beggars Can Choose

I

THERE are three of us: my husband, who cannot be with us, but is sharing our adventure in spirit; nine-year-old John; and myself. We are city folk who have moved into a remote Vermont hill town to live. This, in bare outline, is all there is to our story. ‘Family in reduced circumstances tries the simple life.’ Our answer to the depression was as banal as that.

Yet it did not seem banal to John and me. This stiff New England parlor, with its two Boston rockers, the ‘ modern ’ wood heater, the old schoolmaster’s desk; the small white schoolhouse on the hill; this wide New England street which in the space of three city blocks becomes a country lane — to John and me these details blended into a scene as strange as Timbuktu, as foreign as Turkestan. To us they represented the Unknown, and we picked our way among the daily hazards of village life with the caution, as well as the exhilaration, of explorers.

For it was to the city that we belonged, unmistakably. We had lived all our lives in Chicago. We had derived our living and our traditions from the Big Town. Ours was a folklore of skyscrapers and taxicabs, nurses on park benches, ‘play groups,’ speakeasies, and elevated trains. Our conditioned reflexes, which would have served either of us admirably in a State Street traffic jam, were quite inadequate when the chimneys did n’t draw and the wind blew cold. Our manners and morals, our accomplishments and skills, were of scarcely more service to us than our reflexes. Could we count John’s freedom from inhibitions an asset in this Puritan community? Or my lively ‘line’ of polite conversation? Hardly. So we have had to begin at the beginning and acquire new and more appropriate mental furniture.

In a time of dire need and actual starvation our problem ought not, perhaps, to be rated a serious one. But it is serious to us, and to many others of America’s New Poor who have had to grapple with the same dilemma which faced us before we decided to come here. For each of us has a Moloch who must be fed. We call him our Standard-of-Living, or Position-inthe-Community. In the boom days his appetite grew with eating, but he does not reverse the process and tighten his belt when times are hard. Since many of us can no longer feed our Molochs, we must liberate ourselves from them, and in doing so every man must be his own Houdini. For each the way out will be different. There is no master key that will free us all.

There is at least one mental hazard, however, that all of us who take the road to freedom will have to pass. Each of us will have to exchange the ideology of the Rich or the Comfortable Middle Class for the ideology of the Medium Poor. That wealth and poverty involve different thought ways as well as different behavior we know very well; we have amused ourselves often enough in the past with the gaucheries of the nouveau riche. The gaucheries of the nouveau pauvre somehow never seem quite so amusing, but they involve the same kind of readjustment, the same adaptation to a foreign culture. As for ourselves, we have already undertaken this readjustment. It has led us into many adventures, the most exciting of which remains the discovery that the leopard can change his spots.

Now, after eight months in Gilead Four Corners, we can with some justice count ourselves seasoned Vermonters. We know all the little idiosyncrasies of our ‘chunk’ stove: how to make it hold fire through a long winter’s night; how to make it blaze up quickly on a cold morning; what the warning tick-tick in the stovepipe means. When the water does n’t run in the kitchen sink, do we send for the plumber? We do not: he lives ten miles from here, and the road is rocky. One of us lies on his back under the faucet and blows into it, until a gush of water on the face assures us that all is again in working order. No one rings my telephone bell at seven-thirty in the morning to greet me insinuatingly with ‘Gro-sry?’ I do not market: I go down cellar. Together, John and I have developed the really manifold possibilities of the turnip, the potato, the winter squash. Our ring on the party line is 24. We know who belongs to the other twentythree rings, and, even when we don’t listen in, we usually know who is talking to whom, and why.

II

What we have become, and the incidents of our becoming, are really only interesting in the light of what we used to be. In the old days — when we lived in Chicago — my husband and I both worked: he to support his family and I because I wanted to. Judged by the standards of the Four Corners, we lived, even a year ago, on a scale of Arabian Nights splendor. Judged by the standards of our friends at home, we lived simply, though pleasantly enough.

