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The Venus of Balhinch.
When I returned from Europe with a finished
education, I found that my fortune also
was finished in the most approved modern
style, so I left New York and drifted westward
in search of employment. At length I came
to Indiana, and, having not even a cent left,
and mustering but one presentable suit of
clothes, I looked about me in a hungry, half
desperate sort of way, till I pounced upon the
school in Balhinch. Now Balhinch is not a
town, nor a cross-road place, nor a post-office
—it is simply a neighborhood in the southwestern
corner of Union Township, Montgomery
County — a neighborhood sui generis, stowed
away in the breaks of Sugar Creek, containing
as good, quiet, law-abiding folk as can be found
anywhere outside of Switzerland. My school
was a small one in numbers, but the pupils
ranged from four to six feet three in altitude,
and well proportioned. The most advanced
class had thumbed along pretty well through
time with the school, however, for it has nothing
at all to do with my story, excepting merely
to explain how I came to be in Balhinch, in the
State of Indiana.
My first sight of Susie Adair was on Sunday
at the Methodist prayer meeting. I was sitting
with my back to a window and facing the
door of the log meeting house when she entered.
It was July—a hot glary day, but a
steady wind blew cool and sweet from the
southwest, bringing in all sorts of woodland
odors. The grasshoppers were chirruping in
the little timothy field hard by, and over in a
bit of woodland pasture a swarm of blue jays
were worrying a crow, keeping up an incessant
squeaking and chattering. The dumpy little
class leader—the only little man in Balhinch
—had just begun to give out the hymn
Its beauties never die,
On earth among the saints it grows
And ripens in the sky,” &c.,
by me. He nudged me with his elbow and
whispered:
“How's that 'ere for poorty?”
I made him no answer, but remained staring
Nature plays strange tricks. Susie, the daughter
of farmer Adair, was as beautiful in the
face as any angel could be, and her form was
as perfect as that of the Cnidian Venus. Her
motion when she walked was music, and as
she sat in statuesque repose, the undulations
of her queenly form were those of perfect ease,
grace and strength. Her hands were small
and taper, a little browned from exposure, as
was also her face. Her hair was the real classic
gold, and her grey eyes were riant with health
and content. When her red lips parted to sing,
they discovered small even teeth, as white
as ivory. I can give you no idea of her.
Physically she was perfection's self in the
mould of a Venus of the grandest type. Her
head, too, was an intellectual one (though
feminine), in the best sense of the word. The
first thought that flashed across my mind was
embodied in the words—A Venus—and I still
think of her as the best model I ever saw.
“How's that for poorty?” repeated Crane.
“Who is she?” I replied interrogatively.
“She's my jewlarker,” said he.
“Your what?”
“My sweetheart.”
“What is her name?”
“Susie Adair.”
So I came to know her and admire her, and
even before that little prayer meeting was over
I loved her. Introductions were an unknown
institution in Balhinch, but I was not long in
finding a way to the personal acquaintance of
Susie. I found her remarkably intelligent for
one of her limited opportunities, very fond of
reading, sprightly in conversation, womanly,
modest, sweet tempered, and, indeed, altogether
charming as well as superbly beautiful.
As for me, I am an insignificant looking man,
and then I was even more so than now. My
hair is terribly stiff and red, you know, and
my eyes are very pale blue, nearly white. My
neck is very long and has a large Adam's
apple. I am small and narrow chested, and have
slender bow legs. My teeth are uneven and
my nose is pug. I have a very fine thin voice,
decidedly nasal, as you perceive. One thing,
however, I am well educated, polite, and not a
bad conversationalist.
Susie was a most entertaining and perplexing
study for me from the start. She treated
me with decided consideration and kindness,
seemed deeply interested in my accounts of my
travels, asked me many questions about the
old world and good society, sat for hours at a
I felt that I was impressing her deeply, but she
would go with Ben Crane, that long, awkward,
ignorant gawk. How could a young
woman of such fine magnetic presence, and endowed
with such genuine, instinctive purity of
taste in everything else, bear the presence of a
rough greenhorn like that? Finally I said to
myself: she is kind and good; she cannot
bear to slight Ben, though she cares nothing
for him.
