Evening Star Newspaper, June 9, 1929, Page 100

— A el E lived next door to us when I was a girl—old Mr. Parline. To be / sure. his wife lived there, too, but i we never saw very much of her, She was one of the immaculate housewives of that day, whose life was bounded by the hundred small tasks of a home into which the modern button-pushing conveniences had not come. A shy, effacing woman she was —“mousy” describes her too well to abandon the term for its mere triteness. Mr. Parline was the one who did the talking, who ueigh- bored with the rest of us, who came to the back door bringing us gifts from his garden. The Parline house sat in the midst of trees and flowers like Ceres among her fruits. We were just then emerging from the dark age of fences into the enlightened era of open lawns. By vour fenced or fenceless condition you were known as old-fashioned or up-to-date. ©One by one the picket and the fancy iron and the rough board fences on our street had gone down before the god of fashion. Mr. Parline, mlone, retained his—a neat picket, painted as white as the snowballs that hung over it, Juliet- like, from their green foliage balconies. The shrubbery was not so artistically placed &s that of today. We had not learned to group it against houses and walls, leaving wide stretches of lawn. Single bushes dotted Mr. Parline’s lawn, a hydrangea here, a peony there, ® tiger lily beyond, in spaded spots of brown, sulch-filled earth, like so many chickens squatting in their round nests. / HE Parlines were of English extraction, al- though both had been born in Vermont. There was a faintly whispered tale that they were cousins, but there was no one so intimate &s to verify the gossip and no one so prying as to ask. Mr. Parline was a half head shorter than his tall, slender wife. He was stocky of body. a Yittle ruddy as to complexion, like the color of his apples, a little fuzzy as to face, like the down on his peaches. There was a quiet dignity mbout him that fell just short of pompousness. “Mr. Parline” his wife called him, in contrast to the “John"” and “Silas” and “Fred” with which the other women spoke of their liege lords. ‘Where other women in the block ran in to our home with the freedom of close acquaintances, Mrs. Parline alone occasionally came sedately in at the front gate in a neat brown dress covered with a large snowy apron starched to cardboard stiffness. It was Mr. Parline who came often. With that manner which was paradoxically gentle and pompous, he would bring us edibles from his garden all Summer long on a homemade flat wooden tray. That garden, as neat as con- stant care could make it, was the delight and despair of every one who attempted to emulate it. Not a pigweed showed ils stubborn head. Not a mullen-stock lifted its thick velvety self. The bricklaid paths, without sign of leaf, might have been swept, even scrubbed. As for the growing contents of the garden, they made a varicolored and delightful picture. In its per- fection every cabbage might have been a rose, every beet an exotic tropical plant, the parsley dainty window-box ferns. To Mr. Parline there was no dividing line between the beauty of fiowers and the beauty of vegetables. With impartiality he planted marigolds near the carrots and zinnias next to the beans. “Just a little of the fruits of my labor,” was his dignified greeting on those occasions when he tapped at the back door. In the center of the wooden tray might repose a cabbage, the dew still trembling upon the silver sheen of its leaves, around it a lovely mass of the deli- cate shell-pink of sweet peas. One felt &t as much of a sacrilege to plunge the cabbage into hot water as it would have been to cook the sweet peas. Or he might have several bunches of grapes in merging shades of wine red and purple, their colors meiting into the wine red and purple colors of shaggy asters, Old Mr. Parline had the heart of a poet and the eye of @n interior decorator. “IE never saw Mrs. Parline pulling a vege- L table or cutting a flower. Occasionally, at ‘evening, she walked in the paths with all the interest and curiosity of a stranger, evidently considering the garden as sacred ground as did the rest of us. Indeed, Mother was at their back door one day when Mr. Parline came up the path with the inevitable wooden tray. "There were beets on the tray, their tops cut, their bodies like blood-red hearts, around them white sweet Williams and crimson phlox. “I was just bringing my wife some of the fruits of my labor,” he said in his courteous, half- pompous way. We laughed about the phrase at home. Ours ‘was a noisy, hilarious, fun-loving family. One member might bring in a mess of dirty potatoes in a battered old pail. “A