WICK CUTTER WAS the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter's first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, `for
sentiment's sake,' as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a little
Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early Scandinavian
settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the `fast set' of Black Hawk business men.
He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was going
on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry, and
he said he got his start in life by saving the money that other young men
spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys. When he came to
our house on business, he quoted `Poor Richard's Almanack' to me, and told
me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a cow. He was
particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he would begin
at once to talk about `the good old times' and simple living. I detested
his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and glistening.
It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her hair. His
white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from
perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He
was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in
his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to
Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He
still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check travelling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no change
and would `fix it up next time.' No one could cut his lawn or wash his
buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a
boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.
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.
Read next: BOOK II - The Hired Girls#Chapter 12
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