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In a Little Town

by Rupert Hughes · English · Gutenberg #29561 · 530,753 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: In a Little Town

Author: Rupert Hughes


        
Release date: August 1, 2009 [eBook #29561]

Language: English

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Produced by Colin Bell, Woodie4, Michael and the Online
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  [Illustration: cover]


  IN A LITTLE TOWN




  BOOKS BY

  RUPERT HUGHES

  IN A LITTLE TOWN                Illustrated. Post 8vo

  THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT      Illustrated. Post 8vo

  CLIPPED WINGS.                  Frontispiece. Post 8vo

  WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?           Illustrated. Post 8vo

  THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER.        Frontispiece. 16mo

  EMPTY POCKETS.                  Illustrated. Post 8vo

         *       *       *       *       *

  HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

  [Illustration: Frontispiece]


  In a Little Town

  [Illustration: Title page decoration]

  BY

  RUPERT HUGHES

  [Illustration: Publisher's mark]

  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

  NEW YORK AND LONDON




  IN A LITTLE TOWN

  Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published March, 1917




                     TO
         FREDERICK ATHERTON DUNEKA
              AS AN I-O-U OF
             HEARTFELT ESTEEM




  CONTENTS

                                  PAGE

  DON'T YOU CARE!                    1

  POP                               42

  BABY TALK                         73

  THE MOUTH OF THE GIFT HORSE      106

  THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME            141

  AND THIS IS MARRIAGE             173

  THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN     191

  THE HAPPIEST MAN IN IOWAY        222

  PRAYERS                          224

  PAIN                             232

  THE BEAUTY AND THE FOOL          262

  THE GHOSTLY COUNSELORS           267

  DAUGHTERS OF SHILOH              285

  "A" AS IN "FATHER"               356




FOREWORD


There are two immortal imbecilities that I have no patience for.

The other one is the treatment of little towns as if they were
essentially different from big towns. Cities are not "Ninevehs" and
"Babylons" any more than little towns are Arcadias or Utopias. In fact
we are now unearthing plentiful evidence of what might have been safely
assumed, that Babylon never was a "Babylon" nor Nineveh a "Nineveh" in
the sense employed by poets and praters without number. Those old cities
were made up of assorted souls as good and as bad and as mixed as now.

They do small towns a grievous injustice who deny them restlessness,
vice, ostentation, cruelty; as they do cities a grievous injustice who
deny them simplicity, homeliness, friendship, and contentment. It is one
of those undeniable facts (which everybody denies) that a city is only a
lot of small towns put together. Its population is largely made up of
people who came from small towns and of people who go back to small
towns every evening.

A village is simply a quiet street in the big city of the world. Quaint,
sweet happenings take place in the avenues most thronged, and desperate
events come about in sleepy lanes. People are people, chance is chance.

My novels have mainly concerned themselves with New York, and I have
tried therein to publish bits of its life as they appear to such eyes
and such mind as I have. Though several of my short stories have been
published in single volumes, this is the first group to be issued. They
are all devoted to small-town people. In them I have sought the same end
as in the city novels: to be true to truth, to observe with sympathy and
explain with fidelity, to find the epic of a stranger's existence and
shape it for the eyes of strangers--to pass the throb of another heart
through my heart to your heart.

The scene of these stories lies pretty close to the core of these United
States, in the Middle West, in the valley of the Mississippi River. I
was born near that river and spent a good deal of my boyhood in it.

Though it would be unfair, false, and unkind to fasten these stories on
any definite originals, they are centered in the region about the small
city of Keokuk, Iowa, from which one can also see into Illinois, and
into Missouri, where I was born. Comic poets have found something comic
in the name of Keokuk, as in other town names in which the letter "K" is
prominent. Why "K" should be so humorous, I can't imagine. The name of
Keokuk, however, belonged to a splendid Indian chief who was friendly
to the early settlers and saved them from massacre. The monument over
his bones in the park, on the high bluff there, now commands one of the
noblest views in the world, a great lake formed in the Mississippi River
by a dam which is as beautiful as if the Greeks had built it. It was, in
fact, built by a thousand Greeks who camped there for years. As an
engineering achievement it rivals the Assouan dam and as a manufacturer
of electricity it is a second to Niagara Falls. But it has not yet
materially disturbed the rural quality of the country.

The scenery thereabout is very beautiful, but I guarantee you against
landscape in these stories. I cannot, however, guarantee that the
stories are even based on fact. Yet I hope that they are truth.

The characters are limited to a small neighborhood, but if they are not
also faithful to humanity in general, then, as we would say out there,
"I miss my guess."

                                                      RUPERT HUGHES.




IN A LITTLE TOWN




DON'T YOU CARE!

I


When she was told it was a girl, Mrs. Govers sighed. "Well, I never did
have any luck, anyway; so I d' know's I'm supprised."

Later she wept feebly:

"Girls are easier to raise, I suppose; but I kind of had my heart set on
namin' him Launcelot." After another interval she rallied to a smile: "I
was prepared for the worst, though; so I picked out Ellaphine for a name
in case he was a her. It's an awful pirty name, Ellaphine is. Don't you
think so?"

"Yes, yes," said the nurse, who would have agreed to anything then.

After a time Mrs. Govers resumed: "She'll be an awful pirty girl, I
hope. Is that her makin' all that noise? Give me a glimpse of her, will
you? I got a right, I guess, to see my own baby. Oh, Goshen! Is that
how she looks?" A kind of swoon; then more meditation, followed by a
courageous philosophy: "Children always look funny at first. She'll
outgrow it, I expect. Ellaphine is such an elegant name. It ought to be
a kind of inducement to grow up to. Don't you think so?"

The nurse, who was juggling the baby as if it were red-hot, mumbled
through a mustache of safety-pins that she thought so. Mrs. Govers
echoed, "I thought so, too." After that she went to sleep.

Ellaphine, however, did not grow up elegant, to fit the name. The name
grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little
children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and
allowed her to lapse indolently from Ellar to El.

Mrs. Govers for some years cherished a dream that her ugly duckling
would develop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince.
Later she dwindled to a prayer that she might capture a man who was
"tol'able well-to-do."

The majority of ugly ducklings, however, grow up into uglier ducks, and
Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of the widowed
mother of an old maid perennial.

To the confusion of prophecy, among all the batch of girls who descended
on Carthage about the time of Ellaphine's birth--"out of the nowhere
into the here"--Ellaphine was the first to be married! And she cut out
the prettiest girl in the township--it was not such a small township,
either.

Those homely ones seem to make straight for a home the first thing.
Ellaphine carried off Eddie Pouch--the very Eddie of whom his mother
used to say, "He's little, but oh, my!" The rest of the people said,
"Oh, my, but he's little!"

Eddie's given name was Egbert. Edward was his taken name. He took it
after his mother died and he went to live at his uncle Loren's. Eddie
was sorry to change his name, but he said his mother was not responsible
at the time she pasted the label Egbert on him, and his shy soul could
not endure to be called Egg by his best friends--least of all by his
best girl.

His best girl was the township champion looker, Luella Thickins. From
the time his heart was big enough for Cupid to stick a child's-size
arrow in, Eddie idolized Luella. So did the other boys; and as Eddie was
the smallest of the lot, he was lost in the crowd. Even when Luella
noticed him it was with the atrocious contempt of little girls for
little boys they do not like.

Eddie could not give her sticks of candy or jawbreakers, for his uncle
Loren did not believe in spending money. And Eddie had no mother to go
to when the boys mistreated him and the girls ignored him. A dismal life
he led until he grew up as far as he ever grew up.

Eddie reached his twenty-second birthday and was working in Uncle
Loren's factory--one of the largest feather-duster factories in the
whole State--when he observed a sudden change in Luella's manner.

She had scared him away from paying court to her, save from a distance.
Now she took after him, with her aggressive beauty for a club and her
engaging smiles for a net. She asked him to take her to the
Sunday-school picnic, and asked him what he liked best for her to put in
for him. She informed him that she was going to cook it for herself and
everybody said she could fry chicken something grand. So he chose fried
chicken.

He was so overjoyed that it was hard for him to be as solemn about the
house as he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had
been taken suddenly and violently ill. Eddie was the natural heir to the
old man's fortune.

Uncle Loren was considered close in a town where extravagance was almost
impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous
wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything
but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old
miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem,
Limited. He was frightened immeasurably.

In his youth he had joined the Campbellite church and had been baptized
in the town pond when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor
had to break with a stick before he immersed Loren. Everybody said the
crust of ice had stuck to his heart ever since.

In the panic that came on him now he craftily decided to transfer all
his savings to the other shore. The factory, of course, he must leave
behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to the
Campbellite church under conditions that he counted on to gain him a
high commercial rating in heaven.

Over his shoulder, as he wrote, a shadow waited, grinning; and the old
man had hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his
pillow-slip when the grisly hand was laid on his shoulders and Uncle
Loren was no longer there.


II

His uncle's demise cut Eddie out of the picnic with Luella; but she was
present at the funeral and gave him a wonderful smile. Uncle Loren's
final will was not discovered until the pillow-slip was sent to the
wash; and at the funeral Eddie was still the object of more or less
disguised congratulations as an important heir.

Luella solaced him with rare tact and tenderness, and spoke much of his
loneliness and his need of a helpmate. Eddie resolved to ask her to
marry him as soon as he could compose the speech.

Some days later Uncle Loren's farewell will turned up, and Eddie fell
from grace with a thump. The town laughed at him, as people always laugh
when a person--particularly so plump a person as Eddie was--falls hard
on the slippery sidewalk of this icy world.

In his dismay he hastened to Luella for sympathy, but she turned up
missing. She jilted him with a jolt that knocked his heart out of his
mouth. He stood, as it were, gaping stupidly, in the middle of the
highway.

Then Ellaphine Govers came along, picked his heart out of the road,
dusted it, and offered it back. He was so grateful that he asked her to
keep it for him. He was so pitiable an object that he felt honored even
by the support of Ellar Govers.

He went with Ellar quite a lot. He found her very comfortable company.
She seemed flattered by his attention. Other people acted as if they
were doing him a favor by letting him stand around.

He had lost Uncle Loren's money, but he still had a small job at the
factory. Partly to please Ellar and partly to show certain folks that he
was not yet dead, he took her out for a drive behind a livery-stable
horse. It was a beautiful drive, and the horse was so tame that it
showed no desire to run away. It was perfectly willing to stand still
where the view was good.

He let Ellar drive awhile, and that was the only time the horse
misbehaved. It saw a stack of hay, nearly went mad, and tried to climb a
rail fence; but Ellar yelled at it and slapped the lines at it and got
it past the danger zone, and it relapsed into its usual mood of despair.

Eddie told Ellar the horse was "attackted with haydrophobia." And she
nearly laughed herself to death and said:

"You do say the funniest things!"

She was a girl who could appreciate a fellow's jokes, and he saw that
they could have awful good times together. He told her so without
difficulty and she agreed that they could, and they were as good as
engaged before they got back as far as the fair-grounds. As they came
into the familiar streets Eddie observed a remarkable change in the
manner of the people they passed. People made an effort to attract his
eye. They wafted him salutes from a distance. He encountered such a
lifting of hats, elaborateness of smiles and flourish of hands, that he
said to Ellaphine:

"Say, Pheeny, I wonder what the joke is!"

"Me, I guess," sighed Ellaphine. "They're makin' fun of you for takin'
me out buggy-ridin'."

"Ah, go on!" said Eddie. "They've found out something about me and
they're pokin' fun."

He was overcome with shame and drove to Ellaphine's house by a side
street and escorted the horse to the livery-stable by a back alley. On
his way home he tried in vain to dodge Luella Thickins, but she headed
him off with one of her Sunday-best smiles. She bowled him over by an
effusive manner.

"Why, Eddie, you haven't been round to see me for the longest time!
Can't you come on over 'safternoon? I'd just love to see you!"

He wondered whether she had forgotten how she had ground his meek heart
under her heel the last time he called.

She was so nice to him that she frightened him. He mumbled that he would
certainly call that afternoon, and got away, wondering what the trick
was. Her smile seemed less pretty than it used to be.


III

A block farther on Eddie met a man who explained the news, which had run
across the town like oil on water. Tim Holdredge, an idle lawyer who had
nothing else to do, looked into the matter of Uncle Loren's will and
found that the old man, in his innocence of charity and his passion for
economy, had left his money to the church on conditions that were not
according to the law. The money reverted to the estate. Eddie was the
estate.

When Tim Holdredge slapped Eddie on the shoulder and explained the
result of what he called "the little joker" in Uncle Loren's will, Eddie
did not rejoice, as Tim had a right to expect.

Eddie was poisoned by a horrible suspicion. The logic of events ran
through his head like a hateful tune which he could not shake off:

"When Luella thought I was coming into a pile of money she was nice to
me. When she heard I wasn't she was mean to me. Now that my money's
coming to me, after all, she's nice again. Therefore--" But he was
ashamed to give that ungallant _ergo_ brain room.

Still more bewildering was the behavior of Ellaphine. As soon as he
heard of his good fortune he hurried to tell her about it. Her mother
answered the door-bell and congratulated him on his good luck. When he
asked for Ellar, her mother said, "She was feelin' right poorly, so
she's layin' down." He was so alarmed that he forgot about Luella, who
waited the whole afternoon all dressed up.

After supper that night he patrolled before Ellaphine's home and tried
to pluck up courage enough to twist that old door-bell again. Suddenly
she ran into him. She was sneaking through the front gate. He tried to
talk to her, but she said:

"I'm in a tur'ble hurry. I got to go to the drug-store and get some
chloroform liniment. Mamma's lumbago's awful bad."

He walked along with her, though she tried to escape him. The first
drowsy lamp-post showed him that Ellaphine had been crying. It was the
least becoming thing she could have done. Eddie asked whether her mother
was so sick as all that. She said "No"--then changed to "Yes"--and then
stopped short and began to blubber uncouthly, dabbing her eyes
alternately with the backs of her wrists.

Eddie stared awhile, then yielded to an imperious urge to clasp her to
his heart and comfort her. She twisted out of his arms, and snapped,
"Don't you touch me, Eddie Pouch!"

Eddie mumbled, inanely, "You didn't mind it this mornin', buggy-ridin'."

Her answer completely flabbergasted him:

"No; because you didn't have all that money then."

"Gee whiz, Pheeny!" he gasped. "What you got against Uncle Loren's
money? It ain't a disease, is it? It's not ketchin', is it?"

"No," she sobbed; "but we--Well, when you were so poor and all, I
thought you might--you might really like me because I could be of
some--of some use to you; but now you--you needn't think I'm goin' to
hold you to any--anything against your will."

Eddie realized that across the street somebody had stopped to listen.
Eddie wanted to throw a rock at whoever it was, but Ellaphine absorbed
him as she wailed:

"It 'd be just like you to be just's nice to me as ever; but I'm not
goin' to tie you down to any homely old crow like me when you got money
enough to marry anybody. You can get Luella Thickins back now. You could
marry the Queen of England if you'd a mind to."

Eddie could find nothing better to say than, "Well, I'll be dog-on'd!"

While he gaped she got away.


IV

Luella Thickins cast her spells over Eddie with all her might, but he
understood them now and escaped through their coarse meshes. She was so
resolute, however, that he did not dare trust himself alone in the same
town with her unless he had a chaperon.

He sent a note to Ellaphine, saying he was in dire trouble and needed
her help. This brought him the entree to her parlor. He told her the
exact situation and begged her to rescue him from Luella.

Ellaphine's craggy features grew as radiant as a mountain peak in the
sunrise. The light made beautiful what it illumined. She consented at
last to believe in Eddie's devotion, or at least in his need of her; and
the homely thing enjoyed the privilege of being pleaded for and of
yielding to the prayers of an ardent lover.

She assumed that the marriage could not take place for several years, if
ever. She wanted to give Eddie time to be sure of his heart; but Eddie
was stubborn and said:

"Seein' as we're agreed on gettin' married, let's have the wedding right
away and get it over with."

When Ellaphine's mother learned that Ellaphine had a chance to marry an
heir and was asking for time, Mrs. Govers delivered an oration that
would have sent Ellaphine to the altar with almost anybody, let alone
her idolized Eddie.

The wedding was a quiet affair. Everybody in Carthage was invited. Few
came. People feared that if they went they would have to send
wedding-presents, and Eddie and Ellar were too unimportant to the social
life of Carthage to make their approval valuable.

Eddie wore new shoes, which creaked and pinched. He looked twice as
uncomfortable and twice as sad as he had looked at his uncle Loren's
obsequies; and he suffered that supreme disenchantment of a too-large
collar with a necktie rampant.

In spite of the ancient and impregnable theory that all brides are
beautiful, was there ever a woman who looked her best in the uniform of
approaching servitude? In any case, Ellaphine's best was not good, and
she was at her worst in her ill-fitting white gown, with the veil askew.
Her graceless carriage was not improved by the difficulty of keeping
step with her escort and the added task of keeping step with the music.

The organist, Mr. Norman Maugans, always grew temperamental when he
played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," and always relieved its monotonous
cadence with passionate accelerations and abrupt retardations. That made
walking difficult.

When the minister had finished with the couple and they moved down the
aisle to what the paper called the "Bridle March, by Lohengrin," Mr.
Maugans always craned his neck to see and usually put his foot on the
wrong pedal, with the startling effect of firing a cannon at the
departing guests.

He did not crane his neck, however, to see Mr. and Mrs. Pouch depart.
They were too commonplace entirely. He played the march with such
doleful indifference that Eddie found the aisle as long as the distance
from Marathon to Athens. Also he was trying to walk so that his pinching
shoes would not squeak.

At the end of the last pew Eddie and Ellaphine encountered Luella
Thickins leaning out into the aisle and triumphantly beautiful in her
finest raiment. Her charms were militant and vindictive, and her smile
plainly said: "Uh-huh! Don't you wish you'd taken me instead of that
thing you've hitched up with for life?"

Eddie gave her one glance and found her hideous. Ellaphine lowered her
eyelids in defeat and slunk from the church, thinking:

"Now he's already sorry that he married me. What can he see in me to
love? Nothing! Nothing!"

When they clambered into the carriage Eddie said, "Well, Mrs. Pouch,
give your old husband a kiss!"

Ellaphine shrank away from him, however, crying again. He was hurt and
puzzled until he remembered that it is the business of brides to cry.
He held her hand and tried to console her for being his victim, and
imagined almost every reason for her tears but the true one.

The guests at the church straggled to Mrs. Govers's home, drawn by the
call of refreshments. Luella was the gayest of them all. People wondered
why Eddie had not married her instead of Ellaphine. Luella heard some
one say, "What on earth can he see in her?"

Luella answered, "What on earth can she see in him?" It was hardly
playing fair, but Luella was a poor loser. She even added, to clinch it,
"What on earth can they see in each other?"

That became the town comment on the couple when there was any comment at
all. Mainly they were ignored completely.

Eddie and Ellar were not even honored with the usual outburst of the
ignoblest of all sports--bride-baiting. Nobody tied a white ribbon to
the wheel of the hack that took them to the depot. Old shoes had not
been provided and rice had been forgotten. They were not pelted or
subjected to immemorial jokes. They were not chased to the train, and
their elaborate schemes for deceiving the neighbors as to the place of
their honeymoon were wasted. Nobody cared where they went or how long
they stayed.

They returned sheepishly, expecting to run a gantlet of humor; but
people seemed unaware that they had been away. They settled down into
the quiet pool of Carthage without a splash, like a pair of mud-turtles
slipping off a log into the water. Even the interest in Eddie's
inheritance did not last long, for Uncle Loren's fortune did not last
long--not that they were spendthrift, for they spent next to nothing;
but money must be fed or it starves to death. Money must grow or wither.


V

Eddie found that his uncle's reputation for hard dealing had been a
condition of his success. He soon learned that the feather-duster
factory could be run at a profit only by the most microscopic care.
Wages must be kept down; hours kept up; the workers driven every minute,
fined if they were late, nagged if they dawdled. Profit could be wrung
from the trade only by ugly battles with dealers and purchasers. Raw
material had to be fought down, finished product fought up; bills due
fought off, accounts fought in; the smallest percentage of a percentage
wrestled for.

