Chapter V Pedigrees and Principles
My Aunt Lucretia undoubtedly was the real master of The Home Stretch. She ruled its thousand acres of low, rolling, blue grass land, which bore in pioneer days the canebrake and the poplar, and for a century had been the nursery of thoroughbreds.
My Aunt lived and dreamed in pedigrees. Heaven, according to her, was a blue-grass meadow filled with pedigreed people, and hell—I remember how I had laughed when she said, “Why, Jack, if there is such a place, it’s a low jockey-yard filled with scrubs!”
Pedigrees, I am certain, was her gauge of life. She was more man than woman, handsome though she was. She should have been a bewigged, knee-breeched, ruffle-shirted, horse-racing Virginia gentleman of the old school, as many of her ancestors had been. She still clung to a few blooded horses, though her immaculate dairy of Jersey cows was her greatest pride. When my parents died, even before I could remember, she had adopted me. She intended that I should inherit The Home Stretch. Then, true to her ideas, she had planned a proper mate for me. She had been a success in mating everything but herself. Her ribbons won at State Fairs and in Horse Shows proved it; for her Merino sheep she held a great cup from the International Exhibit in Paris. The wool of her Tennessee sheep had gone back across the ocean, and beaten the parent wool on its own soil. This great, heavy, solid silver cup sat on the mantel in the library, and every spring, when I had a cold, she had given me punch cobbler out of it.
She had early paired me off with Eloise Ward, who was an orphan, and a distant relative of her mother. My Aunt had adopted her, as she had me, and given her every grace of a fashionable education. At ten she had, as she expressed it, engaged us. I remember it was Eloise’s tenth birthday and my twelfth. She bought a little turquoise ring and made me give it to Eloise.
“Now, Jack, Eloise is yours! Eloise, you will marry him when you are grown. Now kiss each other as sensibly engaged people do, to seal it. After this no more kissing.”
The last advice was unneeded. Up to then we had never kissed, but had fought continually. Knowing Aunt Lucretia, and that if we did not do as she said, something uncomfortable would happen to us, we screwed up our mouths, each trying to outdo the other in mock martyrdom, and complied.
After that Aunt Lucretia was very gracious. I think we showed remarkable horse-sense, young as we were, in carrying out her wishes, inasmuch as we expected some day to own the great farm and house.
To comfort me she used to say—for she knew my love of blooded stock: “She is beautiful, Jack, well built and coupled just right in the back. One link more of vertebræ would have spoiled her, turned her up too sloping between the shoulders, and made her gangling in the hips. If there’s too many links in a filly’s back, when the pinch of contest comes, you know, Jack, as well as I do, there will be a crumpling—and it is generally in their legs. And Eloise’s, Jack—well, you should see it—thoroughbred—taut as a bow string—holding hip and head together. And not too short, either, Jack; the little dicky, short-backed ones, with schooner hips, are a sure sign of several vertebræ being lost by sitting on them for too many generations at the loom or the wheel, or carrying home the week’s washing on their heads! It’s the scrub sign, my boy. And Eloise is clean-limbed with good flat bones. Jack, as you love me and your God, never marry a woman that can’t span her ankle with her thumb and forefinger—that kind of a fetlock is a scrub of the most pronounced type! It came from ancestors before them for a thousand years, who had all their weight on their ankles—just hauling plows like beasts of burden. And Eloise has great style with a fine sweep and action. Look how boldly she steps and clean and true! No loblolling, lazy ambling there—hitting even on the ground—and her hair, Jack—red-chestnut—it is beautiful and not too much. Shun the brood-mare with mane thick and heavy. It is pretty but comes from the scrub Shetlands or Andalusian jennets. Look—look, Jack—isn’t she beautiful?”
I watched her myself, tall, her scornful, daring head thrown back, her fine braids of sorrel, silken hair flying out, as in a long-limbed, leaping sweep, she chased the collie across the yard.
