• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 703 0

her visit is, Olympia finds she is profoundly impatient, after only two weeks, to leave that household where a faint odor of shame and failure still follows her and seems to linger in the walls and in the carpets and in the furnishings of the many rooms, like smoke after a fire. She is nineteen, an age at which most young women of her station leave the cities in the summer for the watering places along the coast of New England. They go to cotillions and parties and tennis matches and then undertake engagements to handsome or silly young men. Since such an engagement can never come Olympia’s way, it is understood that it will be better if she is occupied elsewhere.

The journey back to western Massachusetts is long and arduous, although Olympia is much taken with the gentle blue roll of the landscape west of the mill towns. After they have traveled some distance into the Berkshire Mountains, she gets off the train at what appears to be a crossroads with one general store and a small stone building. When she questions the conductor as to the accuracy of this final destination, he assures her that she is at the correct place. She waits at the crossroads until her employer, Averill Hardy, arrives to take her to his house.

Mr. Hardy is a robust man of about thirty-five years. He has an abundance of hair, which seems to have gone silver at an early age, and a beard that reaches nearly to the middle of his chest. He has two wooden teeth in the front of his mouth, and he is nearly always sunburnt. With his wife, Mary Catherine, he had four sons, three of whom still live with him on the farm. The fourth has gone to Springfield. Since there are no women in the household, Averill Hardy explains to Olympia before they have even reached the farm, it is hoped she will take over the preparation of the meals, see to the laundry, and mend the clothes when she is not actually engaged in teaching his sons how to read and write. Olympia bristles at this suggestion, and questions Mr. Hardy rather strenuously at first, telling him that she has not been given to understand these circumstances. But later, when it becomes apparent to her that the poor man and his home are in desperate condition, she decides she will help; otherwise, she should have to live in near squalor, too. And since her only alternative is to give up the position and return to Boston, which she most profoundly does not want to do, she begins to give in to Mr. Hardy’s expectations.

And, in fact, Olympia does not mind this work. She has learned domestic skills at Hastings, and she finds the repetition of household chores to be a calming influence upon her spirit. The farmhouse itself is similar to others in the area in that it is two stories high with white clapboards, black shutters, and an ell in the back. The building is not unpleasant, though the house is close to the barn, which houses dairy cattle and smells poorly on hot days. She has a room at the back of the house, a small room that looks out at a wall of oak and maple trees.

The boys are shy and muscular and range in age from twelve to seventeen, and Olympia thinks it rather astonishing that they cannot read. When she wakes in the mornings, they and Mr. Hardy are already up and tending to the animals and the land, which consists of a hundred acres of feed corn. The kitchen is commodious and easy to work in, and Olympia has learned enough of the culinary arts at the seminary to be able to put together some meals. Before the evening hours, Olympia will have prepared four dinners for Mr. Hardy and his sons, including a breakfast of sausages, porridge, and eggs that she will have ready within a half hour of awakening. She never eats with the men, but rather takes her meals alone at the table when they have finished theirs and have gone out again. After the noon meal, if Mr. Hardy can spare his boys that day, they will come to the parlor, where she teaches them the most rudimentary of skills. The boys are polite, and even somewhat grateful, though the eldest child, who is called Seth, is a painfully slow learner and suffers