Eddie was incapable of such vigilant hostility toward everybody. The
factory almost immediately ceased to pay expenses. Eddie was prompt to
meet debts, but lenient as a collector. The rest of his inheritance
fared no better. Eddie was an ideal mortgagee. The first widow wept him
out of his interest in five tears. Having obliged her, he could hardly
deny the next person, who had money but wanted more, "to carry out a big
deal."

Eddie first gained a reputation for being a kind-hearted gentleman and a
Christian, and later a notoriety for being an easy mark. Eddie overheard
such comment eventually, and it wounded him as deeply as it bewildered
him. Bitterer than the contempt for a hard man is the contempt for a
soft man who is betrayed by a vice of mercy. Eddie was hopelessly
addicted to decency.

Uncle Loren had been a miser and so close that his nickname had implied
the ability to skin a flint. People hated him and raged against him; but
it suddenly became evident that they had worked hard to meet their bills
payable to him. They had sat up nights devising schemes to gain cash for
him. He was a cause of industry and thrift and self-denial. He paid poor
wages, but he kept the factory going. He squeezed a penny until the
eagle screamed, but he made dusters out of the tail feathers, and he was
planning to branch out into whisk brooms and pillows when, in the words
of the pastor, he was "called home." The pastor liked the phrase, as it
did not commit him to any definite habitat.

Eddie, however, though he worked hard and used thrift, and, with
Ellaphine's help, practised self-denial, found that he was not so big a
man as the small man he succeeded. He increased the wages and cut down
the hours, and found that he had diminished the output of everything
except complaints. The men loafed shamelessly, cheated him of the energy
and the material that belonged to him, and whined all the time. His
debtors grew shiftless and contemptuous.

It is the irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may
prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs do
grow from thistles.

For a time the Pouch couple attracted a great deal of attention from the
people of Carthage--the sort of attention that people on shore devote to
a pair of capsized canoeists for whom nobody cares to risk his life.

Luella Thickins had forced the note of gaiety at the wedding, but she
soon grew genuinely glad that Eddie had got away. She began to believe
that she had jilted him.


VI

People who wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Pouch saw in each other could not
realize that he saw in her a fellow-sufferer who upheld him with her
love in all his terrors. She was everything that his office was
not--peace without demand for money; glowing admiration and raptures of
passion.

What she saw in him was what a mother sees in a crippled child that runs
home to her when the play of the other boys is too swift or too rough.
She saw a good man, who could not fight because he could not slash and
trample and loot. She saw what the Belgian peasant women saw--a little
cottage holder staring in dismay at the hostile armies crashing about
his homestead.

The only comfort Eddie found in the situation was the growing
realization that it was hopeless. The drowsy opiate of surrender began
to spread its peace through his soul. His torment was the remorse of
proving a traitor to his dead uncle's glory. The feather-dustery that
had been a monument was about to topple into the weeds. Eddie writhed at
that and at his feeling of disloyalty to the employees, who would be
turned out wageless in a small town that was staggering under the burden
of hard times.

He made a frantic effort to keep going on these accounts, but the battle
was too much for him. He could not imagine ways and means--he knew
nothing of the ropes of finance. He was like a farmer with a scythe
against sharpshooters. Ellaphine began to fear that the struggle would
break him down. One night she persuaded him to give up.

She watched him anxiously the next morning as his fat little body,
bulging with regrets, went meekly down the porch steps and along the
walk. The squeal of the gate as he shoved through sounded like a groan
from his own heart. He closed the gate after him with the gentle care he
gave all things. Then he leaned across it to wave to his Pheeny. It was
like the good-by salute of a man going to jail.

Ellaphine moped about the kitchen, preparing him the best dinner she
could to cheer him when he came home at noon. To add a touch of grace
she decided to set a bowl of petunias in front of him. He loved the
homely little flowers in their calico finery, like farmers' daughters at
a picnic. Their cheap and almost palpable fragrancy delighted him when
it powdered the air. She hoped that they would bring a smile to him at
noon, for he could still afford petunias.

She was squatting by the colony aligned along the walk, and her big
sunbonnet hid her unbeautiful face from the passers-by and theirs from
her, when she caught a glimpse of Luella Thickins coming along, giggling
with the banker's son. Luella put on a little extra steam for the
benefit of Ellaphine, who was glad of her sunbonnet and did not look up.

Later there came a quick step, thumping the boardwalk in a rhythm she
would have recognized but for its allegrity. The gate was opened with a
sweep that brought a shriek from its old rheumatic hinge, and was
permitted to swing shut with an unheeded smack. Ellaphine feared it was
somebody coming with the haste that bad news inspires. Something awful
had happened to Eddie! Her knees could not lift her to face the evil
tidings. She dared not turn her head.

Then she heard Eddie's own voice: "Pheeny! Pheeny, honey! Everything's
all right!"

Pheeny spilled the petunias and sat down on them. Eddie lifted her up
and pushed his glowing face deep into her sunbonnet, and kissed her.

Luella Thickins was coming back and her giggling stopped. She and the
banker's son, who were just sauntering about, exchanged glances of
disgust at the indecorous proceeding. Later Luella resumed her giggle
and enjoyed hugely her comment:

"Ellar looks fine in a sunbonnet! The bigger it is, the better she
looks."


VII

Meantime Eddie was supporting his Pheeny into the house. His path was
strewn with petunias and she supposed he had some great victory to
announce. He had; but he was the victim.

The conqueror was the superintendent of the factory, Jabez Pittinger,
who had survived a cycle of Uncle Loren's martinetism with less
resentment than a year of Eddie's lenience. But Eddie is telling
Ellaphine of his glorious achievement:

"You see, I went to the fact'ry feeling like I was goin' to my grave."

"I know," she said; "but what happened?"

"I just thought I'd rather die than tack up the notice that we were
going to shut down and turn off those poor folks and all."

"I know," said Ellaphine; "but tell me."

"Well, finally," Eddie plodded along, "I tried to draw up the
'nouncement with the markin'-brush; but I just couldn't make the
letters. So I called in Jabe Pittinger and told him how it was; and I
says to him: 'Jabe, I jest naturally can't do it m'self. I wisht you'd
send the word round that the factory's goin' to stop next Sat'd'y.' I
thought he'd show some surprise; but he didn't. He just shot a splash
of tobacco-juice through that missin' tooth of his and says, 'I wouldn't
if I's you.' And I says, 'Goodness knows I hate to; but there's no way
out of it.' And he wopsed his cud round and said, 'Mebbe there is.'
'What do you mean?' I says. And he says, 'Fact is, Eddie'--he always
called me Mr. Pouch or Boss before, but I couldn't say anything to him,
seeing--"

"I know!" Ellaphine almost screamed. "But what'd he say? What's the
upshot?"

Eddie went on at his ox-like gait. "'Well,' he says, 'fact is,
Eddie,' he says, 'I been expectin' this, and I been figgerin' if they
wasn't a way somewhere to keep a-runnin',' says he; 'and I been talkin'
to certain parties that believes as I do, that the fault ain't with the
feather-duster business, but with the way it's run,' he says. 'People
gotter have feather dusters,' he says; 'but they gotter be gave to 'em
right.' O' course I knew he was gettin' at me, but I was in no p'sition
to talk back."

"Oh, please, Eddie!" Ellaphine moaned. "Please tell me! I'm goin' crazy
to know the upshot of it, and I smell the pie burnin'--it's rhubob,
too."

"You got rhubob pie for dinner to-day?" Eddie chortled. "Oh, crickety,
that's fine!"

He followed her into the kitchen and helped her carry the things to the
dining-room, where they waited on each other in alternate dashes and
clashes of "Lemme get it!" and "You set right still!"

Eventually he reached the upshot, which was that Mr. Pittinger thought
he might raise money to run the factory if Eddie would give him the
control and drop out. Eddie concluded, with a burst of rapture: "I'm so
tickled I wisht I could telegraft poor Uncle Loren that everything's all
right!"


VIII

It was an outrageous piece of petty finance on high models, and it
euchred Eddie out of everything he had in the world except his illusion
that Jabez was working for the good of the factory.

Eddie always said "The Fact'ry" in the tone that city people use when
they say "The Cathedral."

Ellaphine saw through the wiles of Jabez and the measly capitalists he
had bound together, and she was ablaze with rage at them and with pity
for her tender-hearted child-husband; but she did not reveal these
emotions to Eddie.

She encouraged him to feast on the one sweetmeat of the situation: that
the hands would not be turned off and the factory would keep open doors.
In fact, when doubt began to creep into his own idle soul and a feeling
of shame depressed him, as the butt of the jokes and the pity that the
neighbors flung at him, Ellaphine pretended to be overjoyed at the
triumph he had wrested from defeat.

And when he began to chafe at his lack of occupation, and to fret about
their future, she went to the factory and invaded the office where the
usurper, Jabez Pittinger, sat enthroned at the hallowed desk, tossing
copious libations of tobacco-juice toward a huge new cuspidor. She
demanded a job for Eddie and bullied Jabez into making him a bookkeeper,
at a salary of forty-five dollars a month.

Thus, at last, Eddie Pouch found his place in the world. There are
soldiers who make ideal first sergeants and are ruined and ruinous as
second lieutenants; and there are soldiers who are worthless as first
sergeants, but irresistible as major-generals. Eddie was a born first
sergeant, a routine man, a congenital employee--doomed, like fire, to be
a splendid servant and a disastrous master.

Working for himself, he neglected every opportunity. Working for
another, he neglected nothing. Meeting emergencies, tricking creditors
and debtors, and massacring competitors were not in his line; but when
it came to adding up columns of figures all day, making out bills,
drawing checks for somebody else to sign, and the Santa Claus function
of stuffing the pay-roll into the little envelopes--Eddie was there.
Shrewd old Jabez recognized this. He tried him on a difficult collection
once--sent him forth to pry an ancient debt of eighteen dollars and
thirty-four cents out of the meanest man in town, vice Uncle Loren.
Eddie came back with a look of contentment.

"Did you git it?" said Jabez.

"Well, you see, it was like this: the poor feller--"

"Poor heller! Did you git it?"

"No; he was so hard up I lent him four dollars."

"What!"

"Out of my own pocket, o' course."

Jabez remarked that he'd be hornswoggled; but he valued the incident and
added it to the anecdotes he used when he felt that he had need to
justify himself for playing Huerta with his dreamy Madero.


IX

After that the most Jabez asked of Eddie was to write "Please remit" or
"Past due" on the mossier bills. Eddie preferred an exquisite poem he
had copied from a city creditor: "This account has no doubt escaped your
notice. As we have several large obligations to meet, we should greatly
appreciate a check by return mail."

Eddie loved that. There was a fine chivalry and democracy about it, as
one should say: "We're all debtors and creditors in this world, and we
big fellows and you little fellows must all work together."

Life had a regularity now that would have maddened a man more ambitious
than Eddie or a woman more restless than Ellaphine. Their world
was like the petunia-garden--the flowers were not orchids or
telegraph-pole-stemmed roses; but the flower faces were joyous, their
frocks neat, and their perfume savory.

Eddie knew just how much money was coming in and there was no temptation
to hope for an increase. They knew just how much time they had, and one
day was like another except that along about the first of every month
Eddie went to the office a little earlier and went back at night to get
out the bills and adjust his balances.

On these evenings Ellaphine was apt to go along and sit with him,
knitting thick woolen socks for the winter, making him shirts or
nightgowns, or fashioning something for herself or the house. Her
loftiest reach of splendor was a crazy quilt; and her rag carpets were
highly esteemed.

On Sundays they went to church in the morning and again in the evening.
Prayer-meeting night saw them always on their way to the place where the
church bell called: "Come! Come!"

Sometimes irregular people, who forgot it was prayer-meeting night,
would be reminded of it by seeing Eddie and Ellar go by. They went so
early that there was time for the careless to make haste with their
bonnets and arrive in time.

It was a saying that housewives set their kitchen clocks by Eddie's
transits to and from the factory. At any rate, there was no end to the
occasions when shiftless gossips, dawdling on their porches, were
surprised to see Eddie toddle homeward, and scurried away, cackling:

"My gracious! There goes Eddie Pouch, and my biscuits not cut out!"


X

The whole year was tranquil now for the Pouches, and the halcyon brooded
unalarmed in the waveless cove of their life. There were no debtors to
be harassed, no creditors to harass them. They paid cash for
everything--at least, Ellaphine did; for Eddie turned his entire
forty-five dollars over to her. She was his banker and his steward.

She could not persuade him to smoke, or to buy new clothes before the
old ones grew too shabby for so nice a man as a bookkeeper is apt to be.
He did not drink or play cards or billiards; he did not belong to any
lodge or political organization.

The outgo of money was as regular as the income--so much for the
contribution-basket on Sundays; so much for the butcher; so much for the
grocer; so much for the coal-oil lamps. The baker got none of their
money and the druggist little.

A few dollars went now and then to the dry-goods store for dress goods,
which Pheeny made up; and Eddie left an occasional sum at the
Pantatorium for a fresh alpaca coat, or for a new pair of trousers when
the seat of the old ones grew too refulgent or perilously extenuate. As
Eddie stood up at his tall desk most of the time, however, it was rather
his shoes than his pantaloons that felt the wear and tear of attrition.

And yet, in spite of all the tender miserhood of Ellaphine and the
asceticism of Eddie, few of the forty-five dollars survived the thirty
days' demands. Still, there was always something for the savings-bank,
and the blessing on its increment was that it grew by exactions from
themselves--not from their neighbors.

The inspiration of the fund was the children that were to be. The fund
had ample time for accretion, since the children were as late as Never
is.

Such things are not discussed, of course, in Carthage. And nobody knew
how fiercely they yearned. Nobody knew of the high hopes that flared and
faded.

After the first few months of marriage Eddie had begun to call Pheeny
"Mother"--just for fun, you know. And it teased her so that he kept it
up, for he liked a joke as well as the next fellow. Before people, of
course, she was "Pheeny," and, on very grand occasions, "the wife."
"Mrs. Pouch" was beyond him. But once, at a sociable, he called across
the room, "Say, mother!"

He was going to ask her whether she wanted him to bring her a piece of
the "chalklut" cake or a hunk of the "cokernut," but he got no farther.
Nobody noticed it; but Eddie and Pheeny were consumed with shame and
slunk home scarlet. Nobody noticed that they had gone.

Time went on and on, and the fund grew and grew--a little coral reef of
pennies and nickels and dimes. The amusements of the couple were
petty--an occasional church sociable was society; a revival period was
drama. They never went to the shows that came to the Carthage Opera
House. They did not miss much.

Eddie wasted no time on reading any fiction except that in the news
columns of the evening paper, which a boy threw on the porch in a
twisted boomerang every afternoon, and which Eddie untwisted and read
after he had wiped the dishes that Pheeny washed.

Ellaphine spent no money on such vanities as novels or short stories,
but she read the edifying romances in the Sunday-school paper and an
occasional book from the Sunday-school library, mainly about children
whose angelic qualities gave her a picture of child life that would have
contrasted strongly with what their children would have been if they had
had any.

Their great source of literature, however, was the Bible. Soon after
their factory passed out of their control and their evenings ceased to
be devoted to riddles in finance, they had resolved to read the Bible
through, "from kiver to kiver." And Eddie and Ellaphine found that a
chapter read aloud before going to bed was an excellent sedative.

They had not invaded Genesis quite three weeks before the evening when
it came Eddie's turn to read aloud the astonishing romance of Abram, who
became Abraham, and of Sarai, who became Sarah. It was very exciting
when the child was promised to Sarah, though she was "well stricken in
age." Eddie smiled as he read, "Sarah laughed within herself." But
Pheeny blushed.

Ellaphine was far from the ninety years of Sarah, but she felt that the
promise of a son was no laughing matter. These poignant hopes and awful
denials and perilous adventures are not permitted to be written about or
printed for respectable eyes. If they are discussed it must be with
laughing ribaldry.

Even in their solitude Eddie and Pheeny used modest paraphrases and
breathed hard and looked askance, and made sure that no one overheard.
They whispered as parents do when their children are abed up-stairs.

The neighbors gave them hardly thought enough to imagine the lofty
trepidation of these thrilling hours. The neighbors never knew of the
merciless joke Fate played on them when, in their ignorance, they
believed the Lord had sent them a sign. They dwelt in a fools' paradise
for a long time, hoarding their glorious expectations.

At length Pheeny grew brazen enough to consult the old and peevish
Doctor Noxon; and he laughed her hopes away and informed her that she
need never trouble herself to hope again.

That was a smashing blow; and they cowered together under the shadow of
this great denial, each telling the other that it did not matter, since
children were a nuisance and a danger anyway.

They pretended to take solace in two current village tragedies--the
death of the mayor's wife in childbed and the death of the minister's
son in disgrace; but, though they lied to each other lovingly, they were
neither convincing nor convinced.


XI

Year followed year as season trudged at the heel of season. The only
difference it made to them was that now Ellaphine evicted weeds from the
petunia-beds, and now swept snow from the porch and beat the broom out
on the steps; now Eddie carried his umbrella up against the sun or rain
and mopped his bald spot, and now he wore his galoshes through the slush
and was afraid he had caught a cold.

The fund in the bank went on growing like a neglected garden, but it was
growing for nothing. Eddie walked more slowly to and from the office,
and Pheeny took a longer time to set the table. She had to sit down a
good deal between trips and suffered a lot of pain. She said nothing
about it to Eddie of evenings, but it grew harder to conceal her
weakness from him when he helped her with the Sunday dinner.

Finally she could not walk to church one day and had to stay at home. He
stayed with her, and their empty pew made a sensation. Eddie fought at
Pheeny until she consented to see the doctor again--on Monday.

The doctor censured her for being foolish enough to try to die on her
feet, and demanded of Eddie why they did not keep a hired girl. Eddie
had never thought of it. He was horrified to realize how heartless and
negligent he had been. He promised to get one in at once.

Pheeny stormed and wept against the very idea; but her protests ended on
the morning when she could not get up to cook Eddie's breakfast for him.
He had to get his own and hers, and he was late at the office for the
first time in years. Two householders, seeing him going by, looked at
their clocks and set them back half an hour.

Jabez spoke harshly to Eddie about his tardiness. It would never do to
ignore an imperfection in the perfect. Eddie was Pheeny's nurse that
night and overslept in the morning. It would have made him late again if
he had stopped to fry an egg or boil a cup of coffee. He ran
breakfastless to his desk.

After that Pheeny consented to the engagement of a cook. They tried five
or six before they found one who combined the traits of being both
enduring and endurable.

Eddie was afraid of her to a pitiful degree. She put too much coffee in
his coffee and she made lighter bread than Pheeny did.

"There's no substance to her biscuits!" Eddie wailed, hoping to comfort
Pheeny, who had leisure enough now to develop at that late date her
first acquaintance with jealousy.


XII

The cook was young and vigorous, and a hired man on a farm might have
called her good-looking; but her charms did not interest Eddie. His soul
was replete with the companionship of his other self--Pheeny; and if
Delia had been as sumptuous a beauty as Cleopatra he would have been
still more afraid of her. He had no more desire to possess her than to
own the Kohinoor.

And Delia, in her turn, was far more interested in the winks and
flatteries of the grocer's boy and the milkman than in any conquest of
the fussy little fat man, who ate whatever she slammed before him and
never raised his eyes.

Pheeny, however, could not imagine this. She could not know how secure
she was in Eddie's heart, or how she had grown in and about his soul
until she fairly permeated his being.

So Pheeny lay up in the prison of her bed and imagined vain things,
interpreting the goings-on down-stairs with a fantastic cynicism that
would have startled Boccaccio. She did not openly charge Eddie with
these fancied treacheries. She found him guilty silently and silently
acquitted him of fault, abjectly asking herself what right she had to
deny him all acquaintance with beauty, hilarity, and health.

She remembered her mother's eternal moan, "All men are alike." She
dramatized her poor mouse of a husband as a devastating Don Juan; and
then forgave him, as most of the victims of Don Juan's ruthless piracies
forgave him.

She suffered hideously, however. Eddie, seeing the deep, sad look of her
eyes as they studied him, wondered and wondered, and often asked her
what the matter was; but she always smiled as a mother smiles at a child
that is too sweet to punish for any mischief, and she always answered:
"Nothing! Nothing!" But then she would sigh to the caverns of her soul.
And sometimes tears would drip from her brimming lids to her pillow.
Still, she would tell him nothing but "Nothing!"