At any rate our manner of life was comfortable and gracious. We had a charming house with seven rooms, two baths, and a garden. We had a car. We employed a maid, a laundress, a janitor, and a college boy who acted as tutor to John. John went to an excellent private school of the modern, experimental type. We did not, like many of our friends, belong to expensive clubs, keep our own horses, or entertain lavishly. Our bill at the bootlegger’s was modest. But we had a delightful social life, extended an easy hospitality, went to the theatre when we chose, hailed taxis when it rained, took vacations when we were too hot, or too cold, or too tired to stay at home, and usually counted our pennies after we had spent them. It was very nice — so long as we had an income of $15,000 a year.

So much for yesterday. Then came the reckoning. We could, perhaps, have compromised with the old way. Many of our friends were compromising. We could have scrimped and worried and borrowed, and practised little, inconsistent, unavailing economies. But (for beggars can choose) we chose a more drastic and a more fundamental course. For the old budget of $15,000 a year we substituted a new one of $900. It covers everything: rent, light, laundry, telephone, fuel, food, gasoline and automobile license, clothes, incidentals — everything except insurance and the personal and traveling expenses of my husband, whose business makes it impossible for him to live with us in any case.

I suppose someone wishes to rise at this point and tell me that I made no startling contribution to the sum of human knowledge when I found out that it is possible to live on less than $1000 a year. Lots of people in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and points cast or west have known that for years. But these are the Old Poor. They have an intimate acquaintance with the technique of poverty. They have inherited an invaluable and extensive store of knowledge concerning the emotions and ideas proper to poor people. They have but to follow the behavior patterns familiar to them since infancy. With us it was different. Only by scrapping our traditions and our traditional patterns of behavior were we able to succeed in making the readjustments necessary to a good life on the new terms.

There is still another difference between our situation and that of the $1000-a-year family in the city. Putting aside our urban, middle-class preconceptions of what was necessary to comfort and the enjoyment of life, we found that in a Vermont village $1000 a year is generally considered an adequate, not to say a luxurious, income for a family as small as ours. There was no reason why (preconceptions aside, again) we should not do very well by ourselves on the new budget, more successfully escaping the pinch of poverty than on a budget of $5000 a year in Chicago,

III

In fairness to our standard of living at $15,000 a year, I must confess that it was very pleasant while it lasted, nor does it now seem altogether distasteful. The new way of life has inevitably meant loss as well as gain, and, while most of our deprivations are indeed trivial, they deserve mention.

For myself, I have missed most my friends: the warm sense of security which their accustomed nearness gave, the joy of their companionship, and the easy sort of shorthand communication that long association had built up between us. My neighbors in Gilead Four Corners will always be strangers to me, and I to them. The gap between our cultures is one of race, religion, manners; it is economic, social, intellectual. Sometimes I think we are at least half a century apart. There have been times when the charm of my neighbors’ archaic naïveté has worn a little thin; times when my hearty chuckles over my own unuttered jokes have seemed inadequate; times when, following some interesting train of thought, I have wished that it might strike sparks from a kindred mind and kindle to a fuller expression in other voices which spoke my language.

I have had moments of shameless longing for a barber who would sculp my head, instead of scalping it, and have felt a rush of real resentment against the impertinence of the advertiser who asks, ‘Domestic Hands?’ On one or two evenings the choice between a lonely fire and a meeting with the ladies of the Get-Together Club has left something still to be desired. On such evenings the pleasures of a good party, a good partner at a good dinner table, a masculine eye lighting to reassure me of my own worth, have not seemed such empty pleasures after all. Trifles, of course. But these go into the fabric of everyday life, and in such an evaluation as this I think they are rightly taken into account.

More serious is the loss to nine-yearold John, though he is not aware of it and whole-heartedly accepts each day’s adventures with a child’s unquestioning zest. At home in Chicago, John had the best we could find to give him, and I think now that it was good. His teachers had a genuine feeling for the joy of exploration into new fields, intellectual or physical. They combined insight with a great love for the learning process, and these things they communicated to their pupils. He has not found such teachers here. Here, expression has had to yield to oldfashioned schoolroom discipline, and curiosity been curbed by drill. There is no doubt that John has lost by the limitations of the village school, though he has gained by the experiences of village life.