little of the fruits of my labor,” he would imitate Mr. Parline's pompous dignity. Or another, coming in with the first scrawny radishes, might have placed a few limpsy dandelions around them as a floral satire on the contents of Mr. Parline’s wooden tray. If the garden was the old man’s hobby, the ‘weather was his very life. It was inconceivable that anybody should be so wrapped up in the constant change of the elements. To other busy people the weather was incidental to their labors, the sefting in which they performed their tasks. It might be pleasant or inconven- ient, but it remained a side 3sue. To old Mr. Parline it was the important event of the day. He scanned the heavens, read the almanac, watched for signs of changes. Of the last he had a thousand at his command. If the sun went down in clouds on Friday night, if it rained the first Sunday in the month, if a ‘dog ate grass, if the snow stuck to the morth ‘sides of the trees--he knew to a nicety what the result would be, To old Parline the weather was not the background. It was the picture itself. It was mot the mere setting for daily Tving. It was Hfe itself. No Government offi- ‘eial connected with the Weather Bureau made THE SUNDAY STAR, ‘WASH We could see her working about she house all day. Sometimes she brought out quilts and hung them on the line for cleaning. it more his life’s thought. In the kitchen he kept a large calendar upon which he made mno- tations for the day. Every vagrant shifting of the wind, every cloud that raced across the blue was recorded. For what purpose no one knew, Another slight dash of snow at noon. Tempera- ture 34. Sun came out at 3 pm. It seemed 50 small, 8o trivial, that a man should give so much time and thought to that which he could not change, He had thermometers by the house, on the north side to show the coldest registration, on the south to get the hottest, in the garden, by the barn. They were like traps everywhere—baited with mercury—Ilittle traps to catch the weather. From Mr, Parline’s conversation one gath- ered that an ever-seeing Providence had given him exclusive charge of the elements. If his words did not utter it, his manner implied it. “Well, how do you like my June day?” his at- titude seemed to be. If the day was bad, he was half apologetic. If it was pleasant, he glowed with satisfaction. The Summer after- noon on which we were to have a little social gathering, he came to the back door and, with genuine feeling, told us how sorry he was that the day was dull and rainy. His manner showed humiliation, as though from the stand- point of neighborliness he had failed us in a crisis. “I am very sorry,” he said in his gentle, half-pompous way. “I had thought—had every reason to believe—that it would be sunshiny. We assured him that we bore him no grudge, and he went home relieved, returning with the wooden tray on which lay a heap of ruby cher- ries, a delicate mass of baby's-breath around them. WAS there a great material event, his talk ¢ turned immediately to the weather in which it was consummated. When he read the newspapers he seemed to ignore the main issue of the news. The weather, lurking in the back- ground, was apparently of greater importance to him than the magnitude of the event. On the day of Dewey’s triumph, he spoke immedi- ately of the weather, wondering whether it had been dull or sunny in the harbor. At an in- auguration there was no comment from him concerning the great issue of the day, the change in the policy of the administration. He gave forth no acclaim or econdemnation of the new head of the Government, His mind dwelt only on the fact that the new President was having a ride up Pennsylvania avenue in a mist. Vegetables, flowers and the weather—they were Mr. Parline’s whole existence. Such little things they were, we said. Whether his wife was bored by the triviality of his life, we could not know. She was too reserved for any one to sense her reactions to her husband's small interests. We could see her working about the house all day. Sometimes she brought out quilts and hung them on the line for cleaning. They were of intricate patterns, . beautifully pieced and quilted>—the Rose of Sharon, the Log Cabin, the Flower Basket and the Rising Sun. “I'll bet the old man sleeps under the Rising Sun,” one of the family remarked and we laughed ‘uproariously at the joke. In the evening Mrs. Parline often came out and strolled through the paths, stepping gingerly about like a stranger, listening to the old man’s courteous, half-pompous talk. She was deeply afraid of storms, he told us vears before. And when one saw the first dark clouds looming up from the southwest in Summer, or the first gray ones rolling in from