Finally the long repose repaired her worn-out sinews and she grew well
enough to move about the house. She prospered on the medicine of a new
hope that she should soon be well enough to expel the third person who
made a crowd of their little home.

And then Luella Thickins came back to town. Luella had married long
before and moved away; but now she came back a widow, handsome instead
of pretty, billowy instead of willowy, seductive instead of spoony, and
with that fearsome menace a widow carries like a cloud about her.

Eddie spoke of meeting her "down-town," and in his fatuous innocence
announced that she was "as pirty as ever." If he had hit Pheeny with a
hatchet he would have inflicted a less painful wound.


XIII

Luella's presence cast Pheeny into a profounder dismay than she had ever
felt about the cook. After all, Delia was only a hired girl, while
Luella was an old sweetheart. Delia had put wicked ideas into Eddie's
head and now Luella would finish him. As Ellaphine's mother had always
said, "Men have to have novelty."

The Lord Himself had never seen old Mr. Govers stray an inch aside from
the straight path of fidelity; but his wife had enhanced him with a
lifelong suspicion that eventually established itself as historical
fact.

Pheeny could find some excuse for Eddie's Don Juanity with the common
clay of Delia, especially as she never quite believed her own beliefs in
that affair; but Luella was different. Luella had been a rival. The
merest courtesy to Luella was an unpardonable affront to every sacred
right of successful rivalry.

The submerged bitternesses that had gathered in her soul like bubbles at
the bottom of a hot kettle came showering upward now, and her heart
simmered and thrummed, ready to boil over if the heat were not removed.

One day, soon, Luella fastened on Eddie as he left the factory to go
home to dinner. She had loitered about, hoping to engage the eye of
Jabez, who was now the most important widower in town. Luella had
elected him for her next; but he was away, and she whetted her wits on
Eddie. She walked at his side, excruciating him with her glib memories
of old times and the mad devotion he had cherished for her then.

He felt that it was unfaithful of him even to listen to her, but he
could not spur up courage enough to bolt and run. He welcomed the sight
of his own gate as an asylum of refuge. To his horror, Luella stopped
and continued her chatter, draping herself in emotional attitudes and
italicizing her coquetries. Her eyes seemed to drawl languorous words
that her lips dared not voice; and she committed the heinous offense of
plucking at Eddie's coat-sleeve and clinging to his hand. Then she
walked on like an erect cobra.

Eddie's very back had felt that Pheeny was watching him from one of the
windows or from all the windows; for when, at last, he achieved the rude
victory of breaking away from Luella and turned toward the porch, every
window was a somber eye of reproach.

He would not have looked so guilty if he had been guilty. He shuffled
into the house like a boy who comes home late from swimming; and when he
called aloud "Pheeny! Oh, Pheeny!" his voice cracked and his throat was
uncertain with phlegm.

He found Pheeny up-stairs in their room, with the door closed. He
closed it after him when he went in. He feigned a care-free joy at the
sight of her, and stumbled over his own foot as he crossed the room and
put his arms about her, where she sat in the big rocking-chair; but she
brushed his arms aside and bent her cheek away from his pursed lips.
This startled him, and he gasped:

"Why, what's the matter, honey? Why don't you kiss me?"

"You don't want to kiss me," she muttered.

"Why don't I?" he exclaimed.

"Because I'm not pirty. I'm not young. I'm not round or tall. I haven't
got nice clothes or those terrible manners that men like in women.
You're tired of me. I don't blame you; but you don't have to kiss me,
and you don't want to."

It was a silly sort of contest for so old a couple; but their souls felt
as young as childhood, or younger, and this debate was all-important. He
caught at her again and tried to drag her head to his lips, pleading
inanely:

"Of course I want to kiss you, honey! Of course I do! Please--please
don't be this way!"

But she evaded him still, and glared at him as from a great distance,
sneering rather at herself than him and using that old byword of
Luella's:

"What can you see in me?" Suddenly she challenged him: "Who do you kiss
when you kiss me?"

He stared at her for a while as if he were not sure who she was. Then he
sat down on the broad arm of her chair and took one of her hands in
his--the hand with the wedding-ring on it--and seemed to talk to the
hand more than to her, lifting the fingers one after another and
studying each digit as though it had a separate personality--as perhaps
it had.


XIV

"Who do I kiss when I kiss you? That's a funny question!"

He laughed solemnly. Then he made a very long speech, for him; and she
listened to it with the attention due to that most fascinating of
themes, the discussion of oneself by another.

"Pheeny, when I was about knee-high to a grasshopper I went over to play
in Tim Holdredge's father's orchard; and when I started for home there
was a big dawg in old Mrs. Pittinger's front yard, and it jumped round
and barked at me. I guess it was just playing, because, as I remember it
now, it was wagging its tail, and afterward I found out it was only a
cocker spaniel; but I thought it was a wolf and was going to eat me. I
begun to cry, and I was afraid to go backward or to go forward. And by
and by a little girl came along and asked me what I was crying about,
and I said, 'About the dawg!' And the little girl said: 'O-oh! He's big,
ain't he?' And I said, 'He's goin' to eat one of us all up!' And the
little girl said: 'Aw, don't you care! You take a-holt of my hand and
I'll run past with you; and if he bites he'll bite me first and you can
git away!' She was as scared as I was, but she grabbed my hand and we
got by without being et up. Do you remember who that little girl was?"

The hand in his seemed to remember. The fingers of it closed on his a
moment, then relaxed as if to listen for more. He mused on:

"I wasn't very big for my size even then, and I wasn't very brave ever.
I didn't like to fight, like the other boys did, and I used to rather
take a lickin' than give one. Well, one day I was playin' marbles with
another boy, and he said I cheated when I won his big taw; but I didn't.
He wanted to fight, though, and he hit me; and I wouldn't hit back. He
was smaller than what I was, and he give me a lot of lip and dared me to
fight; and I just couldn't. He said I was afraid, and so did the other
boys; and I guess I was. It seemed to me I was more afraid of hurtin'
somebody else than gettin' hurt myself; but I guess I was just plain
afraid. The other boys began to push me round and call me a cowardy
calf, and I began to cry. I wanted to run home, but I was afraid to
start to run. And then a little girl came along and said: 'What's the
matter, Eddie? What you cryin' for?' And I said, 'They're all pickin' on
me and callin' me cowardy calf!' And she said: 'Don't you care! You come
right along with me; and if one of 'em says another word to you I'll
scratch their nasty eyes out!' Do you remember that, Pheeny?"

Her other hand came forward and embraced his wrist.

"And another time you found me cryin'. I was a little older, and I'd
studied hard and tried to get my lessons good; but I failed in the
exam'nations, and I was goin' to tie a rock round my neck and jump in
the pond. But you said: 'Aw, don't you care, Eddie! I didn't pass in
mine, either!'

"And when I wanted to go to college, and Uncle Loren wouldn't send me, I
didn't cry outside, but I cried inside; and I told you and you said:
'Don't you care! I don't get to go to boardin'-school myself.'

"And when I was fool enough to think I liked that no-account Luella
Thickins, and thought I'd go crazy because her wax-doll face wouldn't
smile for me, you said: 'Don't you care, Eddie! You're much too good for
her. I think you're the finest man in the country.'

"And when the baby didn't come and I acted like a baby myself, you said:
'Don't you care, Eddie! Ain't we got each other?'

"Seems like ev'ry time I been ready to lay down and die you've been
there with your old 'Don't you care! It's going to be all right!'

"Just last night I had a turrible dream. I didn't tell you about it for
fear it would upset you. I dreamed I got awful sick at the office. I
couldn't seem to add the figures right and the old desk wabbled. Finally
I had to leave off and start for home, though it was only a quarter of
twelve; and I had to set down on Doc Noxon's horse-block and on
Holdredge's wall to rest; and I couldn't get our gate open. And you run
out and dragged me in, and got me up-stairs somehow, and sent Delia
around for the doctor.

"Doc Noxon made you have a trained nurse, but I couldn't stand her; and
I wouldn't take medicine from anybody but you. I don't suppose I was
dreamin' more 'n a few minutes, all told; but it seemed like I laid
there for weeks, till one day Doc Noxon called you out of the room. I
couldn't hear what he was saying, but I heard you let out one horrible
scream, and then I heard sounds like he was chokin' you, and you kept
sayin': 'Oh no! No! No!'

"I tried to go and help you, but I couldn't lift my head. By and by you
come back, with your eyes all red. Doc Noxon was with you and he called
the nurse over to him. You come to me and tried to smile; and you said:

"'Well, honey, how are you now?'

"Then I knew what the doctor had told you and I was worse scared than
when the black dawg jumped at me. I tried to be brave, but I never could
seem to be. I put out my hands to you and hollered:

"'Pheeny, I'm goin' to die! I know I'm goin' to die! Don't let me go!
I'm afraid to die!'"

Now the hands clenched his with a frenzy that hurt--but beautifully.
And he kissed the wedding-ring as he finished:

"And you dropped down to me on the floor by the bed and took my
hands--just like that. And you whispered: 'Don't you care, honey! I'll
go with you. Don't you care!'

"And the fever seemed to cool out of me, and I kind of smiled and wasn't
afraid any more; and I turned my face to you and kissed you--like this,
Pheeny.

"Why, you've been cryin', haven't you? You mustn't cry--you mustn't! All
those girls I been tellin' you about are the girl I kiss when I kiss
you, Pheeny. There couldn't be anybody as beautiful as you are to me.

"I ain't 'mounted to much; but it ain't your fault. I wouldn't have
'mounted to anything at all if it hadn't been for you, Pheeny; and I
been the happiest feller in all this world--or I have been up to now.
I'm awful lonedsome just now. Don't you s'pose you could spare me a
kiss?"

She spared him one.

Then the cook pounded on the door and called through in a voice that
threatened to warp the panels: "Ain't you folks ever comin' down to
dinner? I've rang the bell three times. Everything's all cold!"

But it wasn't. Everything was all warm.




POP

I


They made a handsome family group, with just the one necessary element
of contrast.

Father was the contrast.

They were convened within and about the big three-walled divan which,
according to the fashion, was backed up against a long library-table in
what they now called the living-room. It had once been the sitting-room
and had contained a what-isn't-it and a sofa like an enormous bald
caterpillar, crowded against the wall so that you could fall off only
one side of it.

It was a family reunion and unexpected. Father was not convened with the
rest, but sat off in the shadow and counted the feet sticking out from
the divan and protruding from the chairs. He counted fourteen feet,
including his wife's and excluding his own. All the feet were
expensively shod except his own.

Three of the children had come home for a visit, and father, glad as he
was to see them, had a vague feeling that they had been brought in by
some other motive than their loudly proclaimed homesickness. He was
willing to wait until they disclosed it, for he had an idea what it was
and he was always glad to postpone a payment. It meant so much less
interest to lose. Father was a business man.

Father was also dismally computing the addition to the grocery bills,
the butchery bills, and livery bills, and the others. He was figuring
out the added expense of the dinner, with roast beef now costing as much
as peacocks' tongues. He had raised a large family and there was not a
dyspeptic in the lot--not even a banter.

They had been photographed together the day before and the proof had
just come home. Father was not in the picture. It was a handsome
picture. They admitted it themselves. They had urged father to come
along, but he had pleaded his business, as usual. As they studied the
picture they would glance across at father and realize how little the
picture lost by his absence. It lost nothing but the contrast.

While they were engaged each in that most fascinating of
employments--studying one's own photograph--they were all waiting for
the dining-room maid to appear like a black-and-white sketch and crisply
announce that dinner was served. They had not arrived yet at having a
man. Indeed, that room could still remember when a frowsy, blowsy hired
girl was wont to stick her head in and groan, "Supper's ready!"

In fact, mother had never been able to live down a memory of the time
when she used to put her own head in at a humbler dining-room door and
call with all the anger that cooks up in a cook: "Come on! What we got's
on the table!" But mother had entirely forgotten the first few months of
her married life, when she would sing out to father: "Oh, honey, help me
set the table, will you? I've a surprise for you--something you like!"

This family had evolved along the cycles so many families go
through--from pin feathers to paradise plumes--only, the male bird had
failed to improve his feathers or his song, though he never failed to
bring up the food and keep the nest thatched.

The history of an American family can often be traced by its monuments
in the names the children call the mother. Mrs. Grout had begun as--just
one Ma. Eventually they doubled that and progressed from the accent on
the first to the accent on the second ma. Years later one of the
inarticulate brats had come home as a collegian in a funny hat, and Mama
had become Mater. This had lasted until one of the brattines came home
as a collegienne with a swagger and a funny sweater. And then her Latin
title was Frenchified to _Mère_--which always gave father a shock; for
father had been raised on a farm, where only horses' wives were called
by that name.

Father had been dubbed Pop at an early date. Efforts to change this
title had been as futile as the terrific endeavors to keep him from
propping his knife against his plate. He had been browbeaten out of
using the blade for transportation purposes, but at that point he had
simply ceased to develop.

Names like Pappah, Pater, and _Père_ would not cling to him; they fell
off at once. Pop he was always called to his face, whether he were
referred to abroad as "the old man," "the governor," or "our dear
father."

The evolution of the Grout family could be traced still more clearly in
the names the parents had given the children. The eldest was a daughter,
though when she grew up she dropped back in the line and became ever so
much younger than her next younger brothers. She might have fallen still
farther to the rear if she had not run up against another daughter who
had her own age to keep down.

The eldest daughter, born in the grim days of early penury, had been
grimly entitled Julia. The following child, a son, was soberly called by
his father's given and his mother's maiden names--John Pennock Grout, or
Jno. P., as his father wrote it.

A year or two later there appeared another hostage. Labeling him was a
matter of deep concern. John urged his own father's name, William; but
the mother wafted this away with a gesture of airy disgust. There was a
hired girl in the kitchen now and mother was reading a good many novels
between stitches. She debated long and hard while the child waited
anonymous. At length she ventured on Gerald. She changed that two or
three times and the boy had a narrow escape from Sylvester. He came
perilously near to carrying Abélard through an amused world; but she
harked back to Gerald--which he spelled Jerrold at times.

Then two daughters entered the family in succession and were stamped
Beatrice--pronounced Bay-ah-treat-she by those who had the time and the
energy--and Consuelo, which Pop would call Counser-eller.

By this time Julia had grown up and was beginning at finishing-school.
She soon saw that Julia would never do--never! She had started with a
handicap, but she caught up with the rest and passed them gracefully by
ingeniously altering the final _a_ to an _e_, and pronouncing it
Zheelee.

Her father never could get within hailing distance of the French _j_ and
_u_, and teetered awkwardly between Jilly and Jelly. He was apt to relax
sickeningly into plain Julia--especially before folks, when he was
nervous anyway. Only they did not say "before folks" now; the Grouts
never said "before folks" now--they said, "In the presence of guests."

By the time the next son came the mother was shamelessly literary enough
to name him Ethelwolf, which his school companions joyously abbreviated
to Ethel, overlooking the wolf.

Ethelwolf was the last of the visitors. For by this time _Mère_ had
accumulated so many absolutely unforgivable grievances against her
absolutely impossible husband that she felt qualified for that crown of
comfortable martyrhood, that womanly ideal, "a wife in name only"--and
only that "for the sake of the children."

By this time the children, too, had acquired grievances against Pop. The
more refined they grew the coarser-grained he seemed. They could not
pulverize him in the coffee-mill of criticism. He was as hopeless in
ideas as in language. It was impossible to make him realize that the
best is always the cheapest; that fine clothes make fine people; that
petty economies are death to "the larger flights of the soul"; and that
parents have no right to have children unless they can give them what
other people's children have.

If John Grout complained that he was not a millionaire the younger
Grouts retorted that this was not their fault, but their misfortune; and
it was "up to Pop" to do the best he could during what _Mère_ was now
calling their "formative years." The children had liberal ideas,
artistic and refined ideals; but Pop was forever talking poor, always
splitting pennies, always dolefully reiterating, "I don't know where the
money is coming from!"

It was so foolish of him, too--for it always came from somewhere. The
children went to the best schools, traveled in Europe, wore as good
clothes as anybody--though they did not admit this, of course, within
father's hearing, lest it put false notions into his head; and the sons
made investments that had not yet begun to turn out right.

Parents cannot fool their children long, and the Grout youngsters had
learned at an early date that Pop always forked over when he was nagged
into it. Any of the children in trouble could always write or telegraph
home a "must have," and it was always forthcoming. There usually
followed a querulous note about "Sorry you have to have so much, but I
suppose it costs a lot where you are. Make it go as far as you can, for
I'm a little pinched just now." But this was taken as a mere detail--an
unfortunate paternal habit.

That was Pop's vice--his only one and about the least attractive of
vices. It was harrowing to be the children of a miser--for he must have
a lot hoarded away. His poor talk, his allusions to notes at the bank
and mortgages and drafts to meet, were just bogies to frighten them with
and to keep them down.

It was most humiliating for high-spirited children to be so
misunderstood. Pop lacked refined tastes. It was a harsh thing to say of
one's parent, but when you came right down to it Pop was a hopeless
plebeian.

Pop noticed the difference himself. He would have doubted that these
magnificent youngsters could be his own if that had not implied a
criticism of his unimpeachable wife. So he gave her all the credit. For
_Mère_ was different. She was well read; she entertained charmingly; she
loved good clothes, up-to-the-minute hats; she knew who was who and
what was what. She was ambitious, progressive. She nearly took up French
once.

But Pop was shabby. Pop always wore a suit until it glistened and his
children ridiculed him into a new one. As for wearing evening dress, in
the words of Gerald they "had to blindfold him and back him into his
soup-and-fish, even on the night the Italian Opera Company came to
town."

Pop never could take them anywhere. A vacation was a thing of horror to
him. It was almost impossible to drag him to a lake or the sea, and it
was quite impossible to keep him there more than a few days. His
business always called him home.

And such a business! Dry-goods!--and in a small town.

And such a town, with such a name! To the children who knew their Paris
and their London, their New York and their Washington, a visit home was
like a sentence to jail. It was humiliating to make a good impression on
acquaintances of importance and then have to confess to a home town
named Waupoos.

People either said, "I beg your pardon!" as if they had not heard it
right, or they laughed and said, "Honestly?"

The children had tried again and again to pry Pop out of Waupoos, but he
clung to it like a limpet. He had had opportunities, too, to move his
business to big cities, but he was afraid to venture. He was fairly sure
of sustenance in Waupoos so long as he nursed every penny; but he could
never find the courage to transplant himself to another place.

The worst of his cowardice was that he blamed the children--at least, he
said he dared not face a year or two of possible loss lest they might
need something. So he stayed in Waupoos and managed somehow to keep the
family afloat and the store open.

When _Mère_ revolted and longed for a glimpse of the outer world he
always advised her to take a trip and have a good time. He always said
he could afford that much, and he took an interest in seeing that she
had funds to buy some city clothes with; but he never had funds enough
to go along.

That was one of mother's grievances. Pop bored her to death at home and
she wanted to scream every time he mentioned his business--it was so
selfish of him to talk of that at night when she had so much to tell him
of the misbehavior of the servants. But, greatly as he annoyed her round
the house, she cherished an illusion that she would like him in a hotel.

She had tried to get him to read a certain novel--a wonderful book
mercilessly exposing the curse of modern America; which is the men's
habit of sticking to their business so closely that they give their poor
wives no companionship. They leave their poor wives to languish at home
or to go shopping or gossiping, while they indulge themselves in the
luxuries of vibration between creditor and debtor.

In this novel, and in several others she could have named, the poor
wife naturally fell a prey to the fascinations of a handsome devil with
dark eyes, a motor or two, and no office hours.

_Mère_ often wondered why she herself had not taken up with some
handsome devil fully equipped for the entertainment of neglected wives.

If she had not been a member of that stanch American womanhood to which
the glory of the country and its progress are really due, she might have
startled her husband into realizing too late, as the too-late husbands
in the novels realized, that a man's business is a side issue and that
the perpetuation of romance is the main task. Her self-respect was all
that held _Mère_ to the home; that and--whisper!--the fact that no
handsome devil with any kind of eyes ever tried to lure her away.

When she reproached Pop and threatened him he refused to be scared. He
paid his wife that most odious of tributes--a monotonous trust in her
loyalty and an insulting immunity to jealousy. Almost worse was his
monotonous loyalty to her and his failure to give her jealousy any
excuse.