The comparison was fitting—as a thoroughbred, Eloise was superb. My Aunt had copied it all by herself, tabulating for me, most elaborately and artistically, on a great sheet of parchment, Eloise’s pedigree. It was such a tabulation as I had seen her work over night after night, often for months, handing down volume after volume of the English and Bruce’s Stud Book and the Trotting and Pacing Register. In bold, block, decorated letters, she gradually evolved Eloise’s sire and dam, as she grimly called them, and thence on to granddams and g. g. dams (every g. as I learned standing for another generation) until it looked, when finished, like a great river, with a hundred branching streams flowing in, and an endless row of g. g. g. g. g.’s
Under each sire and dam, and in red ink, in contrast to the black of their names, she had written their records, short and pointed, and often with astonishing frankness. I remember that under her grandsire—a Governor of Virginia—the red ink ran: Died of a wetting, while drunk at a horse race! Watch your children for too much crude liquor!
Under one of her dams, daughter of a Carolina judge, she had: She had a streak of common, for she ate onions. If you have daughters, don’t plant the things in your garden!
Another of her great Virginia ancestors was a preacher, noted for his zeal in proselyting; under him was: Too religious—the reaction may come in your grandson, who is likely to be an infidel, Nature maintaining her balance in morals as in matter.
Now that I had come home from Germany it was evidently my Aunt’s intention that Eloise and I should marry.
“Come, Eloise,” said she, after our guests had left, and my grandfather had retired, “we will light Jack to bed in the old way.”
Eloise jumped up, slipping her arm into mine. Then she two-stepped with me up the hall, humming “A Hot Time In The Old Town To-night.”
Aunt Lucretia looked on, her stern face relaxed into a satisfied smile.
I slipped my arm around Eloise’s slim waist, and, bending over, tried to kiss her cheek. But she drew back laughing, and Aunt Lucretia’s voice came sternly from behind. “Jack—Eloise!”
We stopped instantly under the chandelier. Aunt Lucretia shut the heavy doors, and came up with all the sternness of a Roman lictor in her face.
“Turn her loose, Jack. Listen, both of you: I had intended to inform you to-morrow finally, but this is as good a time as any.”
We stood silent before her. Eloise’s pretty mouth drooped in pretended humbleness.
“You know how I love you both, and—well, how you respect each other. You know that I have planned and dreamed for you both, ever since I brought you together here. Now let me see. This is April—well, I am going to marry you to each other in the fall, and until I marry you off,” she went on sternly, “I have only one rule—no hugging—no kissing. It is bad before marriage, and after you are married,” she added with becoming stiffness, “you will not want to.”
“Don’t you think your conditions are awfully severe for engaged people?” asked Eloise demurely.
“And I may seal it with a kiss surely, Aunt Lucretia,” I said, “for once.”
“No, not for once. That silly performance has caused more trouble in the world than all the sins of Satan combined. We will never have a decent race of people till kissing is cut out,” she exclaimed. “There, no more at present—march!”
And she marched us into my room.
“Isn’t this fine!” I said, looking around at the old room, glad to be home again.
It was twenty by twenty, the pioneer size, with a great fireplace, built of oak and ash. In a corner was my old mahogany tester bed, big posted and canopy-topped. The little cherry writing desk stood near, and so did the quaint mahogany bureau, resting on dragon claws, with great drawers for a base, and ending pyramid-like in a top of granite finish, set off by a little mirror, and with a tiny shaving drawer for my razors. Big windows looked out on all sides.
After Eloise had left Aunt Lucretia sat quietly thinking, looking now and then at a pedigree of Eloise which she had once made and hung over my mantel. It was framed in walnut and decorated with fancy letters. At last she smiled.
“Isn’t she a thoroughbred, Jack?”
“I haven’t really got my breath yet, Aunt Lucretia,” I answered. “I never dreamed she would grow into a being so beautiful. Don’t you really believe you might er—er—hurry up this—er—affair—” and I stopped, blushing.
Aunt Lucretia broke out in her rare, good-humored laugh.
“Poor boy! Jack, you must be careful. You talk as if you had a real case of the silly, unsensible thing.”
“Always had it, Aunt Lucretia,” I smiled weakly.
“Jack, that would be very unfortunate. I want you to marry on common sense—not love.”
“You know how I have always loved her,” I went on. Aunt Lucretia glanced sharply at me. “I mean how I’ve cared for her,” I amended. “But do you—do you honestly believe, Aunt Lucretia, that she loves me—cares for me that way?”
