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Page 59
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-grey hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very colour and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her wash-bowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: `Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!'
They quarrelled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town at
large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from which
it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether he
ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her `people,' whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out to
the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarrelled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her `to live by her brush.'
Cutter wasn't shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the I
privacy' which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed--easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.
XII
AFTER ANTONIA WENT TO live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not
going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the
subject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener's new party dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs. Cutter,
who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she
went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls'
Norwegian Anna. We high-school boys used to linger on the playground at
the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every
day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride that Antonia, like
Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still `fairest of them all.'
Being a senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the
girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlour, where they would
sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country.
I remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared
she had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. `I
guess you'll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won't he
look funny, girls?'
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