They quarreled incessantly, but the wrangles were not gorgeously
dramatic charges of intrigue with handsome men or painted women,
followed by rapturous make-ups. They were quarrels over expenditures,
extravagances, and voyages.

_Mère_ charged Pop with parsimony and he charged her with recklessness.
She accused him of trying to tie them down to a village; he accused her
of trying to drive him to bankruptcy. She demanded to know whether he
wanted his children to be like children of their neighbors--clerks in
small stores, starveling tradespeople and wives of little merchants. He
answered that she was breeding a pack of snobs that despised their
father and had no mercy on him--and no use for him except as a lemon to
squeeze dry. She answered with a laugh of scorn that lemon was a good
word; and he threw up his hands and returned to the shop if the war
broke out at noon, or slunk up to bed if it followed dinner.

This was the pattern of their daily life. Every night there was a new
theme, but the duet they built on it ran along the same formulas.

The children sided with _Mère_, of course. In the first place, she was a
poor, downtrodden woman; in the second, she was their broker. Her job
was to get them things. They gave her the credit for what she got them.
They gave Pop no praise for yielding--no credit for extracting somehow
from the dry-soil of an arid town the money they extracted from him.
They knew nothing of the myriad little agonies, the ingenuity, the
tireless attention to detail, the exquisite finesse that make success
possible in the mêlée of competition. Their souls were above trade and
its petty nigglings.

Jno. P., who was now known as J. Pennock, was aiming at a million
dollars in New York, and his mother was sure that he would get it next
time if Pop would only raise him a little more money to meet an
irritating obligation or seize a glittering opportunity. Pop always
raised the money and J. Pennock always lost it. Yet Pennock was a
financier and Pop was a village merchant. And now Pen had come home
unexpectedly. He was showing a great interest in Pop's affairs.

Gerald was home also unexpectedly. He was an artist of the most
wonderful promise. None of his promises was more wonderful than those he
made his father to repay just one more loan--to tide him over until he
sold his next picture; but it never sold, or it sold for a mere song.
Gerald solaced himself and _Mère_ solaced him for being ahead of his
time, unappreciated, too good for the public. She thanked Heaven that
Gerald was a genius, not a salesman. One salesman in the family was
enough!

And Gerald had beaten Pen home by one train. He had greeted Pen somewhat
coldly--as if Pen were a trespasser on his side of the street. And when
it was learned that Julie had telegraphed that she would arrive the next
day, both the brothers had frowned.

Pop had sighed. He was glad to see his wonderful offspring, but he had
already put off the grocer and the butcher--and even his life-insurance
premium--because he had an opportunity by a quick use of cash to obtain
the bankrupt stock of a rival dealer who had not nursed his pennies as
Pop had. It was by such purchases that Pop had managed to keep his store
alive and his brilliant children in funds.

He had temporarily drawn his bank account down to the irreducible
minimum and borrowed on his securities up to the insurmountable maximum.
It was a bad time for his children to tap him. But here they were--Jno.
P., Jerry, and Julia--all very unctuous over the home-coming, and yet
all of them evidently cherishing an ulterior idea.

He watched them lounging in fashionable awkwardness. They were brilliant
children. And he was as proud of them as he was afraid of them--and for
them.


II

If the children looked brilliant to Pop he did not reflect their
refulgence. As they glanced from the photographer's proof to Pop they
were not impressed. They were not afraid of him or for him.

His bodily arrangement was pitifully gawky; he neither sat erect nor
lounged--he slumped spineless. Big spectacles were in style now, but
Pop's big spectacles were just out of it. His face was like a parchment
that had been left out in the rain and had dried carelessly in deep,
stiff wrinkles--with the writing washed off.

Ethelwolf, the last born, had no ulterior idea. He always spent his
monthly allowance by the second Tuesday after the first Monday, and
sulked through a period of famine and debt until the next month. It was
now the third Tuesday and he was disposed to sarcasm.

"Look at Pop!" he muttered. "He looks just like the old boy they put in
the cartoons to represent The Common People."

"He's the Beau Brummel of Waupoos, all right!" said Bayahtreatshe, who
was soon returning to Wellesley. And Consuelo, who was preparing for
Vassar, added under her breath, "Mère, can't you steal up on him and
swipe that already-tied tie?"

Had Pop overheard, he would have made no complaint. He had known the
time when they had thrown things at him. The reverence of American
children for their fathers is almost as famous as the meekness of
American wives before their husbands. Yet it might have hurt Pop a
little to see Mother shake her head and hear her sigh:

"He's hopeless, children! Do take warning from my misfortune and be
careful what you marry."

Poor _Mère_ had absolutely forgotten how proud she had been when Johnnie
Grout came courting her, and how she had extracted a proposal before he
knew what he was about, and had him at the altar before he was ready to
support a wife in the style she had been accustomed to hope for. She
remembered only the dreams he had not brought true, the harsh realities
of their struggle upward. She had worked and skimped with him then. Now
she was like a lolling passenger in a jinrikisha, who berates the shabby
coolie because he stumbles where the roads are rough and sweats where
they are steep.

Julie spoke up in answer to her mother's word of caution:

"There's one thing better than being careful what you marry--and that's
not marrying at all!"

The rest of them were used to Julie's views; but Pop, who had paid
little heed to them, almost collapsed from his chair. Julie went on:

"Men are all alike, Mère. They're very soft-spoken when they come to
make love; but it's only a bluff to make us give up our freedom. Before
we know it they drag us up before another man, a preacher, and make us
swear to love, honor, and obey. They kill the love, make the honor
impossible, and the obey ridiculous. Then they coop us up at home and
expect us to let them run the world to suit themselves. They've been
running it for thousands of years--and look at the botch they've made of
it! It's time for us to take the helm."

"Go to it, sis," said Ethelwolf. "I care not who makes the laws so long
as I can break them."

"Let your sister alone!" said _Mère_. "Go on, Julie!"

"I've put it all in the address I read before the Federation last week,"
said Julie. "It was reported at length in one of the papers. I've got a
clipping in my handbag here somewhere."

She began to rummage through a little condensed chaos of handkerchiefs,
gloves, powder-puff, powdery dollar bills, powdery coins, loose bits of
paper, samples, thread, pins, buttons--everything--every-whichway.

J. Pennock laughed. "Pipe what's going to run the world! Better get a
few pockets first."

"Don't be a brute, Pen!" said _Mère_.

At last Julie found the clipping she sought and, shaking the powder from
it, handed it to her mother.

"It's on the strength of this speech that I was elected delegate to the
international convention at San Francisco," she said.

"You were!" _Mère_ gasped, and Beatrice and Consuelo exclaimed,
"Ripsnorting!"

"Are you going?" said _Mère_ when she recovered from her awe.

"Well, it's a pretty expensive trip. That's why I came home--to see
if--Well, we can take that up later. Tell me how you like the speech."

_Mère_ mumbled the report aloud to the delighted audience. Pop heard
little of it. He was having a chill. It was very like plain ague, but he
credited it to the terror of Julie's mission home. All she wanted him to
do was to send her on a little jaunt to San Francisco! The tyrant, as
usual, was expected to finance the rebellion.

When _Mère_ had finished reading everybody applauded Julie except Pop.
_Mère_ overheard his silence and rounded on him across the aristocratic
reading-glass she wielded.

"Did you hear that?"

Pop was so startled that he answered, "Uh-huh!"

"Didn't you think it was splendid?" _Mère_ demanded.

"Uh-huh!" said Pop.

"What didn't you like about it?"

"I liked it all first-rate. Julie is a smart girl, I tell you."

_Mère_ scented his evasion, and she would never tolerate evasions. She
repeated:

"What didn't you like about it?"

"I liked all I could understand."

"Understand!" snapped _Mère_, who rarely wasted her culture on Pop.
"What didn't you understand? Could anything be clearer than this?
Listen!" She read in an oratorical voice:

"'Woman has been for ages man's mere beast of burden, his household
drudge. Being a wife has meant being a slave--the only servant without
wages or holiday. But the woman of to-day at last demands that the
shackles be stricken off; she demands freedom to live her life her own
way--to express her selfhood without the hampering restrictions imposed
on her by the barbaric customs inherited from the time of the
cave-man.'"

_Mère_ folded up the clipping and glared defiance at the cave-man
slumped in the uneasy chair.

"What's clearer than that?" she reiterated.

Pop was at bay. He was like a desperate rabbit. He answered:

"It's clear enough, I guess; but it's more than I can take in. Seems to
me the women folks are hollering at the men folks to give 'em what the
men folks have never been able to get for themselves."

It was peevish. Coming from Pop, it amounted to an outburst, a riot, a
mutiny. Such a tendency was dangerous. He must be sharply repressed at
once--as a new servant must be taught her place. _Mère_ administered the
necessary rebuke, aided and abetted by the daughters. The sons did not
rally to their father's defense. He was soon reduced to submission, but
his apology was further irritation:

"I'm kind of rattled like. I ain't feeling as chipper as usual."
"Chipper" was bad enough, but "ain't" was unendurable! They rebuked him
for that and he put in another irrelevant plea: "I had a kind of sick
spell at the store. I had to lay down."

"Lie down!" Beatrice corrected.

"Lie down," he accepted. "But as soon as I laid down--"

"Lay down!"

"Lay down--I had chills and shootin' pains; and I--"

"It's the weather," _Mère_ interrupted, impatiently. "I've had a
headache all day--such a headache as never was known! It seemed as if
hammers were beating upon my very brain. It was--"

"I'm not feeling at all well myself," said Consuelo.

There was almost a tournament of rivalry in describing sufferings.

Pop felt as if he had wakened a sleeping hospital. He sank back ashamed
of his own outburst. He rarely spoke of the few ailments he could
afford. When he did it was like one of his new clerks pulling a bolt of
goods from the shelf and bringing down a silken avalanche.

The clinic was interrupted by the crisp voice of Nora: "Dinner is
served!"

Everybody rose and moved to the door with quiet determination. Pop alone
failed to rise. _Mère_ glowered at him. He pleaded: "I don't feel very
good. I guess I'd better leave my stummick rest."

The children protested politely, but he refused to be moved and _Mère_
decided to humor him.

"Let him alone, children. It won't hurt him to skip a meal."

They said: "Too bad, Pop!"--"You'll be all right soon," and went out and
forgot him.

Pop heard them chattering briskly. It was polite talk. If slang were
used it was the very newest. He gleaned that Pen and Gerald were
opposing Julie's mission to San Francisco on the ground of the expense.
He smiled bitterly to hear that word from them. He heard Julie's retort:

"I suppose you boys want the money yourselves! Well, I've got first
havers at Pop. I saw him first!"

At about this point the conversation lost its coherence in Pop's ears.
It was mingled with a curious buzzing and a dizziness that made him grip
his chair lest it pitch him to the floor. Chills, in which his bones
were a mere rattlebox, alternated with little rushes of prairie fire
across his skin. Throes of pain wrung him.

Also, he was a little afraid--he was afraid he might not be able to get
to the store in the morning. And important people were coming! He had to
make the first payment on the invoice of that bankrupt stock. A
semiannual premium was overdue on his life insurance. The month of grace
had nearly expired, and if he failed to pay the policy would lapse--now
of all times! He had kept it up all these years; it must not lapse now,
for he was going to be right sick. He wanted somebody to nurse him: his
mother--or that long-lost girl he had married in the far past.

His shoes irked him; his vest--what they wanted called his
waistcoat--was as tight as a corset. He felt that he would be safer in
bed. He'd better go up to his own room and stretch out. He rose with
extraordinary difficulty and negotiated a swimming floor on swaying
legs.

The laughter from the dining-room irritated him. He would be better off
up-stairs, where he could not hear it. The noise in his ears was all he
could stand. He attained the foot of the stairs and the flight of steps
seemed as long and as misty as Jacob's Ladder. And he was no angel!

The Grouts lingered at dinner and over their black coffee and tobacco
until it was time to dress for the reception at Mrs. Alvin Mitnick's, at
which Waupoos society would pass itself in review. The later you got
there the smarter you were, and most people put off dressing until the
last possible minute in order to keep themselves from falling asleep
before it was time to start.

The Grouts, however, were eager to go early and get it over with. They
loved to trample on Waupoos traditions. As they drifted into the hall
they found it dark. They shook their heads in dismal recognition of a
familiar phenomenon, and Ethelwolf groaned:

"Pop has gone up-stairs. You can always trace Pop. Wherever he has
passed by the lights are out."

"He has figured out that by darkening the halls while we are at dinner
he saves nearly a cent a day," _Mère_ groaned.

"If Pop were dying he'd turn out a light somewhere because he wouldn't
need it." And Ethelwolf laughed.

But _Mère_ groaned again: "Can you wonder that I get depressed? Now,
children, I ask you--"

"Poor old Mère! It's awful!"--"Ghastly!"--"Maddening!"

They gathered round her lovingly, echoing her moans. They started up the
dark stairway, Consuelo first and turning back to say to Beatrice:

"Pop can cut a penny into more slices than--" Then she screamed and
started back.

Her agitation went down the stairway through the climbing Grouts like a
cold breeze. What was it? She looked close. A hand was just visible on
the floor at the head of the stairs. She had stepped on it.


III

Pop had evidently reached the upper hall, when the ruling passion
burning even through his fever had led him to grope about for the
electric switch. His last remaining energy had been expended for an
economy and he had collapsed.

They switched the light on again; they were always switching on currents
that he switched off--and paid for. They found him lying in a crumpled
sprawl that was awkward, even for Pop.

They stared at him in bewilderment. They would have said he was drunk;
but Pop never drank--nor smoked--nor played cards. Perhaps he was dead!

This thought was like a thunderbolt. There was a great thumping in the
breasts of the Grouts.

Suddenly _Mère_ strode forward, dropped to her knees and put her hand on
Pop's heart. It was not still--far from that. She placed her cold palm
on his forehead. His brow was clammy, hot and cold and wet.

"He has a high fever!" she said.

Then, with a curious emotion, she brushed back the scant wet hair;
closed her eyes and felt in her bosom a sudden ache like the turning of
a rusty iron. She felt young and afraid--a young wife who finds her man
wounded.

She looked up and saw standing about her a number of tall ladies and
gentlemen--important-looking strangers. Then she remembered that they
had once been nobodies. She felt ashamed before them and she said,
quickly:

"He's going to be ill. Telephone for the doctor to come right away. And
you girls get his bed ready. No, you'd better put him in my room--it
gets the sunlight. And you boys fill the ice-cap--and the hot-water bag
and--hurry! Hurry!"

The specters vanished. She was alone with her lover. She was drying his
forehead with her best lace handkerchief and murmuring:

"John honey, what's the matter! Why, honey--why didn't you tell me?"

Then a tall gentleman or two returned and one of them said:

"Better let us get him off the floor, Mère."

And the big sons of the frail little man picked him up and carried him
into the room and pulled off his elastic congress gaiters, and his coat
and vest, and his detached cuffs, and his permanently tied tie, and his
ridiculous collar.

Then _Mère_ put them out, and when the doctor arrived Pop was in bed in
his best nightshirt.

The doctor made his way up through the little mob of terrified children.
He found Mrs. Grout vastly agitated and much ashamed of herself. She did
not wish to look sentimental. She had reached the Indian-summer modesty
of old married couples.

The doctor went through the usual ritual of pulse-feeling and
tongue-examining and question-asking, while Pop lay inert, with a little
thermometer protruding from his mouth like a most inappropriate
cigarette.

The doctor was uncertain yet whether it were one of the big fevers or
pneumonia or just a bilious attack. Blood-tests would show; and he
scraped the lobe of the ear of the unresisting, indifferent old man, and
took a drop of thin pink fluid on a bit of glass. The doctor tried to
reassure the panicky family, but his voice was low and important.


IV

The brilliant receptions and displays that _Mère_ and the children had
planned were abandoned without regret. All minor regrets were lost in
the one big regret for the poor old, worn-out man up-stairs.

There was a dignity about Pop now. The lowliest peasant takes on majesty
when he is battling for his life and his home.

There was dismay in all the hearts now--dismay at the things they had
said and the thoughts and sneers; dismay at the future without this
shabby but unfailing provider.

The proofs of the family photograph lay scattered about the living-room.
Pop was not there. They had smiled about it before. Now it looked
ominous! What would become of this family if Pop were not there?

The house was filled with a thick sense of hush like a heavy fog; but
thoughts seemed to be all the louder in the silence--jumbled thoughts of
selfish alarm; filial terror; remorse; tenderness; mutual rebuke; dread
of death, of the future, of the past.

The day nurse and the night nurse were in command of the house. The only
events were the arrivals of the doctor, his long stops, his whispered
conferences with the nurses, and the unsatisfactory, evasive answers he
gave as the family ambushed him at the foot of the stairs on his way
out.

Meanwhile they could not help Pop in his long wrestle. They had drained
his strength and bruised his heart while he had his power, and now that
he needed their help and their youth they could not lend him anything;
they could not pay a single instalment on the mortgages they had
incurred.

They could only stand at the door now and then and look in at him. They
could not beat off one of the invisible vultures of fever and pain that
hovered over him, swooped, and tore him.

They could not even get word to him--not a message of love or of
repentance or of hope. His brain was in a turmoil of its own. His white
lips were muttering delirious nonsense; his soul was fluttering from
scene to scene and year to year, like a restless dragon-fly. He was
young; he was old; he was married; he was a bachelor; he was at home;
he was in his store; he was pondering campaigns of business, slicing
pennies or making daring purchases; he was retrenching; he was
advertising; but he was afraid always that he might sink in the bog of
competition with rival merchants, with creditors, debtors, bankers, with
his wife, his children, his neighbors, his ideals, his business
axioms----

"Ain't the moon pirty to-night, honey! Gee! I'm scared of that preacher!
What do I say when he says, 'Do you take this woman for your'--The
pay-roll? I can't meet it Saturday. How am I going to meet the pay-roll?
I don't see how we can sell those goods any cheaper, but we got to get
rid of 'em. My premium! My premium! I haven't paid my premium! What'll
become of the children? Three cents a yard--it's robbery! Eight cents a
yard--that's givin' it away! Don't misunderstand me, Sally. It's my way
of making love. I can't say pirty things like some folks can, but I can
think 'em. My premium--the pay-roll--so many children! Couldn't they do
without that? I ain't a millionaire, you know. Every time I begin to get
ahead a little seems like one of the children gets sick or in
trouble--the pay-roll! Three cents a yard--the new invoice--I can't buy
myself a noo soot. The doctor's bills! I ain't complaining of 'em; but
I've got to pay 'em! Let me stay home--I'd rather. I've had a hard day.
My premium! Don't put false notions in their heads! The pay-roll! Don't
scold me, honey! I got feelings, too. You haven't said a word of love
to me in years! I'll raise the money somehow. I know I'm close; but
somebody's got to be--the pay-roll--so many people depending on me. So
many mouths to feed--the children--all the clerks--the delivery-wagon
drivers--the advertising bills--the pay-roll--the children! I ain't as
young as I was--honey, don't scold me!"

The ceaseless babbling grew intolerable. Then it ceased; and the stupor
that succeeded was worse, for it meant exhaustion. The doctor grew more
grave. He ceased to talk of hope. He looked ashamed. He tried to throw
the blame from himself.

And one dreadful day he called the family together in the living-room.
Once more they were all there--all those expensively shod feet; those
well-clothed, well-fed bodies. In the chair where Pop had slumped the
doctor sat upright. He was saying:

"Of course there's always hope. While there's life there's always hope.
The fever is pretty well gone, but so is the patient. The crisis left
him drained. You see he has lived this American business man's life--no
exercise, no vacations, no change. The worst of it is that he seems to
have given up the fight. You know we doctors can only stand guard
outside. The patient has to fight it out inside himself. It's a very
serious sign when the sick man loses interest in the battle. Mr. Grout
does not rally. His powerful mind has given up."

In spite of themselves there was a general lifting of the brows of
surprise at the allusion to Pop's poor little footling brain as a
powerful mind. Perhaps the doctor saw it. He said:

"For it was a powerful mind! Mr. Grout has carried that store of his
from a little shop to a big institution; he has kept it afloat in a dull
town through hard times. He has kept his credit good and he has given
his family wonderful advantages. Look where he has placed you all! He
was a great man."