“Tut—tut,” she said sharply, “what nonsense you talk! What does it matter? This silly love business has spoiled more good pedigrees and brought more fools into the world, I tell you, than anything else under the sun. What a fine breed of folks we’d have had in the world by now if so many idiots had not fallen in love and married without a moment’s thought of results. You ought to be grateful to me, Jack,” she continued after a while; “you will be grateful, I am sure, some day, that you had me to select a wife for you and didn’t just happen to fall in love. That’s an accident often as fatal as happening to fall down the steps.
“It is awful, Jack, this haphazard of humanity!” she went on in a moment. “No wonder only one in a hundred is born who has got any brains in his head. Think of it, Jack, our race is so pig-headed from thoughtless marryings that it took them three hundred years after they invented a saddle before it dawned upon them that they needed stirrups to complete it. Rode three centuries on bare saddles for lack of sense enough to invent stirrups! Some day for the benefit of humanity I am going to open a human Registry. I want to do this because I think it is our duty to try to teach people to take as much interest in their own children’s pedigree as they do in their horses’ or dogs’. Many a man falls in love with and marries a woman whose qualities and character, and pedigree, if she were a horse, he wouldn’t be caught trading a blind mule for! And many a woman, under the same divine influence, marries some vicious brute of a man for no other reason than because she has just fallen in love with him, or maybe wants to reform him, who, if he were turned into a buggy horse she wouldn’t be caught risking her neck behind.
“And this is the way I’d go to registering my people,” she continued. “In all registration there must be a foundation stock. For man, I’d let Truthfulness, Bravery, Honesty, Manliness, and Ability to Do Things, count as Foundations. This would change the present social system radically and let into good society and life a flood of good blood that is at present badly needed but is shut out, unless it suddenly happens to get rich and comes in under a dress suit. I would make accomplishments, the Ability to Do Things, from the Ability to do Poetry, Art, Drama, Music—everything that is worth while—to the ability to make two blades of grass grow, the greatest of them all, count as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out Old Humanity and breed a race of people, who, in a few generations, as old Horace says, would strike the stars with their uplifted heads!”
She laughed. “Look, Jack, here it is. I have worked it all out, just for fun.” She unrolled a parchment, as immaculately executed in decorated letters as Eloise’s pedigree had been. Then she read, glancing over her glasses now and then to emphasize her remarks.
“A STANDARD OF HUMAN REGISTRATION.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred, and shall be permitted to marry:
FIRST: Any white man, who has a home of his own and is honest, industrious, and truthful, and sound in wind, limb and eye.
SECOND: Any white woman, who can cook a good meal, make her own clothes, keep a home clean, lives a pure life, and has some moral standard for herself and children, and will agree to raise them under it.
THIRD: Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.
FOURTH: Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.
NON-STANDARD:
The following shall be Non-Standard, and neither they nor their children shall be registered.
FIRST: Fools.
SECOND: Liars.
THIRD: Cranks.
FOURTH: Idiots.
FIFTH: Geniuses. They are freaks merely, and fools in another form.
SIXTH: Sissy men.
SEVENTH: Consumptives, the cancerous, the insane.
EIGHTH: Impure women.
NINTH: Society people wherever found, and their one child.
TENTH: Married men who lead Germans.
ELEVENTH: The children of women who play cards for money and prizes.
TWELFTH: Evangelists who preach slang from the pulpit.
THIRTEENTH: Praying lawyers.
FOURTEENTH: Trading preachers.
FIFTEENTH: Professional politicians.
SIXTEENTH: Bank cashiers who run Sunday Schools.
SEVENTEENTH: Doctors who cut open people quickly, or dope them with much medicine.
LUCRETIA RUTHERFORD, Registrar.”
I laughed. “It wouldn’t do any harm to try it awhile, Aunt Lucretia; but—referring again to Eloise—”
“We’ll not refer again to Eloise,” she said, seeing what I was coming to; “this thing is settled. You two will marry this fall, and until then I want no foolishness around me.”
“But, suppose she—” I began.
“She is not to suppose anything—nor you. Get her a beautiful ring the next time you go to town. I’ll attend to the rest of it.”
We talked for an hour or two. I could see how glad she was that I was at home again, for, with all of her stern ways, my Aunt Lucretia was very fond of me.
“And to think of your being the man you are, Jack,” she said finally, “and that lameness all gone. Ah, but that is what I’m telling you—the Germans are the greatest thinkers in the world—because—well, because they have been bred to think. Yes, it is good to see you here again, Jack, and sound, and you will earn your oats from now on, young man, remember that.”