IV

In spite of these things, we still have our faith in the credit side of the ledger, and that faith grows with each passing month. In the first place, we have gained a real respite from economic pressure. We can live within our means. And, in obtaining our release from the old notion that a $15,000-ayear standard of living is the only standard, we have got an intoxicating sense of freedom, a kind of rebirth. We have learned that even for us, with our inept city ways and our selfindulgent city habits, it is possible, somewhere in the world, to live simply without ugliness or discomfort; to escape the tyranny of a big overhead; to run our little domestic plant on a small scale with real profit and adequate compensation to the operators. These lessons alone make us feel that the experiment has been worth the cost.

We have gained a new sense of time, equally precious to John and to me. In the city both of us usually felt as pressed for time as we were often pressed for money. Here there is time for everything, and for everybody. Time to watch the day dawn and the evening fall. Time to watch the mist rise and the clouds change color above the hillsides. Time to watch each leaf turn, and each bud swell. Time to read the stories of a colorful past which we find all about us, in books, in old letters and records, in the memory of old men. Time to know our neighbors, and ourselves. Both of us are still a little drunk with our new-found wealth of hours and days and minutes, so much our own, so nearly tangible that we almost know the touch of them in our fingers, and taste their sweetness on our tongues.

Time and money. Besides these, there is the gain we have brewed from our very losses. I have never held much with the man who hit his head against the wall because it felt so good when he stopped. Nevertheless, something may be said for him. The rich profusion of the city’s gifts brings its own surfeit. Having so little now, we extract full value from what we have, and are content. New cider in the fall, new syrup in the spring, a wood box well filled, a book from friends at home, a threatened chimney fire, a sick neighbor to ‘do’ for, a village dance— these are joy and comfort and drama. Oddly enough, they suffice.

I have spoken of the gap that divides us from our neighbors. Friendliness and good will, a genuine impulse to tolerate and understand, and above all the Vermonter’s respect for individual differences and personal freedom, have done much to bridge that gap. It has been good to feel the warmth of the village’s welcome. We are not visitors, transient freaks, merely, but fellow citizens. We have been accepted, and both of us value our acceptance as a cherished prize.

When there is a Chicken Pie Supper, a sugar party, a programme for the Parent-Teachers Association, we too play our parts. Our small talents, neglected in a world entertained by movies and blues singers and Follies girls, have been cultivated and applauded on the hill. John plays the mouth organ in the school band; he taught his class to make a puppet show at Thanksgiving time. I teach a sketching class of twenty girls; together we have introduced anagrams, and added ‘coffeepot’ and ‘polite conversation ’ to the village repertoire of games. Modest offerings, but they loom large among the simple pleasures of our community life. They have been appreciated, and we are proud of our contribution.

V

Our neighbors have been kindly guides to the customs and the mores of their land. They recognize us as foreigners, but they neither mock nor shun us because we are different. Rather they have seemed to enjoy advising us, and we have been grateful for their help. Thus, when I said, ‘Nothing to-day, thanks,’ in a brisk city fashion and shut the door on a peddler with his pack, the postmistress obligingly set me straight.

‘I guess we never told you about Abijah Griscom,’ said she, handing me my letters through the wicket. ‘He’s one of the Chelsea Griscoms. He was real hurt to think you did n’t ask him in this morning. Said he did n’t know who you were, but guessed you were n’t much ’count. He’s real sensitive that way, and won’t ever stop to sell you again if he thinks you don’t treat him right. Abijah, he’s real interesting. He’s quite a health faddist and tries to convert folks to a grape-nuts diet.’

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think maybe you can apologize for me, and make it all right?’

The postmistress said she would try.

A few months later someone knocked at my door and I opened it to find Abijah and his pack. You don’t catch me making the same mistake twice! The best chair was none too good for Abijah. And he was a forgiving soul: he sat in it and accepted my apology. ‘Now that’s all right; don’t you worry no more about it,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it, it was natch’l, you not knowin’ who I was.’