When the doctor had gone they began to understand that the town had
looked upon Pop as a giant of industry, a prodigal of vicarious
extravagance. They began to feel more keenly still how good a man he
was. While they were flourishing like orchids in the sun and air, he had
grubbed in the earth, sinking roots everywhere in search of moisture and
of sustenance. Through him, things that were lowly and ugly and cheap
were gathered and transformed and sent aloft as sap to make flowers of
and color them and give them velvet petals and exquisite perfume.

They gathered silently in his room to watch him. He was white and still,
hardly breathing, already the overdue chattel of the grave.

They talked of him in whispers, for he did not answer when they praised
him. He did not move when they caressed him. He was very far away and
drifting farther.

They spoke of how much they missed him, of how perfect a father he had
been, competing with one another in regrets and in praise. Back of all
this belated tribute there was a silent dismay they did not give voice
to--the keen, immediately personal reasons for regret.

"What will become of us?" they were thinking, each in his or her own
terrified soul.

"I can't go back to school!"

"This means no college for me!"

"I'll have to stay in this awful town the rest of my life!"

"I can't go to San Francisco! The greatest honor of my life is taken
from me just as I grasped it."

"I had a commission to paint the portrait of an ambassador at
Washington--it would have been the making of me! It meant a lot of
money, too. I came home to ask Pop to stake me to money enough to live
on until it was finished."

"My business will go to smash! I'll be saddled with debts for the rest
of my life. If I could have hung on a little longer I'd have reached the
shore; but the bank wouldn't lend me a cent. Nobody would. I came home
to ask Pop to raise me some cash. I counted on him. He never failed me
before."

"What will become of us all?"

There was a stir on the pillow. The still head began to rock, the throat
to swell, the lips to twitch.

_Mère_ ran to the bedside and knelt by it, laying her hand on the
forehead. A miracle had been wrought in the very texture of his brow.
He was whispering something. She put her ear to his lips.

"Yes, honey. What is it? I'm here."

She caught the faint rustling of words. It was as if his hovering soul
had been eavesdropping on their thoughts. Perhaps it was merely that he
had learned so well in all these years just what each of them would be
thinking. For he murmured:

"I've been figuring out--how much the--funeral will cost--you know
they're awful expensive--funerals are--of course I wouldn't want
anything fancy--but--well--besides--and I've been thinking the children
have got to have so many things--I can't afford to--be away from the
store any longer. I ain't got time to die! I've had vacation enough!
Where's my clothes at?"

They held him back. But not for long. He was the most irritatingly
impatient of convalescents. In due course of time the family was
redistributed about the face of the earth. Ethelwolf was at preparatory
school; Beatrice and Consuelo were acquiring and lending luster at
Wellesley and Vassar; Gerald was painting a portrait at Washington; and
J. Pennock was like a returned Napoleon in Wall Street.

Pop was at his desk in the store. All his employees had gone home. He
was fretfully twiddling a telegram from San Francisco:

Julie's address sublime please telegraph two hundred more love

MERE.

Pop was remembering the words of the address: "Woman has been for ages
man's mere beast of burden.... Being a wife has meant being a slave."

Pop could not understand it yet. But he told everybody he met about the
first three words of the telegram, and added:

"I got the smartest children that ever was and they owe it all to their
mother, every bit."




BABY TALK

I


The wisest thing Prof. Stuart Litton was ever caught at was the thing he
was most ashamed of. He had begun to accumulate knowledge at an age when
most boys are learning to fight and to explain at home how they got
their clothes torn. He wore out spectacles almost as fast as his
brothers wore out copper-toed boots; but he did not begin to acquire
wisdom until he was just making forty. Up to that time, if the serpent
is the standard, Professor Litton was about as wise as an angleworm.

He submerged himself in books for nearly forty years; and then--in the
words of Leonard Teed--then he "came up for air." This man Teed was the
complete opposite of Litton. For one thing he was the liveliest young
student in the university where Litton was the solemnest old professor.
Teed had scientific ambitions and hated Greek and Latin, which Litton
felt almost necessary to salvation. Teed regarded Litton and his Latin
as the sole obstacles to his success in college; and, though Litton was
too much of a gentle heart to hate anybody, if he could have hated
anybody it would have been Teed. A girl was concerned in one of their
earliest encounters, though Litton's share in it was as unromantic as
possible.

Teed, it seems, had violated one of the rules at Webster University. He
had chatted with Miss Fannie Newman--a pretty student in the Woman's
College--after nine o'clock; nay, more, he had sat on a campus bench
bidding her good night for half an hour, and, with that brilliant
mathematical mind of his, had selected the bench at the greatest
possible distance from the smallest cluster of lampposts.

On this account he was haled before the disciplinary committee of the
faculty. Litton happened to be on that committee. Teed made the best
fight he could. He showed himself a Greek--in argument at least--and,
like an old sophist, he tried to prove, first, that he was not on the
campus with the girl and never had spooned with her; second, that if he
had been there and had spooned with her it was too dark for them to be
seen; and third, that he was engaged to the girl, anyway, and had a
right to spoon with her.

The accusing witness was a janitor whom Teed had played various jokes on
and had neglected to appease with tips. Teed submitted him to a fierce
cross-examination; forced him to admit that he could not see the loving
couple and had identified them solely by their voices. Teed demanded
the exact words overheard; and, as often happens to the too-ardent
cross-examiner, he got what he asked for and wished he had not. The
janitor, blushing at what he remembered, pleaded:

"You don't vant I should say it exectly vat I heered?"

"Exactly!" Teed answered in his iciest tone.

"Vell," the janitor mumbled, "it vas such a foolish talk as--but--vell,
ven I come by I hear voman's voice says, 'Me loafs oo besser as oo loafs
me!'"

Teed flushed and the faculty sat forward.

"Den I hear man's voice says,'Oozie-voozie, mezie-vezie--' Must I got to
tell it all?"

"Go on!" said Teed, grimly; and the old German mopped his brow with
anguish and snorted with rage: "'Mezie-vezie loafs oozie-voozie
bestest!'"

The purple-faced members of the faculty were hanging on to their own
safety-valves to keep from exploding--all save Professor Litton, who
felt that his hearing must be defective. Teed, fighting in the last
ditch, said:

"But such language does not prove the identity of the--er--participants.
You said you knew positively."

The janitor, writhing with disgust and indignation, went on:

"Ven I hear such nonsunse I stop and listen if it is two people escapet
from de loonatic-houze. And den young voman says, 'It doesn't loaf its
Fannie-vannie one teeny-veeny mite!' And young man says, 'So sure my
name is Lennie Teedie-veedie, little Fannie Newman iss de onliest gerl I
ever loafed!'"

The cross-examiner crumpled up in a chair, while the members of the
faculty behaved like children bursting with giggles in church--all save
Litton, who had listened with increasing amazement and now leaned
forward to demand of the janitor:

"Mr. Kraus, you don't mean to say that two of our students actually
disgraced this institution with conversation that would be appropriate
only to a nursery?"

Mr. Kraus thundered: "De talk of dose stoodents vould disgrace de
nursery! It vas so sickenink I can't forget ut. I try to, but I keep
rememberink Oozie-voozie! Mezie-vezie!"

Mr. Kraus was excused in a state of hydrophobic rage and Teed withdrew
in all meekness.

Litton had fallen into a stupor of despair at the futility of learning.
He remained in a state of coma while the rest of the committee laughed
over the familiar idiocies and debated a verdict. Two of the professors,
touched by some reminiscence of romance, voted to ignore the incident as
a trivial commonplace of youth. Two others, though full of sympathy for
Teed--Miss Fannie was very pretty--voted for his suspension as a
necessary example, lest the campus be overrun by duets in lovers' Latin.
The result was a tie and Litton was roused from his trance to cast the
deciding vote.

Now Professor Litton had read a vast amount about love. The classics are
full of its every imaginable version or perversion; but Litton had seen
it expressed only in the polished phrases of Anacreon, Bion, Propertius,
and the others. He had not guessed that, however these men polished
their verses, they doubtless addressed their sweethearts with all the
imbecility of sincerity.

Litton's own experience gave him little help. In his late youth he had
thought himself in love twice and had expressed his fiery emotions in a
Latin epistle, an elegy, and a number of very correct Alcaics. They
pleased his teacher, but frightened the spectacles off one bookish young
woman, and drove the other to the arms of a prescription clerk, who knew
no Latin except what was on his drug bottles.

Litton had thenceforward been wedded to knowledge. He had read nearly
everything ancient, but he must have forgotten the sentence of Publilius
Syrus: "Even a god could hardly love and be wise." He felt no mercy in
his soft heart for the soft-headed Teed. He was a worshiper of language
for its own sake and cast a vote accordingly.

"I do not question the propriety of the conduct of these young people,"
he said. "Mr. Teed claims to be engaged to the estimable young woman."

"Ah!" said Professor Mackail, delightedly.

Teed was the brightest pupil in his laboratory and he had voted for
acquittal. His joy vanished as Professor Litton went on:

"But"--he spoke the word with emphasis--"but waiving all questions of
propriety, I do feel that we should administer a stinging rebuke to the
use of such appallingly infantile language by one of our students.
Surely a man's culture should show itself, above all, in the addresses
he pays to the young lady of his choice. What vanity to build and
conduct a great institution of learning, such as this aims to be, and
then permit one of its pupils to express his regard for a student from
the Annex in such language as even Mr. Kraus was reluctant to quote:
'Mezie-wezie loves oozie-woozie bestest!'--if I remember rightly.
Really, gentlemen, if this is permitted we might as well change the
university to a kindergarten. For his own sake I vote that Mr. Teed be
given six months of meditation at home; and I trust that the faculty of
the Woman's College will have a similar regard for its ideals and the
welfare of the misguided young woman."

Professor Mackail protested furiously, but his advocacy only embittered
Litton--for Mackail was the leader of the faction that had tried for
years to place Webster University in line with others by removing Latin
and Greek from the position of required studies.

Mackail and his crew pretended that French and German, or science, were
appropriate substitutes for the classic languages in the case of those
whose tastes were not scholastic; but to Litton it was a religion that
no man should be allowed to spend four years in college without at
least rubbing up against Homer, Æschylos, Vergil, and Horace.

As Litton put it: "No man has a right to an Alma Mater who doesn't know
what the words mean; and nobody has a right to graduate without knowing
at least enough Latin to read his own diploma."

This old war had been fought with all the bitterness and professional
jealousies of scholarship, which rival those of religion and exceed
those of the stage. For yet a while Litton and his followers had
vanquished opposition. He little dreamed what he was preparing for
himself in punishing Teed.

Teed accepted his banishment with poor grace, but a magnificent
determination to come back and graduate. The effect of his punishment
was shown when, after six months of rustic meditation, he set out for
the university, leaving behind him his Fannie, who had been too timid to
return to the scene of her discomfiture. Teed's good-by words ran
something like this:

"Bess its ickle heartums! Don't se care! Soonie as Teedle-weedle gets
graduated he'll get fine job and marry his Fansy-pansy very first sing."
Then he kissed her "Goo'byjums"--and went back with the face of a
Regulus returning to be tortured by the enemy.


II

Teed had a splendid mind for everything material and modern, but he
could not and would not master the languages he called dead. His
mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the
other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When
he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless
exactitude.

Teed reached the end of his junior year with a heap of conditions in the
classics. Litton insisted that he should not be allowed to graduate
until he cleaned them up. This meant that Teed must tutor all through
his last vacation or carry double work throughout his senior year--when
he expected to play some patriotic or Alma-Matriotic football.

Teed had no intention of enduring either of these inconveniences; he
trusted to fate to inspire him somehow with some scheme for attaining
his diploma without delay. His future job depended on his diploma--and
his girl depended on his job.

He did not intend to be kept from either by any ancient authors. He had
not the faintest idea how he was going to bridge that chasm--but, as he
wrote his Fansy-pansy, "Love will find the way."

While Teed was taking thought for the beginning of his life-work Litton
was completing his--or at least he thought he was. With the splendid
devotion of the scholar he had selected for his contribution to human
welfare the best possible edition of the work least likely to be read by
anybody. A firm of publishers had kindly consented to print it--at
Litton's expense.

Litton would donate a copy to his own university; two or three college
libraries would purchase copies out of respect to the learned professor;
and Litton would give away a few more. The rest would stand in an
undisturbed stack of increasing dust, there to remain unread as long
perhaps as the myriads of Babylonian classics that Assurbani-pal had
copied in brick volumes for his great library at Nineveh.

Professor Litton had chosen for his life-work a recension of the
ponderous epic in forty-eight books that old Nonnus wrote in Egypt, the
labyrinthine Dionysiaka describing the voyage of Bacchus to India and
back.

A pretty theme for an old water-drinker who had never tasted wine! But
Litton toiled over the Greek text, added copious notes as to minute
variants, appallingly learned prolegomena, an index, and finally an
English version in prose. He had begun to translate it into hexameters,
but he feared that he would never live to finish it. It was hard enough
for a man like Litton to express at all the florid spirit of an author
whose theme was "the voluptuous phalanxes" of Bacchus' army--"the heroic
race of such unusual warriors; the shaggy satyrs; the breed of centaurs;
the tribes of Sileni, whose legs bristle with hair; and the battalions
of Bassarids."

He had kept at it all these years, however, and it was ready now for the
eyes of a world that would never see it. He had watched it through the
compositors' hands, keeping a tireless eye on the infinite nuisance of
Greek accents. He had read the galley proofs, the page proofs, and now
at last the black-bordered foundry proofs. He scorned to write the
bastard "O. K." of approval and wrote, instead, a stately "Imprimatur."
He placed the proofs in their envelope and sealed it with lips that
trembled like a priest's when giving an illuminated Gospel a ritual
kiss.

The hour was late when Professor Litton finished. He stamped the
brown-paper envelope and went down the steps of the boarding-house that
had been for years his nearest approach to a home. He left the precious
envelope on the hall-tree, whence it would be taken to the post-office
for the first mail.

Feeling the need of a breath of air, he stepped out on the porch. It was
a spring midnight and the college roofs were wonderful under the
quivering moon--or _tremulo sub lumine_, as he remembered it. And he
remembered how Quintus Smyrnæus had said that the Amazon queen walked
among her outshone handmaidens, "as when, on the wide heavens, among the
stars, the divine Selene moves pre-eminent among them all."

He thought of everything in terms of the past; yet, when he heard,
mingled with the vague murmur of the night, a distant song of befuddled
collegians, among whose voices Teed's soared pre-eminent above the key,
he was not pleasantly reminded of the tipsy army of Dionysus. He was
revolted and, returning to his solitude, closed an indignant door on
the disgrace.

Poor old Litton! His learning had so frail a connection with the life
about him! Steeped in the classics and acquainted with the minutest
details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to
realize that they are classics because their authors were so close to
life and imbued them with such vitality that time has not yet rendered
them obsolete.

He had hardly suspected the mischief that is in them. A more innocent
man could hardly be imagined or one more versed in the lore of evil.
Persons who believe that what is called immoral literature has a
debasing effect must overlook such men as Litton. He dwelt among those
Greek and Roman authors who excelled in exploiting the basest emotions
and made poems out of putridity.

He read in the original those terrifying pages that nobody has ever
dared to put into English without paraphrase--the polished infamies of
Martial; the exquisite atrocities of Theocritus and Catullus. Yet these
books left him as unsullied as water leaves a duck's back. They infected
him no more than a medical work gives the doctor that studies it the
diseases it describes. The appallingly learned Professor Litton was a
babe in arms compared with many of his pupils, who read little--or with
the janitor, who read nothing at all.

And now, arrived at a scant forty and looking a neglected fifty,
short-sighted, stoop-shouldered and absent-minded to a proverb, he cast
a last fond look at the parcel containing his translation of the Bacchic
epic and climbed the stairs to his bachelor bedroom, took off his shabby
garments, and stretched himself out in the illiterate sleep of a tired
farm-hand.

Just one dream he had--a nightmare in which he read a printed copy of
his work, and a wrongly accented enclitic stuck out from one of the
pages like a sore thumb. He woke in a cold sweat, ran to his duplicate
proofs, found that his text was correct--and went back to bed contented.

Of such things his terrors and his joys had consisted all his years.


III

The next morning he felt like a laborer whose factory has closed. Every
day would be Sunday hereafter until he got another job. In this unwonted
sloth he dawdled over his porridge, his weak tea, and his morning paper.

Head-lines caught his eyes shouting the familiar name of Joel
Brown--familiar to the world at large because of the man's tremendous
success and relentless severity in business. Brown fell in love with one
of those shy, sly young women who make a business of millionaires. He
fell out with a thud and his Flossie entered a suit for breach of
promise, submitting selected letters of Brown's as proofs of his guile
and of her weak, womanly trust.

The newspapers pounced on them with joy, as cats pounce and purr on
catnip. The whole country studied Brown's letters with the rapture of
eavesdropping. Such letters! Such oozing molasses of sentiment! Such
elephantine coquetry! Joel weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds and
called himself Little Brownie and Pet Chickie!

This was the literature that the bewildered Litton found in the first
paper he had read carefully since he came up for air. One of the letters
ran something like this:

     Angel of the skies! My own Flossie-dovelet! Your Little Brownie has
     not seenest thee for a whole half a day, and he is pining,
     starving, famishing, perishing for a word from your blushing
     liplets. Oh, my Peaches and Cream! Oh, my Sugar Plum! How can your
     Pet Chickie live the eternity until he claspeths thee again this
     evening? When can your Brownie-wownie call you all his ownest only
     one? Ten billion kisses I send you from

                  Your own, owner, ownest

                                       Pet Chickie-Brownie.

       x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

The X's, Flossie explained, indicated kisses--a dozen to an X.

The jury laughed Little Brownie out of court after pinning a
twenty-five-thousand-dollar verdict to his coat-tail. The nation elected
him the Pantaloon of the hour and pounded him with bladders and
slap-sticks.

Professor Litton had heard nothing of the preliminary fanfare of the
suit. As he read of it now he was too much puzzled to be amused. He
read with the same incredulity he had felt when he heard the janitor
quote Teed's remarks to his fiancée. Litton called his landlady's
attention to the remarkable case. She had been reading it, with greedy
glee, every morning. She had had such letters herself in her better
days. She felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown and sorrier for the poor
professor when he said:

"Poor Mr. Brown must have gone quite insane. Nobody could have built up
such wealth without brains; yet nobody with brains could have written
such letters. Ergo, he has lost his brains."

"You'll be late to prayers," was all the landlady said. She treated
Litton as if he were a half-witted son. And he obeyed her, forsook his
unfinished tea and hurried away to the chapel. Thence he went to his
class-room, where Teed achieved some further miracles of mistranslation.
Litton thought how curious it was that this young man, of whom his
scientific professor spoke so highly, should have fallen into the same
delirium of amorous idiocy as the famous plutocrat, Joel Brown.

When the class was dismissed he sank back in his chair by the class-room
window. It was wide ajar to-day for the first time since winter. April,
like an early-morning housemaid, was throwing open all the windows of
the world. Litton felt a delicious lassitude; he was bewildered with
leisure. A kind of sweet loneliness fell on him. He had made no
provision for times like these.

He sat back and twiddled his thumbs. His eyes roved lazily about the
campus. The wind that fluttered the sparse forelock on his overweening
forehead hummed in his ears. It had a distance in it. It brought soft
cadences of faint voices from the athletic field. They seemed to come
from no place nearer than the Athenian Academe.

Along the paths of the campus a few women were sauntering, for the
students and teachers in the Women's Annex had the privilege of the
libraries, the laboratories, and lecture-rooms.

Across Litton's field of view passed a figure that caught his eye.
Absently he followed it as it enlarged with approach. He realized that
it was Prof. Martha Binley, Ph.D., who taught Greek over there in the
Annex.

"How well she is looking!" he mused.

The very thought startled him, as if some one had spoken unexpectedly.
He wondered that he had noticed her appearance. After the window-sill
blotted her from view he still wondered, dallying comfortably with the
reverie.


IV

There was a knock at his door and in response to his call the door
opened--and she stood there.

"May I come in?" she said.

"Certainly."

Before he knew it some impulse of gallantry hoisted him to his feet. He
lifted a bundle of archeological reviews from a chair close to his desk
and waited until she sat down. The chair was nearer his than he
realized, and as Professor Binley dropped into it she was so close that
Professor Litton pushed his spectacles up to his forehead.

It was the first time she had seen his eyes except through glasses
darkly. She noted their color instantly, woman-like. They were not dull,
either, as she had imagined. A cloying fragrance saluted his nostrils.

