Chapter XIII. How my Aunt
and Uncle Entertained
the Spinners
MEANTIME there was poor consolation in my home. Aunt and uncle were drinking every night. Aunt, with the advantage over my uncle, was drinking much during the day.
When our dinners came, carried by a neighbor’s boy, they were generally cold, cheerless combinations of canned tongue, store bread lavishly spread with butter, jelly roll, and a bottle of cold soda water, either strawberry or ginger flavor! We knew what that sort of dinner meant. Aunt Millie was drunk at home, too much intoxicated to make a warm dinner. We had to work through the afternoon, knowing that when we arrived home at night we should find her either at a saloon, in a back room at a neighbor’s, or at home, helpless, incoherent.
“Oh, Al,” sighed my uncle, “I don’t see what we’re coming to. What’s the use of you and me slaving here and she taking on so? Do you wonder, lad, that it’s hard for me to keep a pledge? It just drives me mad. Here we have to go on through the day, working ourselves to death, only to have the money go in that way! It’s torture, and always sets me off into drink, too!”
When we arrived home on such nights, uncle would have stored up an afternoon of wrath, and, on entering the house, would unload it on aunt. She would work herself into an hysterical paroxysm, screaming, shrieking, pawing, and frothing at the mouth, so that uncle would suddenly leave her to me and go off for the night to a saloon.
In the morning, when both were sober, would occur the real disheartening quarrel, when aunt would tell uncle he lied if he said she had been drunk; the words would get more and more heated until, in an unbearable fit of rage, insults would be exchanged and lead up to a struggle, a bloody struggle, that sometimes was on the threshold of murder.
That day there would be no dinner for us at all, and I would have to run out to the gates and buy something like an apple-roll or a pie. At night we would find aunt sitting down, perfectly sober, but silent, and with no supper ready.
“Get it yourself, you old fiend,” she would announce. Uncle would leave the house and get his meal in an eating-house, while aunt would make me a supper and scold me while I ate it, for she always considered me as one of her secret enemies, and linked my name with my uncle’s in almost every quarrel.
But there were few quarrels of long standing between my foster parents. They were generally patched up with a drink or two. Then the wheel would turn again and produce exactly the same conditions as before.
One day, uncle, in a noble-minded effort to get away from temptation, told us that he had decided to board in another place, where he could live in peace. But aunt visited all the boarding-houses that she knew, finally found her husband in one at the North End, and scolded him so unmercifully, and unloaded so much weight of family history, that he came back to the South End with her on the car, took a pail, and brought back a quart of beer, and things went on as before.
After we had established our piano, and when uncle had become well acquainted with the spinners, he proposed to invite some of them with their wives for a “house-warming.”
The event occurred on a Saturday night. “Fatty” Dunding came, and brought an unknown woman with him, whom he tickled under the chin in play quite often, and told her that she was a “stunner in that new piece of hair, even better looking than in t’other lighter shade!” Tom Fellows, a tall man with a poetic face, brought his wife and child, a baby of seven months. There was a bass-voiced spinner named Marvin present, and he brought a roll of music with him.
“What hast’ got in, Stanny?” asked “Fatty.” “Summat to warm cockles o’ t’ ’eart?”
Uncle told him that there was half a barrel of beer in the cellar: that there were several bottles of port wine in the pantry, and that there was a taste of whiskey and a few softer drinks on hand.
By eight o’clock the program began to shape itself. Marvin undid his roll, at the first request, placed before my uncle a copy of “White Wings,” and asked, as the Hadfield bassoes had in the former days in the parlors of the “Linnet’s Nest,” and the “Blue Sign,” “Can t’ play it?”
And uncle responded, “Hum it o’er!” Marvin bent down his head as if in the act of telling a secret, hummed it over for a few bars, when uncle, after fingering with his chords, struck the pitch, and began to vamp gloriously.
“Wait till I play t’ introduction,” he said, and he hunched back, and confidently “introduced” the air to the satisfaction of all. Marvin sang “White Wings,” and after he had dampened his pipe with a noggin of whiskey, he asked uncle if he knew “I am a Friar of Orders Grey?”
Uncle said, again, “Hum it o’er.” When the introduction had been given, Marvin began a tumbling performance on the low notes that won great applause.
“Tha’ went so low, lad, that we couldna’ ’ear thee, eh, folks?” grinned “Fatty.”
“Hear, hear! Hen-core, hen-core!” shouted the audience, but Marvin said that he’d better rest. Singing low tickled his whistle unduly.