What a strange state being in love is! It is
like dreaming in the grass. One hears the
flow of the wind—it is the breath of love—one
smells the flowers, and it is the perfume of a
young cheek, the sharp fragrance of blonde
curls. What dreams I had in those days! I
could scarcely endure my school to the end of
the first three months. Then I gave it up, and
collecting my wages purchased me some fine
clothes—that is, fine for the time and the place.
I recollect that suit now, and wonder how a
man of my taste could have borne to wear it.
A black coat, a scarlet vest and white pants,
ending with calf boots and a very tall silk hat!
If you should see me dressed that way now
you would laugh till your ribs would hurt. I
do not know how true it is, but, from a pretty
looked like a red-headed woodpecker. One
thing I do know, I never saw a woodpecker
with a freckled face. I have a freckled face.
Ben soon recognized me as his rival and
treated me with supreme impertinence, even
going so far as to rub his fist under my nose
and swear at me—a thing at which I felt profoundly
indignant, and considering which I
was surely justified in sticking a lucifer match
into Ben's six valuable hay stacks one night
thereafter. It was a great fire, and two hundred
dollars loss to Ben. Let him keep his fist out
from under my nose.
But I must come to my story, cutting short
these preliminaries. It is a story I never tire
of telling, and a story which has elicited ejaculations
from many.
It was a ripe sweet day in the latter part of
September—clear, but hazy and dreamful—a
prelude to the Indian summer. I stood before
the glass in my room at 'Squire Jones's, where
I boarded, and very carefully arranged my
bright blue neck-tie. Then I combed my hair.
I never have got thoroughly familiar with my
hair. I cannot, even now, comb it, while looking
in a glass, without cringing for fear of
burning my fingers. The long, wavy red locks
is a gleam of live coals and red hot
ashes. Ben Crane said he believed my head
had set his hay stacks a-fire. Maybe it did.
I wished that a stray flash from the same source
would kindle the heart of Susie Adair and
heat it until it lay under her Cytherean
breasts a puddle of molten love. I put my
silk hat carefully upon my head and wriggled
my hands into a pair of kid gloves; then,
walking-stick in hand, I set out to know my
fate at the hands of Susie. My way was across
a stubble field in which the young clover, sown
in the spring, displayed itself in a variety of
fantastic modes. Have you ever noticed how
much grass is like water? Some one, Hawthorne,
perhaps, has spoken of “a gush of
violets,” and Swinburne, going into one of his
musical frenzies, cries:
“Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers.”
I have seen pools of clover and streams of
timothy; I have stood ankle deep in shoal
blue grass and have watched for hours the
liquid ripples of the red top. I have seen the
field sparrows dive into the green waves of
young wheat, and the black starlings wade
about in the sink-foil of southern countries.
it shines like that of a clean, healthy child.
But clover prefers to stand in pools and
eddies, in which oft and oft I have seen the
breasts of meadow larks shine like gold, the
while a few sweet notes, like rung silver, rose
and trembled above the trefoil, all woven, in
and out, through the swash of the wind's palpitant
currents—a music of unspeakable influence.
Swallows skim the surface of grass
just as they do that of water. When the summer
air agitates the smooth bosom of a broad
green meadow field, you will see these little
random arrows glancing along the emerald
surface, cutting with barbed wings through
the tossing, bloom-capped waves, thence ricochetting
high into the bright air to whirl
and fall again as swiftly as before. Many a
time I have traced streams of grass to their
fresh fountains, where jets of tender foliage
and bubbles of tinted flowers welled up from
dark, rich earth, and flowed away, with a
velvet rustle and a ripple like blown floss, to
break and recoil and eddy against the dark
shadows of a distant grove. Such a fountain
is a place of fragrance and joy. The bees go
thither to get the sweetest honey, and find it
a very Hybla. The butterflies float about it
shade of a dock leaf squats a great toad, like
a slimy dragon guarding the gate of a paradise.