"What are the flowers you are wearing, may I ask?" he said. He hardly
knew a harebell from a peony.

"These are hyacinths," she said. "One of the girls gave them to me. I
just pinned them on."

"Ah, hyacinths!" he murmured. "Ah yes; I've read so much about them. So
these are hyacinths! Such a pretty story the Greeks had. You remember
it, no doubt?"

She said she did; but, schoolmaster that he was, he went right on:

"Apollo loved young Hyacinthus--or Huakinthos, as the Greeks called
it--and was teaching him to throw the discus, when a jealous breeze blew
the discus aside. It struck the boy in the forehead. He fell dead, and
from his blood this flower sprang. The petals, they said, were marked
with the letters Ai, Ai!--Alas! Alas! And the poet Moschus, you
remember, in his 'Lament for Bion,' says:

     "Nun huakinthe lalei ta sa grammata kai pleon aiai!

"Or, as I once Englished it--let me see, I put it into hexameters--it
was a long while ago. Ah, I have it!"

And with the orotund notes a poet assumes when reciting his own words,
he intoned:

     "Now, little hyacinth, babble thy syllables--louder yet--Aiai!
     Whimper with all of thy petals; a beautiful singer has perished."

Professor Binley stared at him in amazement and cried: "Charming!
Beautiful! Your own translation, you say?"

And he, somewhat shaken by her enthusiasm, waved it aside.

"A little exercise of my Freshman year. But to get back to
our--hyacinths: Theocritus, you remember, speaks of the 'lettered
hyacinth.' May I see whether we can find the words there?"

He bent forward to take and she bent forward to give the flowers. Her
hair brushed his forehead with a peculiar influence; and when their
fingers touched he noted how soft and warm her hand was. He flushed
strangely. She was flushed a little, too, possibly from
embarrassment--possibly from the warmth of the day, with its insinuation
of spring.

He pulled his spectacles over his eyes in a comfortable discomfiture and
peered at the flowers closely. And she peered, too, breathing foolishly
fast. When he could not find the living letters he shook his head and
felt again the soft touch of her hair.

"I can't find the words--can you? Your eyes are brighter than mine."

She bent closer and both their hands held the flowers. He looked down
into her hair. It struck him that it was a remarkably beautiful idea--a
woman's hair--especially hers, streaked as it was with white--silken
silver. When she shook her head a snowy thread tickled his nose
amusingly.

"I can't find anything like it," she confessed.

Then he said: "I've just remembered. Theocritus calls the hyacinth
black--_melan_--and so does Vergil. These cannot be hyacinths at all."

He was bitterly disappointed. It would have been delightful to meet the
flower in the flesh that he knew so well in literature. Doctor Martha
answered with quiet strength:

"These are hyacinths."

"But the Greeks--"

"Didn't know everything," she said; "or perhaps they referred to another
flower. But then we have dark-purple hyacinths."

"Ah!" he said. "Sappho speaks of the hyacinth as purple--_porphuron_."

Thus the modern world was reconciled with the Greek and he felt easier;
but there was a gentle forcefulness about her that surprised him. He
wondered whether she would not be interested in hearing about his
edition of Nonnus. He assumed that she would be, being evidently
intelligent. So he told her. He told her and told her, and she listened
with almost devout interest. He was still telling her when the students
in other classes stampeded to lunch with a many-hoofed clatter. When
they straggled back from lunch he was still telling her.

It was not until he was interrupted by an afternoon class of his own
that he realized how long he had talked. He apologized to Professor
Binley; but she said she was honored beyond words. She had come to ask
him a technical question in prosody, as from one professor to another;
but she had forgotten it altogether--at least she put it off to another
visit. She hastened away in a flutter, feeling slightly as if she had
been to a tryst.

Litton went without his lunch that day, but he was browsing on memories
of his visitor. He had not talked so long to a woman since he could
remember. This was the only woman who had let him talk uninterruptedly
about himself--a very superior woman, everybody said.

When he went to his room that night he was still thinking of hyacinths
and of her who had brought them to his eyes.

He knocked from his desk a book. It fell open at a page. As he picked it
up he noted that it was a copy of the anonymous old spring rhapsody, the
_Pervigilium Veneris_, with its ceaselessly reiterated refrain,
"To-morrow he shall love who never loved before." As he fell asleep it
was running through his head like a popular tune: _Cras amet qui nunquam
amavit; quique amavit cras amet_.

It struck him as an omen; but it did not terrify him.


V

Professor Martha called again to ask her question in verse technic. The
answer led to further talk and the consultation of books. She was a
trifle nearsighted and too proud to wear glasses, so she had to bend
close to the page; and her hair tickled his nose again foolishly.

Conference bred conference, and one day she asked him whether she would
dare ask him to call. He rewarded her bravery by calling. She lived in a
dormitory, with a parlor for the reception of guests. Male students were
allowed to call on only two evenings a week. Litton did not call on
those evenings; yet the fact that he called at all swept through the
town like a silent thunderbolt. The students were mysteriously apprised
of the fact that old Professor Litton and Prof. Martha Binley were
sitting up and taking notice. To the youngsters it looked like a
flirtation in an old folks' home.

Litton's very digestion was affected; his brain was in a whirl. He was
the prey of the most childish alarms; gusts of petulant emotion swept
through him if Martha were late when he called; he was mad with jealousy
if she mentioned another professor.

She was growing more careful of her appearance. A new youth had come to
her. She took fifteen years off her looks by simply fluffing her hair
out of its professorial constriction. Professor Mackail noticed it and
mentioned to Professor Litton that Professor Binley was looking ever so
much better.

"She's not half homely for such an old maid!" he said.

Professor Litton felt murder in his heart. He wanted to slay the
reprobate twice--once for daring to observe Martha's beauty and once for
his parsimony of praise.

That evening when he called on Martha he was tortured with a sullen
mood. She finally coaxed from him the astounding admission that he
suspected her of flirting with Mackail. She was too new in love to
recognize the ultimate compliment of his distress. She was horrified by
his distrust, and so hurt that she broke forth in a storm of tears and
denunciation. Their precious evening ended in a priceless quarrel of
amazing violence. He stamped down the outer steps as she stamped up the
inner.

For three days they did not meet and the university wore almost visible
mourning for its pets. Poor Litton had not known that the human heart
could suffer such agony. He was fairly burned alive with loneliness and
resentment--like another Hercules blistering in the shirt of Nessus. And
Martha was suffering likewise as Jason's second wife was consumed in
the terrible poisoned robe that Medea sent her.

One evening a hollow-eyed Litton crept up the dormitory steps and asked
the overjoyed maid for Professor Binley. When she appeared he caught her
in his arms as if she were a spar and he a drowning sailor. They made up
like young lovers and swore oaths that they would never quarrel
again--oaths which, fortunately for the variety of their future
existence, they found capable of infinite breaking and mending.

Each denied that the other could possibly love each. He decried himself
as a stupid, ugly old fogy; and she cried him up as the wisest and most
beautiful and best of men. Since best sounded rather weak, she called
him the bestest; and he did not charge the impossible word against her
as he had against Teed. He did not remember that Teed had ever used such
language. Nobody could ever have used such language, because nobody was
ever like her!

And when she said that he could not possibly love a homely, scrawny old
maid like her, he delivered a eulogy that would have struck Aphrodite,
rising milkily from the sea, as a slight exaggeration. And as for old
maid, he cried in a curious blending of puerility and scholasticism:

"Old maid, do you say? And has my little Margy-wargles forgotten what
Sappho said of an old maid? We'd have lost it if some old scholiast on
the stupid old sophist Hermogenes hadn't happened to quote it to
explain the word glukumalon--an apple grafted on a quince. Sappho said
this old maid was like--let me see!--'like the sweet apple that blushes
on the top of the bough--on the tip of the topmost; and the
apple-gatherers forgot it--no, they did not forget it; they just could
not get it!' And that's you, Moggles mine! You're an old maid because
you've been out of reach of everybody. I can't climb to you; so you're
going to drop into my arms--aren't you?"

She said she supposed she was. And she did.

Triumphantly he said, "Hadn't we better announce our engagement?"

This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid
to let the students all know it. A little later--on Commencement Day
will be time enough."

He bowed to her decision--not for the last time.

For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the
service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names--_Meæ Deliciæ_,
or _Glukutate_, or _Melema_. A poem that he had always thought the last
word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions--the
poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a
hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have
made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not
know--nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows--how many
kisses there are."

His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an
affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in
speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol
on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch
to after dinner.

She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she
achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had
thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to
Stookie-tookie.

Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart,
so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations
of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop
or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.

During those black days when Litton had quarreled with Martha he had
fiercely reminded Teed that only a month remained before his final
examinations, and warned him that he would hold him strictly to account.
No classics, no diploma!

Teed had sulked and moped while Litton sulked and moped; but when Litton
was reconciled to Martha the sun seemed to come out on Teed's clouded
world, too. He took a sudden extra interest in his electrical studies
and obtained permission to work in the laboratory overtime. He obtained
permission even to visit the big city for certain apparatus. And he
wrote the despondent, distant Fannie Newman that there would "shortly
be something doing in the classics."


VI

One afternoon Professor Litton, having dismissed his class--in which he
was obliged to rebuke Teed more severely than usual--fell to remembering
his last communion with Martha, the things he had said--and heard! He
wondered, as a philologist, at the strange prevalence of the "oo" sound
in his love-making. It was plainly an onomatopoeic word representing
the soul's delight. Oo! was what Ah! is to the soul in exaltation and
Oh! to the soul in surprise. If the hyacinths babbled _Ai, Ai!_ the
roses must murmur Oo! Oo!

The more he thought it over, the more nonsense it became, as all words
turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love
could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to
think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of
his own for his everlastingly mysterious love affairs?

Eager for the comfort of fellowship in disgrace he hurried to the
library and sought out the works of the Dean of St. Patrick's. And in
the "Journal to Stella" he found what he sought--and more. Expressions
of the most appalling coarseness alternated with the most insipid
tendernesses.

The old dean had a code of abbreviations: M.D. for "My dear," Ppt. for
"Poppet," Pdfr. for "Poor dear foolish rogue," Oo or zoo or loo stood
for "you," Deelest for "Dearest," and Rettle for "Letter," and Dallars
for "Girl," Vely for "Very," and Hele and Lele for "Here and there."
Litton copied out for his own comfort and Martha's this passage.

     Do you know what? When I am writing in my own language I make up my
     mouth just as if I was speaking it: "Zoo must cly Lele and Hele,
     and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr., pay? Iss, and so la shall!
     And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood mollow."

And Dean Swift had written this while he was in London two hundred years
before, a great man among great men. With such authority back of him
Litton returned to his empty class-room feeling as proud as Gulliver in
Lilliput. A little later he was Gulliver in Brobdingnag.

Alone at his desk, with none of his students in the seats before him, he
took from his pocket--his left pocket--a photograph of Prof. Martha
Binley. It had been taken one day on a picnic far from the spying eyes
of pupils. Her hair was all wind-blown, her eyes frowned gleamingly into
the sun, and her mouth was curled with laughter.

He sat there alone--the learned professor--and talked to this snapshot
in a dialogue he would have recently accepted as a perfect examination
paper for matriculation in an insane-asylum.

"Well, Margy-wargy, zoo and Stookie-tookie is dust like old Dean
Swiffikins, isn't we?"

There was a rap on the door and the knob turned as he shot the
photograph into his pocket and pretended to be reading a volume of
Bacchylides--upside down. The intruder was Teed. Litton was too much
startled and too throbbing with guilt to express his indignation. He
stammered:

"We-well, Teed?" He almost called him teed-leums, his tongue had so
caught the rhythm of love.

Teed came forward with an ominous self-confidence bordering on
insolence. There was a glow in his eye that made his former tyrant
quail.

"Professor, I'd like a word with you about those conditions. I wish
you'd let me off on 'em."

"Let you off, T-Teed?"

"Yes, sir. I can't get ready for the exams. I've boned until my skull's
cracked and it lets the blamed stuff run out faster than I can cram it
in. The minute I leave college I expect to forget everything I've
learned here, anyway; so I'd be ever so much obliged if you'd just pass
me along."

"I don't think I quite comprehend," said Litton, who was beginning to
regain his pedagogical dignity.

"All you've gotta do," said Teed, "is to put a high enough mark on my
papers. You gimme a special examination and I'll make the best stab I
can at answering the questions; then you just shut one eye and mark it
just over the failure line. That'll save you a lot o' time and fix me
hunky-dory."

Litton was glaring at him, hearing the uncouth "gimme" and "gotta," and
wondering that a man could spend four years in college and scrape off
so little paint. Then he began to realize the meaning of Teed's
proposal. His own honor was in traffic. He groaned in suffocation:

"Do you dare to ask me to put false marks on examination-papers, sir?"

"Aw, Professor, what's the dif? You couldn't grind Latin and Greek into
me with a steel-rolling machine. Gimme a chance! There's a little girl
waiting for me outside and a big job. I can't get one without the
other--and I don't get either unless you folks slip me the sheepskin."

"Impossible, sir! Astounding! Insulting! Impossible!"

"Have a heart, can't you?"

"Leave the room, sir, at once!"

"All right!" Teed sighed, and turned away. At the door he paused to
murmur, "All right for you, Stookie-tookie!"

Litton's spectacles almost exploded from his nose.

"What's that?" he shrieked.

Teed turned and came back, with an intolerable smirk, straight to the
desk. He leaned on it with odious familiarity and grinned.

"Say, Prof, did you ever hear of the dictagraph?"

"No! And I don't care to now."

"You ought to read some of the modern languages, Prof! Dictagraph comes
from two perfectly good Latin words: dictum and graft--well, you'll know
'em. But the Greeks weren't wise to this little device. I got part of it
here."

He took from his pocket the earpiece of the familiar engine of
latter-day detective romance. He explained it to the horribly fascinated
Litton, whose hair stood on end and whose voice stuck in his throat in
the best Vergilian manner. Before he quite understood its black magic
Litton suspected the infernal purpose it had been put to. His wrath had
melted to a sickening fear when Teed reached the conclusion of his
uninterrupted discourse:

"The other night I was calling on a pair of girls at the dormitory where
your--where Professor Binley lives. They pointed out the sofa near the
fireplace where you and the professoress sit and hold hands and make
googoo eyes."

There was that awful "oo" sound again! Litton was in an icy
perspiration; but he was even more afraid for his beloved, precious
sweetheart than for himself--and that was being about as much afraid as
there is. Teed went on relentlessly, gloating like a satyric mask:

"Well, I had an idea, and the girls fell for it with a yip of joy. The
next evening I called I carried a wire from my room across to that
dormitory and nobody paid any attention while I brought it through a
window and under the carpet to the back of the sofa. And there it
waited, laying for you. And over at my digs I had it attached to a
phonograph by a little invention of my own.

"Gosh! It was wonderful! It even repeated the creak of those old, rusty
springs while you waited for her. And when she came--well, anyway, I
got every word you said, engraved in wax, like one of those old poets of
yours used to write on."

Litton was afraid to ask evidence in verification. Teed supplied the
unspoken demand:

"For instance, the first thing she says to you is: 'Oh, there you are,
my little lover! I thought you'd never come!' And you says, 'Did it miss
its stupid old Stookie?' And she says: 'Hideously! Sit down, honey
heart.' And splung went the spring--and splung again! Then she says:
'Did it have a mis'ble day in hateful old class-room? Put its boo'ful
head on Margy-wargy's shojer.' Then you says--"

"Stop!" Litton cried, raising the only missile he could find, an
inkstand. "Who knows of this infamy besides you?"

"Nobody yet--on my word of honor."

"Honor!" sneered Litton, so savagely that Teed's shameless leer vanished
in a glare of anger.

"Nobody yet! The girls are dying to hear and some of the fellows knew
what I was up to; but I was thinking that I'd tell 'em that the blamed
thing didn't work, provided--provided--"

"Provided?" Litton wailed, miserably.

"Provided you could see your way clear to being a little careless with
your marks on my exam-papers."

Litton sat with his head whirling and roaring like a coffee-grinder. A
multitude of considerations ran through and were crushed into
powder--his honor; her honor; the standards of the university; the
standards of a lover; the unimportance of Teed; the all-importance of
Martha; the secret disloyalty to the faculty; the open disloyalty to his
best-beloved. He heard Teed's voice as from far off:

"Of course, if you can't see your way to sparing my sweetheart's
feelings I don't see why I'm expected to spare yours--or to lie to the
fellows and girls who are perishing to hear how two professors talk when
they're in love."

Another long pause. Then the artful Teed moved to the door and turned
the knob. Litton could not speak; but he threw a look that was like a
grappling-iron and Teed came back.

"How do I know," Litton moaned, "how do I know that you will keep your
word?"

"How do I know that you'll keep yours?" Teed replied, with the insolence
of a conqueror.

"Sir!" Litton flared, but weakly, like a sick candle.

"Well," Teed drawled, "I'll bring you the cylinders. I'll have to trust
you, as one gentleman to another."

"Gentleman!" Litton snarled in hydrophobic frenzy.

"Well, as one lover to another, then," Teed laughed. "Do I get my
diploma?"

Litton's head was so heavy he could not nod it.

"It's my diploma in exchange for your records. Come on, Professor--be a
sport! And take it from me, it's no fun having the words you whisper in
a girl's ear in the dark shouted out loud in the open court. And mine
were repeated in a Dutch dialect! I got yours just as they came from
your lips--and hers."

That ended it. Litton surrendered, passed himself under the yoke;
pledged himself to the loathsome compact, and Teed went to fetch the
price of his degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Litton hung dejected beyond feeling for a long while. His heart was
whimpering _Ai, Ai!_ He felt himself crushed under a hundred different
crimes. He felt that he could never look up again. Then he heard a soft
tap at the door. He could not raise his eyes or his voice. He heard the
door open and supposed it was Teed bringing him the wages of his shame;
but he heard another voice--an unimaginably beautiful, tragically tender
voice--crooning:

"Oo-oo! Stookie-tookie!"

He looked up. How radiant she was! He could only sigh. She came across
to him as gracefully and lightly as Iris running down a rainbow. She was
murmuring:

"I just had to slip over and tell you something."

"Well, Martha!" he sighed.

She stopped short, as if he had struck her.

"'Martha'? What's the matter? You aren't mad at me, are you, Stookie?"

"How could I be angry with you, Marg--er--Martha?"

"Then why don't you call me Margy-wargleums?"

He stared at her. Her whimsical smile, trembling to a piteously pretty
hint of terror, overwhelmed him. He hesitated, then shoved back his
chair and, rising, caught her to him so tightly that she gasped out,
"Oo!" There it was again! He laughed like an overgrown cub as he cried:

"Why don't I call you Margy-wargleums? Well, what a darned fool I'd be
not to! Margy-wargleums!"

To such ruin does love--the blind, the lawless, the illiterate
child--bring the noblest intelligences and the loftiest principles.




THE MOUTH OF THE GIFT HORSE

I


The town of Wakefield was--is--suffering from growing pains--from
ingrowing pains, according to its rival, Gatesville.

Wakefield has long been guilty of trying to add a cubit to its stature
by taking thought. Established, like thousands of other pools left in
the prairies by that tidal wave of humanity sweeping westward in the
middle of the last century, it passed its tenth thousand with a rush;
then something happened.

For decades the decennial census dismally tolled the same knell of
fifteen thousand in round numbers. The annual censuses but echoed the
reverberations. A few more cases of measles one year, and the population
lapsed a little below the mark; an easy winter, and it slipped a little
above. No mandragora of bad times or bad health ever quite brought it so
low as fourteen thousand. No fever of prosperity ever sent the
temperature quite so high as sixteen thousand.

The iteration got on people's nerves till a commercial association was
formed under the name of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club, with a motto of
"Boom or Bust." Many individuals accomplished the latter, but the town
still failed of the former. The chief activity of the club was in the
line of decoying manufacturers over into Macedonia by various bribes.

Its first capture was a cutlery company in another city. Though
apparently prosperous, it had fallen foul of the times, and its
president adroitly allowed the Wide-a-Wakefield Club to learn that, if a
building of sufficient size were offered rent free for a term of years,
the cutlery company might be induced to move to Wakefield and conduct
its business there, employing at least a hundred laborers, year in, year
out.