But uncle knew “Sally In Our Alley,” which Tom Fellows sang with a lift of his light brows at the high notes, and a crinkling of his chin as he bent his head to get the low ones. Tom had almost a feminine voice; a romantic chord ran through all his singing, so that he was at his best in an original song of his, which he had written shortly before and was having the bandmaster set to four-part music for the piano. “Hum it,” said uncle. And Tom went through the usual process until uncle had the key, the time, and the chords. Tom’s song, which was later published at his own expense, began:
“Bright was the day,
Bells ringing gay,
When to church I brought my Sue.
I felt so proud
’Mongst all the crowd”—
and Uncle Stanwood considerably increased his reputation for improvisation when at the end of the verse, where Tom lingered lovingly on the sentiment to the extent of four full rests, he introduced a set of trills!
With this part of the program over, the company retired to the cellar, where there was a boarded floor, a man with a concertina, and a half-barrel of beer. There followed a square dance and some more singing, but the beer was the chief enjoyment.
It was not long before drink had inflamed the peculiarities of temper of our guests. “Fatty” let loose his oaths and his foul speech, while Uncle Stanwood nearly got into a fight with him over it, but was prevented by Tom Fellows falling against him, in a drunken lurch, thereby diverting the issue. My aunt’s tongue had a sting to it, and she was in a corner telling Mrs. Fellows that she, Mrs. Fellows, was not married to Tom, or else she would have her marriage certificate framed in the house, or, at least, could show it in the photograph album! Marvin was roaring “Rule Britannia,” with the energy and incoherency of a bull. I told “Fatty” that he had better go home or else I would send for the police, and when he aimed his fist at my head, I merely dodged and he fell with a crash to the floor and went off into a piggish snoring. Tom Fellows took his drunken leave, forgetting his wife, who was just then calling my aunt a series of uncomplimentary names. In some sort of way, our guests left us in the early morning. Then I saw that aunt and uncle were safely to sleep where they chanced to have stumbled, turned out the lamps, locked the door, and went to bed.
The next morning the Sabbath sun lighted up a sickening memento of the house-warming. Glasses were scattered about with odorous dregs of liquor in them. Chairs were overturned, and there were big splotches on the tablecloth in the kitchen, where port wine had been spilled. There was a lamp still burning, which I had overlooked, and it was sending out a sickly, oily fume. The house was like a barroom, with bottles scattered about the kitchen, clothes that had been left, and my foster parents yet in a drunken sleep where I had left them!
When Monday morning came, uncle was unfit to go to work. He told Aunt Millie so, and she immediately scolded him and worked herself in so violent a rage that the matter ended by uncle picking up some of his clothes and saying, “This is the last you’ll see of me, Dame! I’m going to some other place where I’ll be away from it. Al, there, can keep you on his four dollars a week—if he wants! I’m done!”
“And how about the debts, you—coward!” cried aunt. “I’ll send the police after you, mind!”
“Let debts go to the dogs,” said my uncle. “You’ll always manage to have the beer-wagon call!” And then he left the house.
He did not come to work that morning, and when the overseer asked me where he was, I said that uncle had left home and would not be back, so a spare man was put on uncle’s mules.
That day, opened with such gloom, was one of thick shadows for me. The outlook was certainly disheartening. Why should I have to stand it all? It was my wages that were making some of this squalor possible. It was my money that helped purchase the beer. Then the old question obtruded itself: “What other thing can you do? You’ll have to stay in the mill!”
I lost my heart then. I saw no way out from the mill, yet I knew that in the end, and that not long removed, the mill would overpower me and set me off on one side, a helpless, physical wreck. It was just a matter of a year or two, and that waiting line of out-of-works, which always came into the mule-room in the morning, would move up one, as the head boy was given my place.
Late in that afternoon, with the hands on the clock going slower than ever, and the bitterness of my life full before me, I began to think of suicide. I imagined that it would be the easiest and safest exit from it all. It would end the misery, the pain, the distraction, and the impending uselessness of my body for work! It was so easy, too. I took up a three-pound weight, and put it on a pile of bobbins high above my head. I balanced it on the edge where the merest touch would allow it to crash to the floor. Then I experimented with it, allowing it to fall to see how much force there was to it. I speculated as to whether it would kill me instantly or not. It was a great temptation. It just meant a touch of the finger, a closing of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and it would be over! I tried to imagine how sorry and repentant my aunt and uncle would feel. It might make them stop drinking. It was worth doing, then. But suddenly there loomed up the fact that there are two sides to a grave, and the thought of God, a judgment, and an eternity dazed me. I was afraid. I put the weight back, and thought: “Well, I guess I’ll have to do the best I can, but it’s hard!”