As I slowly walked across that stubble field,
now and then stepping into a tuft of clover,
out from which a quail would start, whirling
away in a convulsion of flight, I allowed
dreams of bliss to steal rosily across my brain.
I scarcely saw the great gold-sharded beetles
that hummed and glanced in the mellow sun-light.
I heard like one half asleep, as if far
away, the sharp twitter of the blue bird and
the tender piping of the meadow lark. Susie
Adair was all my thought. I recollect that,
just as I climbed the fence at the farther side
of the clover field, I saw a white winged, red
headed woodpecker pounce upon and carry off
a starry opal-tinted butterfly, and I thought
how sweet it would be if I could thus steal
away into the free regions of space the object
of my gentler passion. But then what wonderful
big wings I should have needed, for my
Venus of the hollow of the hill of Balhinch
was no airy thing. Her tall, strong body and
magnificent limbs equalled one hundred and
forty pounds avoirdupois! My own weight
was about one hundred and twenty.
As I neared Susie's home I began, for the
The shadow of a doubt floated in the autumn
sun-light. I set my teeth together and resolved
not to be faint hearted. I must go in
boldly and plead my cause and win.
When I reached the gate of the Adair farmhouse
I had to look straight over the head of
a very large, sanctimonious-faced bull-dog to
get a view of the vine covered porch. This
dog looked up at me and smiled ineffably;
then he came to the gate and stood over
against me, peeping between the slats. I
hesitated. About this time Ben Crane came
out of the house with a banjo in his hand.
He had been playing for Susie. He was a
natural musician.
“'Feared o' the dog, Mr. Woodpecker?”
said he. “Begone, Bull!” and he kicked the
big-headed canine aside so that I could go in.
I heard him thrumming on his banjo far
down the road as Susie met me at the door.
How wondrously beautiful she was!
“Sit down Mr. —, and, if you do not
care, I'll bring the churn in and finish getting
the butter while we talk.”
I was delighted—I was charmed—fascinated.
Susie's father had gone to a distant village,
and her mother, a gentle work-worn matron,
meantime, snatches of camp meeting hymns.
The sound of that spinning-wheel seemed to
me strangely mournful and sad, but Susie's
deep, clear gray eyes and cheerful voice were
the very soul of joyousness, health and youth.
She brought in a great fragrant cedar churn,
made to hold six or eight gallons of cream,
and forthwith began her labor. She stood as
she worked, and the exercise throwing her
entire body into gentle but well-defined motion,
displayed all the riches of her contour. The
sleeves of her calico gown were rolled up
above the elbows, leaving her plump, muscular
arms bare, and her skirt was pinned away
from her really small feet and shapely ankles
in such a way as to give one an idea, a suggestion,
of supreme innocence and grace. Her
long, crinkled gold hair was unbound, hanging
far below her waist, and shining like silk.
Her lips, carmine red, seemed to overflow
with tender utterances.
Ever since that day I have thought churning
a kind of sacred, charmingly blessed work,
which ought to be, if really it is not, the pastime
of those delightful beings the ancients
called deities. Cream is more fragrant, more
delicious, more potent than nectar or ambrosia.
than any patera of the gods. And, I say it
with reverence, I have seen, swaying lily-like
above the churn, a beauty more perfect than
that which bloomed full grown from the bright
focus of the sea's ecstatic travail.
What a talk Susie and I had that day!
Slowly, stealthily I crept nearer and nearer to
the subject burning in my heart. I watched
Susie closely, for her face was an enigma to
me. I never think of her and of that day
without recalling Baudelaire's dream of a
giantess. More happy than the poet, I really
saw my colossal beauty stand full grown
before me, but, like him, I wondered—
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux.”
I could not tell, from any outward sign,
what was going on in her heart. No sphinx
could have been more utterly calm and mysterious.
She had a most baffling way about her,
too. When at last I had reached the point of a
confession of my maddening love, she broke
into one of my charmingest sentences to say—
“Mr. —, you'd better move farther away
from the churn or I might spatter your
clothes.”
This, somehow, disconcerted and bothered
it, her gray eyes beamed so mysteriously innocent
of any impropriety, that I soon regained
my lost eloquence.