the north in Winter, one also saw old Mr. Parline hurrying home, his square, This Story—“The M W eather, by Bess Stre of the Series of O. Hen: Selections. On Account Declared One of the Past Year. heavy body swinging along out of its accus- tomed slower movements, To get home to Mrs. Parline when there was rain of hail or snow was his first duly. It was the only time when he ever seemed thrown out of his pom- pous calm. You saw them later through the windows looking out at the storm together. The Parlines attended a little ivy-grown church where the old gentleman passed the collection box. When his own part of the serv- ice was over he would take a seat near the door, one eye on the sky. It was as though he must have everything as auspicious as possible when the congregation should returm home. One wondered if he heard the sermon at all. A queer old man. BUT the queerest thing of all was his strange prophecy that the day would come when the weather could be regulated. We young folks guffawed at that. “He was eccentric before he sprung that one,” we said, “but now he's a nut.” In his half-pompous, half-gentle way, he argued it. “In the centuries to come, who knows but that humanity will have progressed to such an extent that men can catch the weather and retain it—hold it for a time to their own choice? You smile at that.” He was sensitive to our thoughts. “But strange things have happened. Who would have thought you could catch the human voice in a little box and listen to it through a tube to the ear?” This was all some 20 years ago. “Who would have thought a machine would rise up in the air under its own power? Who would have thought carriages without horses would go about the streets?” “The whole trouble would be,” we joked with him, “you would want rain the day we wanted sunshine, and living next door to us, there would be complications.” “I don't pretend to know how it could be accomplished,” he said in his gentle, dignified way. *“I merely suggest that in the years to come it may be so.” So the Parlines went on living their quiet lives. Refined, gentle folk, but different—and a little queer. And then on a Spring day, old Mrs. Parline died, as quietly and unostenta- tiously as she had lived. There was no fuss about it. A hard cold, the doctor coming and going, a neighbor slipping in and out of the back door, a cousin coming out from Chicago to care for her—death. The various members of our family went over to the house. Other neighbors came, as they do in small towns. A man’s sorrow is the town's sorrow. In a neighborly community, sympathy takes concrete form. It becomes buns and flowers and apple Jjelly and sitting up. Old Mr. Parline greeted us kindly, courteously. Outwardly he showed no manifestations of his grief, except that his face was gray and drawn. He was solicftous of our comfort. He brought in fuel for the kitchen stove and oil for the lamps. He went to the cellar and came back with apples, polishing them scrupulously. He asked us if we were too cold or too hot. He went up and down his tulip beds pulling a few tiny weeds from the soil. Such little things in the face of death! He looked at the thermom- eter, at the almanac, at the sky, and predicted a pleasant sunshiny afternoon for the services. A queer old man, we all said. Not even death itself could take his mind away from the habits of a lifetime. I\,IRS. PARLINE was buried in Riverside Cemetery. “It seemed very mild out there this afternoon,” he said to us a day or two after the services. *“There was a light breese from the northeast.” We knew where “out there” was. By Memorial day there was a stone at the grave and a mass of scarlet geraniums which he had transplanted and some parsley. “How odd,” we said, “parsley from the wvegetable garden.” But he was always odd. We walked around the stone to read the imscription. Propped up against it, in the lush grass, was a thermometer. We laughed a little—but only a little. Some laughter is half tears. During that Summer he seemed lost, & boat without a rudder. It was pathetic the way he went about his housework. He hung the quilts out on the line to clean them—the Flower Basket and the Log Cabin, the Rose of Sharon . and the Rising Sun, We would see him, walk- ing about the yard in the evening with a lan- tern, reading the thermometers. “Look at that,” we young folks said, “he's batty.” “Oh, no,” mother said, “he’s lonely.” And then, quite suddenly, we realized that he was going out to the cemetery at the sign of every storm. At the first glimpse of a thunderhead looming up over the trees, we would see him slipping out of the white picket gate and hurrying down the street. In some indefinable way he must have felt thot he INGTON,