There was not in all Wakefield a citizen too dull to see the individual
and collective advantage of this hundred increase. It meant money
in the pocket of every doctor, lawyer, merchant, clothier,
boarding-house-keeper, saloon-keeper, soda-water-vender--whom not?

Every establishment in town would profit, from the sanatorium to the
"pantatorium"--as the institution for the replenishment of trousers was
elegantly styled.

Commercial fervor rose to such heights in Wakefield that in no time at
all enough money was subscribed to build a convenient factory and to
purchase as many of the shares of cutlery stock as the amiable president
cared to print. In due season the manufacture of tableware and penknives
began, and the pride of the town was set aglow by the trade-mark
stamped on every article issued from the cutlery factory. It was an
ingenious emblem--a glorious Cupid in a sash marked "Wakefield,"
stabbing a miserable Cupid in a sash marked "Sheffield."

It was Sheffield that survived. In fact, the stupid English city
probably never heard of the Wakefield Cutlery Company. Nor did Wakefield
hear of it long. For the emery dust soon ceased to glisten in the air
and the steel died of a distemper.

It was a very real shock to Wakefield, and many a boy that had been
meant for college went into his father's store instead, and many a girl
who had planned to go East to be polished stayed at home and polished
her mother's plates and pans, because the family funds had been invested
in the steel-engravings of the cutlery stock certificates. They were
very handsome engravings.

Hope languished in Wakefield until a company from Kenosha consented to
transport its entire industry thither if it could receive a building
rent free. It was proffered, and it accepted, the cutlery works. For a
season the neighboring streets were acrid with the aroma of the
passionate pickles that were bottled there. And then its briny deeps
ceased to swim with knobby condiments. A tin-foil company abode awhile,
and yet again a tamale-canning corporation, which in its turn sailed on
to the Sargasso Sea of missing industries.

Other factory buildings in Wakefield fared likewise. They were but
lodging-houses for transient failures. The population swung with the
tide, but always at anchor. The lift which the census received from an
artificial-flower company, employing seventy-five hands, was canceled by
the demise of a more redolent pork-packing concern of equal pay-roll.
People missed it when the wind blew from the west.

But Wakefield hoped on. One day the executive committee of the
Wide-a-Wakefield Club, having nothing else to do, met in executive
session. There were various propositions to consider. All of them were
written on letter-heads of the highest school of commercial art, and all
of them promised to endow Wakefield with some epoch-making advantage,
provided merely that Wakefield furnish a building rent free, tax free,
water free, and subscribe to a certain amount of stock.

The club regarded these glittering baits with that cold and clammy gaze
with which an aged trout of many-scarred gills peruses some newfangled
spoon.

But if these letters were tabled with suspicion because they offered too
much for too little, what hospitality could be expected for a letter
which offered still more for still less? The chairman of the committee
was Ansel K. Pettibone, whose sign-board announced him as a "practical
house-painter and paper-hanger." He read this letter, head-lines and
all:

MARK A. SHELBY     JOHN R. SHELBY     LUKE B. SHELBY

SHELBY PARADISE POWDER COMPANY

SPRINGFIELD, MASS., U. S. A.

MAKES WASHDAY WELCOME.     SIDESTEP SUBSTITUTES.
WIDE-A-WAKEFIELD CLUB, Wakefield:

     DEAR SIRS,--The undersigned was born in your city, and left same
     about twenty years ago to seek his fortune. I have finally found it
     after many ups and downs. Us three brothers have jointly perfected
     and patented the famous Paradise Powder. It is generally conceded
     to be the grandest thing of its kind ever put on the market, and,
     in the words of the motto, "Makes Washday Welcome." Ladies who have
     used it agree that our statement is not excessive when we say,
     "Once tried, you will use no other."

     It is selling at such a rate in the East that I have a personal
     profit of two thousand dollars a week. We intend to push it in the
     West, and we were talking of where would be the best place to
     locate a branch factory at. My brothers mentioned Chicago, St.
     Louis, Omaha, Denver, and such places, but I said, "I vote for
     Wakefield." My brothers said I was cracked. I says maybe I am, but
     I'm going back to my old home town and spend the rest of my life
     there and my surplus money, too. I want to beautify Wakefield, and
     as near as I can remember there is room for improvement. It may not
     be good business, but it is what I want to do. And also what I want
     to know is, can I rely on the co-operation of the Wide-a-Wakefield
     Club in doing its share to build up the old town into a genuine
     metropolis? Also, what would be the probable cost of a desirable
     site for the factory?

     Hoping to receive a favorable reply from you at your earliest
     convenience,
                                         Yours truly,
                                                       LUKE B. SHELBY.

The chairman's grin had grown wider as he read and read. When he had
finished the letter he tossed it along the line. Every member read it
and shook with equal laughter.

"I wonder what kind of green goods he sells?" said Joel Spate, the owner
of the Bon-Ton Grocery.

"My father used to say to me," said Forshay, of the One-Price Emporium,
"whatever else you do, Jake, always suspicion the fellow that offers you
something for nothing. There's a nigger in the woodpile some'eres."

"That's so," said Soyer, the swell tailor, who was strong on second
thought.

"He says he's goin' to set up a factory here, but he don't ask for rent
free, tax free, light free--nothin' free," said the practical
house-painter.

"What's the name again?" said Spate.

"Shelby--Luke B. Shelby," answered Pettibone. "Says he used to live here
twenty years ago. Ever hear of him? I never did."

Spate's voice came from an ambush of spectacles and whiskers: "I've
lived here all m' life--I'm sixty-three next month. I don't remember any
such man or boy."

"Me, neither," echoed Soyer, "and I'm here going on thirty-five year."

The heads shook along the line as if a wind had passed over a row of
wheat.

"It's some new dodge for sellin' stock," suspicioned One-Price Forshay,
who had a large collection of cutlery certificates.

"More likely it's just a scheme to get us talking about his Paradise
Powder. Seems to me I've had some of their circulars," said Bon-Ton
Spate.

Pettibone, the practical chairman, silenced the gossip with a brisk,
"What is the pleasure of the meeting as regards answering it?"

"I move we lay it on the table," said Eberhart of the Furniture Palace.

"I move we lay it under the table," said Forshay, who had a keen sense
of humor.

"Order, gentlemen! Order," rapped Pettibone, as the room rocked with the
laughter in which Forshay led.

When sobriety was restored it was moved, seconded, and passed that the
secretary be instructed to send Shelby a copy of the boom number of the
Wakefield _Daily Eagle_.

And in due time the homesick Ulysses, waiting a welcome from Ithaca,
received this answer to his letter:

     LUKE B. SHELBY, Springfield, Mass.

     SIR,--Yours of sixteenth inst. rec'd and contents noted. In reply
     to same, beg to state are sending last special number _Daily
     Eagle_, giving full information about city and sites.

                                              Yours truly,

                                        JOEL SPATE, _Secy. Exec. Comm._

Shelby winced. The hand he had held out with pearls of price had been
brushed aside. His brothers laughed.

"We said you were cracked. They don't want your old money or your
society. Go somewheres where they do."

But Luke B. Shelby had won his success by refusing to be denied, and he
had set his heart on refurbishing his old home town. The instinct of
place is stronger than any other instinct in some animals, and Shelby
was homesick for Wakefield--not for anybody, any house, or any street in
particular there, but just for Wakefield.

Without further ado he packed his things and went.


II

There was no brass band to meet him. At the hotel the clerk read his
name without emotion. When he required the best two rooms in the hotel,
and a bath at that, the clerk looked suspicious:

"Any baggage?"

"Three trunks and a grip."

"What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?"

"Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room."

He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it
seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs,
apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows.

He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked
horse dozing at the hitching-post?

Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There
stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the
trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the
porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with
the same arch of water springing from the nozzle.

He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he
started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A
raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It
was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat
dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score
of years ago.

Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor
Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy
was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened
the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and washing-powder
Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used washing-powder
then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."

As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the
grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy
leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The
delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in
Wakefield, now as then.

Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery
where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables
seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the
strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as
always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs. Spate had so
distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old
Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as
his hard-driven horses.

Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into
conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had
always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and
whiskers.

Joel Spate, never dreaming who Shelby was, was gracious to him for the
first time in history. He evidently looked upon Shelby as a new-comer
who might be pre-empted for a regular customer before Mrs. L. Bowers,
the rival grocer, got him. It somehow hurt Shelby's homesick heart to be
unrecognized, more than it pleased him to enjoy time's topsy-turvy. Here
he was, returned rich and powerful, to patronize the taskmaster who had
worked him hard and paid him harder in the old years. Yet he dared not
proclaim himself and take his revenge.

He ended the interview by buying a few of the grocer's horrible cigars,
which he gave away to the hotel porter later.

All round the town Shelby wandered, trying to be recognized. But age and
prosperity had altered him beyond recall, though he himself knew almost
every old negro whitewash man, almost every teamster, he met. He was
surer of the first names than of the last, for the first names had been
most used in his day, and it surprised him to find how clearly he
recalled these names and faces, though late acquaintances escaped his
memory with ease.

The women, too, he could generally place, though many who had been
short-skirted tomboys were now heavy-footed matrons of embonpoint with
children at their skirts, children as old as they themselves had been
when he knew them. Some of them, indeed, he recognized only by the
children that lagged alongside like early duplicates.

As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of
their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but
the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before
she reached him he identified Phoebe Carew.

Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a
meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled
about town on Saturday afternoons. And now the child, though she must be
thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful
prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by
accident or choice, not by nature's decree.

He wondered if she, at least, would pay him the compliment of
recognition. She made no sign of it as she approached. As she passed he
lifted his hat.

"Isn't this Miss Phoebe Carew?"

Wakefield women were not in danger from strangers' advances; she paused
without alarm and answered with an inquiring smile:

"Yes."

"You don't remember me?"

She studied him. "I seem to, and yet--"

"I'm Luke Shelby."

"Luke Shelby! Oh yes! Why, how do you do?" She gave him her beautiful
hand, but she evidently lacked the faintest inkling of his identity.
Time had erased from recollection the boy who used to take her sliding
on his sled, the boy who used to put on her skates for her, the boy who
used to take her home on his grocery-wagon sometimes, pretending that he
was going her way, just for the benizon of her radiant companionship,
her shy laughter.

"I used to live here," he said, ashamed to be so forgettable. "My mother
was--my stepfather was A. J. Stacom, who kept the hardware-store."

"Oh yes," she said; "they moved away some years ago, didn't they?"

"Yes; after mother died my stepfather went back to Council Bluffs, where
we came from in the first place. I used to go to school with you,
Phoebe--er--Miss Carew. Then I drove Spate's delivery-wagon for a
while before I went East."

"Oh yes," she said; "I think I remember you very well. I'm very glad to
see you again, Mr.--Mr. Stacom."

"Shelby," he said, and he was so heartsick that he merely lifted his hat
and added, "I'm glad to see you looking so well."

"You're looking well, too," she said, and smiled the gracious, empty
smile one visits on a polite stranger. Then she went her way. In his
lonely eyes she moved with a goddess-like grace that made clouds of the
uneven pavements where he stumbled as he walked with reverted gaze.

He went back to the hotel lonelier than before, in a greater loneliness
than Ulysses felt ending his Odyssey in Ithaca. For, at least, Ulysses
was remembered by an old dog that licked his hand.

Once in his room, Shelby sank into a patent rocker of most uncomfortable
plush. The inhospitable garishness of a small-town hotel's luxury
expelled him from the hateful place, and he resumed the streets, taking,
as always, determination from rebuff and vowing within himself:

"I'll make 'em remember me. I'll make the name of Shelby the biggest
name in town."

On the main street he found one lone, bobtailed street-car waiting at
the end of its line, its horse dejected with the ennui of its career,
the driver dozing on the step.

Shelby decided to review the town from this seedy chariot; but the
driver, surly with sleep, opened one eye and one corner of his mouth
just enough to inform him that the next "run" was not due for fifteen
minutes.

"I'll change that," said Shelby. "I'll give 'em a trolley, and open cars
in summer, too."

He dragged his discouraged feet back to the hotel and asked when dinner
would be served.

"Supper's been ready sence six," said the clerk, whose agile toothpick
proclaimed that he himself had banqueted.

Shelby went into the dining-room. A haughty head waitress, zealously
chewing gum, ignored him for a time, then piloted him to a table where
he found a party of doleful drummers sparring in repartee with a damsel
of fearful and wonderful coiffure.

She detached herself reluctantly and eventually brought Shelby a supper
contained in a myriad of tiny barges with which she surrounded his plate
in a far-reaching flotilla.

When he complained that his steak was mostly gristle, and that he did
not want his pie yet, Hebe answered:

"Don't get flip! Think you're at the Worldoff?"

Poor Shelby's nerves were so rocked that he condescended to complain to
the clerk. For answer he got this:

"Mamie's all right. If you don't like our ways, better build a hotel of
your own."

"I guess I will," said Shelby.

He went to his room to read. The gas was no more than darkness made
visible. He vowed to change that, too.

He would telephone to the theater. The telephone-girl was forever in
answering, and then she was impudent. Besides, the theater was closed.
Shelby learned that there was "a movin'-pitcher show going"! He went,
and it moved him to the door.

The sidewalks were full of doleful loafers and loaferesses. Men placed
their chairs in the street and smoked heinous tobacco. Girls and women
dawdled and jostled to and from the ice-cream-soda fountains.

The streets that night were not lighted at all, for the moon was abroad,
and the board of aldermen believed in letting God do all He could for
the town. In fact, He did nearly all that the town could show of charm.
The trees were majestic, the grass was lavishly spread, the sky was
divinely blue by day and angelically bestarred at night.

Shelby compared his boyhood impressions with the feelings governing his
mind now that it was adult and traveled. He felt that he had grown, but
that the town had stuck in the mire. He felt an ambition to lift it and
enlighten it. Like the old builder who found Rome brick and left it
marble, Shelby determined that the Wakefield which he found of plank he
should leave at least of limestone. Everything he saw displeased him and
urged him to reform it altogether, and he said:

"I'll change all this. And they'll love me for it."

And he did. But they--did they?


III

One day a greater than Shelby came to Wakefield, but not to stay. It was
no less than the President of these United States swinging around the
circle in an inspection of his realm, with possibly an eye to the
nearing moment when he should consent to re-election. As his special
train approached each new town the President studied up its statistics
so that he might make his speech enjoyable by telling the citizens the
things they already knew. He had learned that those are the things
people most like to hear.

His encyclopædia informed him that Wakefield had a population of about
fifteen thousand. He could not know how venerable an estimate this was,
for Wakefield was still fifteen thousand--now and forever, fifteen
thousand and insuperable.

The President had a mental picture of just what such a town of fifteen
thousand would look like, and he wished himself back in the White House.

He was met at the train by the usual entertainment committee, which in
this case coincided with the executive committee of the Wide-a-Wakefield
Club. It had seemed just as well to these members to elect themselves as
anybody else.

Mr. Pettibone, the town's most important paper-hanger, was again
chairman after some lapses from office. Joel Spate, the Bon-Ton Grocer,
was once more secretary, after having been treasurer twice and president
once. The One-Price Emporium, however, was now represented by the
younger Forshay, son of the founder, who had gone to the inevitable
Greenwood at the early age of sixty-nine. Soyer, the swell tailor, had
yielded his place to the stateliest man in town, Amasa Harbury,
president of the Wakefield Building and Loan Association. And Eberhart,
of the Furniture Palace, had been supplanted by Gibson Shoals, the bank
cashier.

To the President's surprise the railroad station proved to be, instead
of the doleful shed usual in those parts, a graceful edifice of
metropolitan architecture. He was to ride in an open carriage, of
course, drawn by the two spanking dapples which usually drew the hearse
when it was needed. But this was tactfully kept from the President.

There had been some bitterness over the choice of the President's
companions in the carriage, since it was manifestly impossible for the
entire committee of seven to pile into the space of four, though young
Forshay, who had inherited his father's gift of humor, volunteered to
ride on the President's lap or hold him on his.

The extra members were finally consoled by being granted the next
carriage, an equipage drawn by no less than the noble black geldings
usually attached to the chief mourners' carriage.

As the President was escorted to his place he remarked that a
trolley-car was waiting at the station.

"I see that Wakefield boasts an electric line," he beamed.

"Yes," said Pettibone, "that's some of Shelby's foolishness."

A look from Spate silenced him, but the President had not caught the
slip.

The procession formed behind the town band, whose symphony suffered
somewhat from the effort of the musicians to keep one eye on the music
and throw the other eye backward at the great visitor.

"What a magnificent building!" said the President as the parade turned a
corner. Nobody said anything, and the President read the name aloud.
"The Shelby House. A fine hotel!" he exclaimed, as he lifted his hat to
the cheers from the white-capped chambermaids and the black-coated
waiters in the windows. They were male waiters.

"And the streets are lighted by electricity! And paved with brick!" the
President said. "Splendid! Splendid! There must be very enterprising
citizens in Gatesville--I mean Wakefield." He had visited so many towns!

"That's a handsome office-building," was his next remark. "It's quite
metropolitan." The committee vouchsafed no reply, but they could see
that he was reading the sign:

THE SHELBY BLOCK:
SHELBY INDEPENDENT TELEPHONE COMPANY
SHELBY'S PARADISE POWDER COMPANY
SHELBY ARTESIAN WELL COMPANY
SHELBY PASTIME PARK COMPANY
SHELBY OPERA HOUSE COMPANY
SHELBY STREET RAILWAY COMPANY

The committee was not used to chatting with Presidents, and even the
practical Pettibone, who had voted against him, had an awe of him in the
flesh. He decided to vote for him next time; it would be comforting to
be able to say, "Oh yes, I know the President well; I used to take long
drives with him--once."

There were heartaches in the carriage as the President, who commented on
so many things, failed to comment on the banner of welcome over
Pettibone's shop, painted by Pettibone's own practical hand; or the
gaily bedighted Bon-Ton Grocery with the wonderful arrangement of
tomato-cans into the words, "Welcome to Wakefield." The Building and
Loan Association had stretched a streamer across the street, too, and
the President never noticed it. His eyes and tongue were caught away by
the ornate structure of the opera-house.

"Shelby Opera House. So many things named after Mr. Shelby. Is he the
founder of the city or--or--"

"No, just one of the citizens," said Pettibone.

"I should be delighted to meet him."

Three votes fell from the Presidential tree with a thud.

Had the committee been able to imagine in advance how Shelbyisms would
obtrude everywhere upon the roving eye of the visitor, whose one aim was
a polite desire to exclaim upon everything exclaimable, they might have
laid out the line of march otherwise.

But it was too late to change now, and they grew grimmer and grimmer as
the way led to the stately pleasure-dome which Shelby Khan had decreed
and which imported architects and landscape-gardeners had established.

Here were close-razored lawns and terraces, a lake with spouting
fountains, statues of twisty nymphs, glaring, many-antlered stags and
couchant lions, all among cedar-trees and flower-beds whose perfumes
saluted the Presidential nostril like a gentle hurrah.

Emerging through the trees were the roofs, the cupola and ivy-bowered
windows of the home of Shelby, most homeless at home. For, after all his
munificence, Wakefield did not like him. The only tribute the people had
paid him was to boost the prices of everything he bought, from land to
labor, from wall-paper to cabbages. And now on the town's great day he
had not been included in any of the committees of welcome. He had been
left to brood alone in his mansion like a prince in ill favor exiled to
his palace.

He did not know that his palace had delighted even the jaded eye of the
far-traveled First Citizen. He only knew that his fellow-townsmen
sneered at it with dislike.

Shelby was never told by the discreet committeemen in the carriage that
the President had exclaimed on seeing his home:

"Why, this is magnificent! This is an estate! I never dreamed
that--er--Wakefield was a city of such importance and such wealth. And
whose home is this?"

Somebody groaned, "Shelby's."

"Ah yes; Shelby's, of course. So many things here are Shelby's. You must
be very proud of Mr. Shelby. Is he there, perhaps?"

"That's him, standing on the upper porch there, waving his hat,"
Pettibone mumbled.

The President waved his hat at Shelby.

"And the handsome lady is his wife, perhaps?"

"Yes, that's Mrs. Shelby," mumbled Spate. "She was Miss Carew. Used to
teach school here."

Phoebe Shelby was clinging to her husband's side. There were tears in
her eyes and her hands squeezed mute messages upon his arm, for she knew
that his many-wounded heart was now more bitterly hurt than in all his
knowledge of Wakefield. He was a prisoner in disgrace gazing through the
bars at a festival.