How sharply and indelibly cut in my memory,
like intaglios in ivory, the surroundings
of that scene, even to the minutest detail!
For instance, I can see as plainly as then my
new silk hat on the floor between my knees,
containing a red handkerchief and a paper of
chewing tobacco. I recall, also, that a sliptrod
shoe lay careened to one side near the
centre of the room. The bull-dog came to the
door and peeped solemnly in a time or two.
A string of dried pumpkin cuts hung by the
fireplace, and under a small wooden table in
one corner were piled a few balls of “carpet
rags.” I sat in a very low chair. A picture
of George Washington hung above a small
square window. The floor was ash boards uncarpeted.
I heard some chickens clucking and
cackling under the house.
Finally, I recollect it as if it were but yesterday,
I said:
“I love you, Susie—I love you, and I have
loved you ever since I first saw you!”
How tame the words sound now! but then
they came forth in a tremulous murmur that
straight at me a moment, and I thought I saw
a softer light gather in her eyes. Then she
took away the churn dasher and lid and
fetched a large bowl from a cupboard. What
a fine golden pile of butter she fished up into
the bowl!
I drew my chair somewhat nearer, and
watched her pat and roll and squeeze the
plastic mass with the cherry ladle. A little
gray kitten came and rubbed and purred
round her. Again the bull-dog peeped in. A
breeze gathered some force and began to ripple
pleasantly through the room. Far away
in the fields I heard the quails whistling to
each other. An old cow strolled up the lane
by the house and round the corner of the
orchard, plaintively tinkling her bell. Steadily
hummed Mrs. Adair's spinning wheel. I
slipped my hat and my chair a little closer to
Susie, and by a mighty effort directed my
burning words straight to the point. I cannot
repeat all I said. I would not if I could.
Such things are sacred.
“Susie, I love you, madly, blindly, dearly,
truly! O, Susie! will you love me—will you
be my wife?”
Again she turned on me that strange, sweet,
flush on her cheeks almost died out.
“Answer me, Susie, and say you will make
me happy.”
She walked to the cupboard, put away the
bowl of butter and the ladle, then came back
and stood by the churn and me. How indescribably
charming she looked! She smiled
strangely and made a motion with her round
strong arms. I answered the movement. I
spread wide my arms and half rose to clasp
her to my bosom. A whole life was centred in
the emotion of that moment. Susie's arms
missed me and lifted the churn. I sank back
into my chair. How gracefully Susie swayed
herself to her immense height, toying with the
ponderous churn held far above her head. I
saw a kitten fairly fly out of the room, its tail
as level as a gun barrel; I saw the bull-dog's
face hastily withdraw from the door; I saw
the carpet balls, the pumpkin cuts and the
print of Washington all through a perpendicular
cataract of deliciously fragrant buttermilk!
I saw my hat fill up to the brim, with my
handkerchief afloat. I heaved an awful sigh
and leaped to my feet. I saw old Mrs. Adair
standing in the partition door, with her arms
akimbo, and heard her say—
“W'y, Susan Jane Samantha Ann! What
'pon airth hev ye done?”
And the Venus replied:
“I've been givin' this 'ere little woodpecker
a good dose of buttermilk!”
I seized my hat and shuffled out of the door,
feeling the milk gush from the tops of my
boots at each hasty step I made. I ran to the
gate, went through and slammed it after me.
As I did so I heard a report like the closing of
a strong steel trap. It was the bull-dog's
teeth shutting on a slat of the gate as he made
a dive at me from behind. I smiled grimly,
thinking how I'd taste served in buttermilk.
On my way home I passed Ben Crane's
house. He was sitting at a window playing
his banjo, and singing in a stentorian voice:
Yer chance is mighty slim!
Jest draw yer red head into yer hole
And there die easy, dern your soul,
O! slim Woodpecker Jim!”
I was so mad that I sweat great drops of
pure buttermilk, but over in the fields the
quails whistled just as clear and sweet as ever,
and I heard the wind pouring through the
stubble as it always does in autumn!
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