Dinner was ready; John had to get back to school. So, somewhat presumptuously, in view of his being one of the Chelsea Griscoms, I asked Abijah to stay for dinner. He ‘did n’t know but what he could.’ When he had washed up and we three were seated at the table, Abijah began to talk. He had a lean, fanatic face with rather poppy black eyes and thin, moist lips. His voice was gentle, but he talked rapidly, and there was a kind of febrile energy behind his speech. He talked about the depression, only he called it the ‘deficit,’ and he had abandoned the cult of grape-nuts for socialism.

I asked him how he had come to be interested in socialism.

‘I jest kinda figured it out for myself,’ he said. ‘It jest kinda came to me, as you might say, go in’ along the road, seein’ how things be.’ Somewhere he had stumbled on a leaflet, published out West, which supported his views. He read aloud to us from the leaflet, taking its well-worn pages from his shirt pocket. But he kept going back to his own reasonable discovery, the homely truth that had ‘jest come to him’: ‘It ain’t fair, now, is it?’

John, who has read in the old gazetteers and knows something about the settling of Chelsea, and about the Chelsea Griscoms, chimed in with a question. ‘Are you descended from Ebenezer Griscom?’ he wanted to know. We like the story about Ebenezer. In 1804 the question came up of painting the church and putting a lightning rod on it. Ebenezer said he was quite willing to pay his share toward the painting, and ‘wanted God’s house should look as respectable as his own.’ But as for the lightning rod — why, if God wanted to strike down His own house, when honest men had been to the expense of building one for Him, it would ill become Ebenezer Griscom to do aught to prevent.

Abijah was very clear in the matter of his kinship with Ebenezer, tracing for us again the Griscom lineage which we already knew from Chelsea records. The old church is used now for a hog house. But something of Ebenezer’s independent spirit still prevails.

Abijah was as deliberate in his eating as he was eager in speech. We really did have beans for dinner, and he really did eat them with his knife, mashing each bean with finicking precision. If John noticed this offense to Mrs. Post, he did not show that he did, and he has never referred to it since, though we often recall that noteworthy dinner. For the point about it was that Abijah Griscom, to us, was not just a quaint local character. To us he was incident, unexpected color in our quiet day, a breath of news from the outside world. He told us how the roads were over Tunbridge way, and how much snow they had in East Braintree; he and his skinny horse and his dilapidated sleigh linked us with our neighbors and with their thought.

It was not until dinner was over and John back at school that Abijah remembered his pack and his business. And even when the needles and pins, the shoelaces and pack thread, were spread out on the parlor sofa, it was of the inequality in the world that he talked, not of his wares. Because I felt so keenly the benefit to us of Abijah’s visit, and his graciousness in overlooking an unintended slight, I did not want to take the trinket from his pack which he offered in payment for his meal. But it is his self-respecting habit to pay his way, so a bottle of lemon extract on my kitchen shelf remains as a souvenir of our guest.

VI

Dinner with a New England peddler who talked like a Shavian dustman would hardly rank as the outstanding social event of the season at home. But in our days, which go by without incident, these things stand out and take on a quality of drama and a poignancy that more vivid happenings in the city lacked.

Looking back over a winter in which ‘nothing has happened,’ I ask myself what has made it seem so full, and so satisfying. What Midas touch has made the days seem brighter than when they were weighted with ‘solid’ gold? I think the answer is this: that our adventure, bare of pirates and Indians and gangland thrills, is a spiritual adventure. We have escaped a bondage no less real because we were for long unconscious of it. If we feel a kinship with the ghosts that haunt our house, it is because we too have pioneered. It is true that it took a national catastrophe to pry us loose from our sheltered corner. But on the whole we are glad to have been dislodged. We shall never again be frightened by the bogey of hard times. We have been freed from the narrow confines of our own class, as surely as any serf or Negro slave was ever freed from his. We have found a new security — the security of simple needs.

Whatever the coming years may bring in the way of social and economic changes, it is fairly certain that many people will have to make a psychological readjustment similar to ours. It is human to fear upheavals of thought above all other change. Such upheavals are painful, always. But, if we have learned anything, it is that they are also fun!