He never knew that the President suggested stopping a moment to
congratulate him, and that it was his own old taskmaster Spate who
ventured to say that the President could meet him later. Spate could
rise to an emergency; the other committeemen thanked him with their
eyes.

As the carriage left the border of the Shelby place the President turned
his head to stare, for it was beautiful, ambitiously beautiful. And
something in the silent attitude of the owner and his wife struck a
deeper note in the noisy, gaudy welcome of the other citizens.

"Tell me about this Mr. Shelby," said the President.

Looks were exchanged among the committee. All disliked the task, but
finally Spate broke the silence.

"Well, Mr. President, Shelby is a kind of eccentric man. Some folks say
he's cracked. Used to drive a delivery-wagon for me. Ran away and tried
his hand at nearly everything. Finally, him and his two brothers
invented a kind of washing-powder. It was like a lot of others, but they
knew how to push it. Borrowed money to advertise it big. Got it started
till they couldn't have stopped it if they'd tried. Shelby decided to
come back here and establish a branch factory. That tall chimney is it.
No smoke comin' out of it to-day. He gave all the hands a holiday in
your honor, Mr. President."

The President said: "Well, that's mighty nice of him. So he's come back
to beautify his old home, eh? That's splendid--a fine spirit. Too many
of us, I'm afraid, forget the old places when ambition carries us away
into new scenes. Mr. Shelby must be very popular here."

There was a silence. Mr. Pettibone was too honest, or too something, to
let the matter pass.

"Well, I can't say as to that, Mr. President. Shelby's queer. He's very
pushing. You can't drive people more 'n so fast. Shelby is awful fussy.
Now, that trolley line--he put that in, but we didn't need it."

"Not but what Wakefield is enterprising," Spate added, anxiously.

Pettibone nodded and went on: "People used to think the old bobtailed
horse-car--excuse my language--wasn't much, but the trolley-cars are a
long way from perfect. Service ain't so very good. People don't ride on
'em much, because they don't run often enough."

The President started to say, "Perhaps they can't run oftener because
people don't ride on 'em enough," but something counseled him to
silence, and Pettibone continued:

"Same way with the electric light. People that had gas hated to change.
He made it cheap, but it's a long way from perfect. He put in an
independent telephone. The old one wasn't much good and it was
expensive. Now we can have telephones at half the old price. But result
is, you've got to have two, or you might just as well not have one.
Everybody you want to talk to is always on the other line."

The President nodded. He understood the ancient war between the simple
life and the strenuous. He wished he had left the subject unopened, but
Pettibone had warmed to the theme.

"Shelby built an opery-house and brought some first-class troupes here.
But this is a religious town, and people don't go much to shows. In the
first place, we don't believe in 'em; in the second place, we've been
bit by bad shows so often. So his opery-house costs more 'n it takes in.

"Then he laid out the Pastime Park--tried to get up games and things;
but the vacant lots always were good enough for baseball. He tried to
get people to go out in the country and play golf, too; but it was too
much like following the plow. Folks here like to sit on their porches
when they're tired.

"He brought an automobile to town--scared most of the horses to death.
Our women folks got afraid to drive because the most reliable old nags
tried to climb trees whenever Shelby came honking along. He built two or
three monuments to famous citizens, but that made the families of other
famous citizens jealous.

"He built that big home of his, but it only makes our wives envious.
It's so far out that the society ladies can't call much. Besides, they
feel uneasy with all that glory.

"Mrs. Shelby has a man in a dress-suit to open the door. The rest of
us--our wives answer the door-bell themselves. Our folks are kind of
afraid to invite Mr. and Mrs. Shelby to their parties for fear they'll
criticize; so Mrs. Shelby feels as if she was deserted.

"She thinks her husband is mistreated, too; but--well, Shelby's
eccentric. He says we're ungrateful. Maybe we are, but we like to do
things our own way. Shelby tried to get us to help boost the town, as he
calls it. He offered us stock in his ventures, but we've got taken in so
often that--well, once bit is twice shy, you know, Mr. President. So
Wakefield stands just about where she did before Shelby came here."

"Not but what Wakefield is enterprising," Mr. Spate repeated.

The President's curiosity overcame his policy. He asked one more
question:

"But if you citizens didn't help Mr. Shelby, how did he manage all
these--improvements, if I may use the word?"

"Did it all by his lonesome, Mr. President. His income was immense. But
he cut into it something terrible. His brothers in the East began to row
at the way he poured it out. When he began to draw in advance they were
goin' to have him declared incompetent. Even his brothers say he's
cracked. Recently they've drawn in on him. Won't let him spend his own
money."

A gruesome tone came from among Spate's spectacles and whiskers:

"He won't last long. Health's giving out. His wife told my wife, the
other day, he don't sleep nights. That's a bad sign. His pride is set on
keepin' everything going, though, and nothing can hold him. He wants the
street-cars to run regular, and the telephone to answer quick, even if
the town don't support 'em. He's cracked--there's nothing to it."

Amasa Harbury, of the Building and Loan Association, leaned close and
spoke in a confidential voice:

"He's got mortgages on 'most everything, Mr. President. He's borrowed on
all his securities up to the hilt. Only yesterday I had to refuse him a
second mortgage on his house. He stormed around about how much he'd put
into it. I told him it didn't count how much you put into a hole, it was
how much you could get out. You can imagine how much that palace of his
would bring in this town on a foreclosure sale--about as much as a white
elephant in a china-shop."

"Not but what Wakefield is enterprising," insisted Spate.

The lust for gossip had been aroused and Pettibone threw discretion to
the winds.

"Shelby was hopping mad because we left him off the committee of
welcome, but we thought we'd better stick to our own crowd of
represent'ive citizens. Shelby don't really belong to Wakefield,
anyway. Still, if you want to meet him, it can be arranged."

"Oh no," said the President. "Don't trouble."

And he was politic--or politician--enough to avoid the subject
thenceforward. But he could not get Shelby out of his mind that night as
his car whizzed on its way. To be called crazy and eccentric and to be
suspected, feared, resisted by the very people he longed to
lead--Presidents are not unaware of that ache of unrequited affection.

The same evening Shelby and Phoebe Shelby looked out on their park.
The crowds that had used it as a vantage-ground for the pageant had all
vanished, leaving behind a litter of rubbish, firecrackers, cigar stubs,
broken shrubs, gouged terraces. Not one of them had asked permission,
had murmured an apology or a word of thanks.

For the first time Phoebe Shelby noted that her husband did not take
new determination from rebuff. His resolution no longer made a
springboard of resistance. He seemed to lean on her a little.


IV

The perennially empty cutlery-works gave the Wide-a-Wakefield Club no
rest. Year after year the anxiously awaited census renewed the old note
of fifteen thousand and denied the eloquent argument of increased
population. The committee in its letters continued to refer to
Wakefield as "thriving" rather than as "growing." Its ingeniously
evasive circulars finally roused a curiosity in Wilmer Barstow, a
manufacturer of refrigerators, dissatisfied with the taxes and freight
rates of the city of Clayton.

Barstow was the more willing to leave Clayton because he had suffered
there from that reward which is more unkind than the winter wind. He
loved a woman and paid court to her, sending her flowers at every
possible excuse and besetting her with gifts.

She was not much of a woman--her very lover could see that; but he loved
her in his own and her despite. She was unworthy of his jewels as of his
infatuation, yet she gave him no courtesy for his gifts. She behaved as
if they bored her; yet he knew no other way to win her. The more
indifference she showed the more he tried to dazzle her.

At last he found that she was paying court herself to a younger man--a
selfish good-for-naught who made fun of her as well as of Barstow, and
who borrowed money from her as well as from Barstow.

When Barstow fully realized that the woman had made him not only her own
booby, but the town joke as well, he could not endure her or the place
longer. He cast about for an escape. But he found his factory no
trifling baggage to move.

It was on such fertile soil that one of the Wide-a-Wakefield circulars
fell.

It chimed so well with Barstow's mood that he decided at least to look
the town over.

He came unannounced to make his own observations, like the spies sent
into Canaan. The trolley-car that met his train was rusty, paintless,
forlorn, untenanted. He took a ramshackle hack to the best hotel. Its
sign-board bore this legend: "The Palace, formerly Shelby
House--entirely new management."

He saw his baggage bestowed and went out to inspect the factory building
described to him. The cutlery-works proved smaller than his needs, and
it had a weary look. Not far away he found a far larger factory, idle,
empty, closed. The sign declared it to be the Wakefield Branch of the
Shelby Paradise Powder Company. He knew the prosperity of that firm and
wondered why this branch had been abandoned.

In the course of time the trolley-car overtook him, and he boarded it as
a sole passenger.

The lonely motorman was loquacious and welcomed Barstow as the Ancient
Mariner welcomed the wedding guest. He explained that he made but few
trips a day and passengers were fewer than trips. The company kept it
going to hold the franchise, for some day Wakefield would reach sixteen
thousand and lift the hoodoo.

The car passed an opera-house, with grass aspiring through the chinks of
the stone steps leading to the boarded-up doors.

The car passed the Shelby Block; the legend, "For Rent, apply to Amasa
Harbury," hid the list of Shelby enterprises.

The car grumbled through shabby streets to the outskirts of the town,
where it sizzled along a singing wire past the drooping fences, the
sagging bleachers, and the weedy riot of what had been a
pleasure-ground. A few dim lines in the grass marked the ghost of a
baseball diamond, a circular track, and foregone tennis-courts.

Barstow could read on what remained of the tottering fence:

HELBY'S PAST    ARK

When the car had reached the end of the line Barstow decided to walk
back to escape the garrulity of the motorman, who lived a lonely life,
though he was of a sociable disposition.

Barstow's way led him shortly to the edge of a curious demesne, or
rather the débris of an estate. A chaos of grass and weeds thrust even
through the rust of the high iron fence about the place. Shrubs that had
once been shapely grew raggedly up and swept down into the tall and
ragged grass. A few evergreen trees lifted flowering cones like funeral
candles in sconces. What had been a lake with fountains was a great,
cracked basin of concrete tarnished with scabious pools thick with the
dead leaves of many an autumn.

Barstow entered a fallen gate and walked along paths where his feet
slashed through barbaric tangles clutching at him like fingers. As he
prowled, wondering what splendor this could have been which was so
misplaced in so dull a town and drooping into so early a neglect, birds
took alarm and went crying through the branches. There were lithe
escapes through the grass, and from the rim of the lake ugly toads
plounced into the pool and set the water-spiders scurrying on their
frail catamarans.

Two bronze stags towered knee-deep in verdure; one had a single antler,
the other none. A pair of toothless lions brooded over their lost
dignity. Between their disconsolate sentry, mounted flight on flight of
marble steps to the house of the manor. It lay like an old frigate
storm-shattered and flung aground to rot. The hospitable doors were
planked shut, the windows, too; the floors of the verandas were broken
and the roof was everywhere sunken and insecure.

At the portal had stood two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One
of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her
sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept into stone.

The scene somehow reminded Barstow of one of Poe's landscapes. It was
the corpse of a home. Eventually he noticed a tall woman in black,
seated on a bench and gazing down the terraces across the dead lake.
Barstow was tempted to ask her whose place this had been and what its
history was, but her mien and her crêpe daunted him.

He made his way out of the region, looking back as he went. When he
approached the most neighboring house a grocery-wagon came flying down
the road. Before it stopped the slanted driver was off the seat and
half-way across the yard. In a moment he was back again. Barstow called
out:

"Whose place is that?"

"Shelby's."

"Did he move away?"

But the horse was already in motion, and the youth had darted after,
leaping to the side of the seat and calling back something which Barstow
could not hear.

Shelby, who had given the town everything he could, had even endowed it
with a ruins.

When Barstow had reached the hotel again he went in to his supper. A
head waitress, chewing gum, took him to a table where a wildly coiffed
damsel brought him a bewildering array of most undesirable foods in a
flotilla of small dishes.

After supper Barstow, following the suit of the other guests, took a
chair on the sidewalk, for a little breeze loafed along the hot street.
Barstow's name had been seen upon the hotel register and the executive
committee of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club waited upon him in an august
body.

Mr. Pettibone introduced himself and the others. They took chairs and
hitched them close to Barstow, while they poured out in alternate
strains the advantages of Wakefield. Barstow listened politely, but the
empty factory and the dismantled home of Shelby haunted him and made a
dismal background to their advertisements.

It was of the factory that he spoke first:

"The building you wrote me about and offered me rent-free looks a little
small and out of date for our plant. I saw Shelby's factory empty. Could
I rent that at a reasonable figure, do you suppose?"

The committee leaped at the idea with enthusiasm. Spate laughed through
his beard:

"Lord, I reckon the company would rent it to you for almost the price of
the taxes."

Then he realized that this was saying just a trifle too much. They began
to crawfish their way out. But Barstow said, with unconviction:

"There's only one thing that worries me. Why did Shelby close up his
Paradise Powder factory and move away?"

Pettibone urged the reason hastily: "His brothers closed it up for him.
They wouldn't stand any more of his extravagant nonsense. They shut down
the factory and then shut down on him, too."

"So he gave up his house and moved away?" said Barstow.

"He gave up his house because he couldn't keep it up," said Amasa
Harbury. "Taxes were pretty steep and nobody would rent it, of course.
It don't belong in a town like Wakefield. Neither did Shelby."

"So he moved away?"

"Moved away, nothin'," sneered Spate. "He went to a boardin'-house and
died there. Left his wife a lot of stock in a broken-down street-car
line, and a no-good electric-light company, and an independent telephone
system that the regulars gobbled up. She's gone back to teachin' school
again. We used our influence to get her old job back. We didn't think we
ought to blame her for the faults of Shelby."

"And what had Shelby done?"

They told him in their own way--treading on one another's toes in their
anxiety; shutting one another up; hunching their chairs together in a
tangle as if their slanders were wares they were trying to sell.

But about all that Barstow could make of the matter was that Shelby had
been in much such case as his own. He had been hungry for human
gratitude, and had not realized that it is won rather by accepting than
by bestowing gifts.

Barstow sat and smoked glumly while the committee clattered. He hardly
heard what they were at such pains to emphasize. He was musing upon a
philosophy of his father's:

"There's an old saying, 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth.' But
sayings and doings are far apart. If you can manage to sell a man a
horse he'll make the best of the worst bargain; he'll nurse the nag and
feed him and drive him easy and brag about his faults. He'll overlook
everything from spavin to bots; he'll learn to think that a hamstrung
hind leg is the poetry of motion. But a gift horse--Lord love you! If
you give a man a horse he'll look him in the mouth and everywhere else.
The whole family will take turns with a microscope. They'll kick because
he isn't run by electricity, and if he's an Arabian they'll roast him
because he holds his tail so high. If you want folks to appreciate
anything don't give it to 'em; make 'em work for it and pay for
it--double if you can."

       *       *       *       *       *

Shelby had mixed poetry with business, had given something for nothing;
had paid the penalty.




THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

I


The old road came pouring down from the wooded hills to the westward,
flowed round the foot of other hills, skirting a meadow and a pond, and
then went on easterly about its business. Almost overhanging the road,
like a mill jutting upon its journeyman stream, was an aged house. Still
older were the two lofty oaks standing mid-meadow and imaged again in
the pond. Younger than oaks or house or road, yet as old as Scripture
allots, was the man who stalked across the porch and slumped into a
chair. He always slumped into a chair, for his muscles still remembered
the days when he had sat only when he was worn out. Younger than oaks,
house, road, or man, yet older than a woman wants to be, was the woman
in the garden.

"What you doin', Maw?" the man called across the rail, though he could
see perfectly well.

"Just putterin' 'round in the garden. What you been doin', Paw?"

"Just putterin' 'round the barn. Better come in out the hot sun and rest
your old back."

Evidently the idea appealed to her, for the sunbonnet overhanging the
meek potato-flowers like a flamingo's beak rose in air, as she stood
erect, or as nearly erect as she ever stood nowadays. She tossed a few
uprooted weeds over the lilac-hedge, and, clumping up the steps of the
porch, slumped into a chair. Chairs had once been her luxury, too. She
carried a dish-pan full of green peas, and as her gaze wandered over the
beloved scene her wrinkled fingers were busy among the pods, shelling
them expertly, as if they knew their way about alone.

The old man sighed, the deep sigh of ultimate contentment. "Well, Maw,
as the fellow says in the circus, here we are again."

"Here we are again, Paw."

They always said the same thing about this time of year, when they
wearied of the splendid home they had established as the capital of
their estate and came back to the ground from which they had sprung.
James Coburn always said:

"Well, Maw, as the fellow says in the circus, here we are again."

And Sarah Gregg Coburn always answered:

"Here we are again, Paw."

This place was to them what old slippers are to tired feet. Here they
put off the manners and the dignities their servants expected of them,
and lapsed into shabby clothes and colloquialisms, such as they had been
used to when they were first married, long before he became the master
of a thousand acres, of cattle upon a hundred hills, of blooded
thoroughbreds and patriarchal stallions, of town lots and a bank, and
of a record as Congressman for two terms. This pilgrimage had become a
sort of annual elopement, the mischief of two white-haired runaways. Now
that the graveyard or the city had robbed them of all their children,
they loved to turn back and play at an Indian-summer honeymoon.

This year, for the first time, Maw had consented to the aid of a "hired
girl." She refused to bring one of the maids or the cook from the big
house, and engaged a woman from the village nearest at hand--and then
tried to pretend the woman wasn't there. It hurt her to admit the
triumph of age in her bones, but there was compensation in the privilege
of hearing some one else faintly clattering over the dish-washing of
evenings, while she sat on the porch with Paw and watched the sunset
trail its gorgeous banners along the heavens and across the little toy
sky of the pond.

It was pleasant in the mornings, too, to lie abed in criminal indolence,
hearing from afar the racket of somebody else building the fire. After
breakfast she made a brave beginning, only to turn the broom and the
bedmaking over to Susan and dawdle about after Paw or celebrate matins
in the green aisles of the garden. But mostly the old couple just
pretended to do their chores, and sat on the porch and watched the
clouds go by and the frogs flop into the pond.

"Mail come yet, Maw?"

"Susan's gone for it."

He glanced up the road to a sunbonneted figure blurred in the glare, and
sniffed amiably. "Humph! Country's getting so citified the morning
papers are here almost before breakfast's cleared off. Remember when we
used to drive eleven mile to get the _Weekly Tribune_, Maw?"

"I remember. And it took you about a week to read it. Sometimes you got
one number behind. Nowadays you finish your paper in about five
minutes."

"Nothing much in the papers nowadays except murder trials and divorce
cases. I guess Susan must have a mash on that mail-carrier."

"I wish she'd come on home and not gabble so much."

"Expectin' a letter from the boy?"

"Ought to be one this morning."

"You've said that every mornin' for three weeks. I s'pose he's so busy
in town he don't realize how much his letters mean to us."

"I hate to have him in the city with its dangers--he's so reckless with
his motor, and then there's the temptations and the scramble for money.
I wish Stevie had been contented to settle down with us. We've got
enough, goodness knows. But I suppose he feels he must be a millionaire
or nothing, and what you've made don't seem a drop in the bucket."

The old man winced. He thought how often the boy had found occasion to
draw on him for help in financing his "sure things" and paying up the
losses on the "sure things" that had gone wrong. Those letters had been
sent to the bank in town and had not been mentioned at home, except now
and then, long afterward, when the wife pressed the old man too hard
about holding back money from the boy. Then he would unfold a few
figures. They dazed her, but they never convinced her.

Who ever convinced a woman? Persuaded? Yes, since Eve! Convinced? Not
yet!

It hurts a man's pride to hear his wife impliedly disparage his own
achievements in contrast with his son's. Not that he is jealous of his
son; not that he does not hope and expect that the boy will climb to
peaks he has never dared; not that he would not give his all and bend
his own back as a stepping-stone to his son's ascension; but just that
comparisons are odious. This disparagement is natural, though, to wives,
for they compare what their husbands have done with what their sons are
going to do.

It was an old source of peevishness with Paw Coburn, and he was moved to
say--answering only by implication what she had unconsciously implied,
and seeming to take his theme from the landscape about them:

"When my father died all he left me was this little--bungalow they'd
call it nowadays, I suppose, and a few acres 'round it. You remember,
Maw, how, when the sun first came sneakin' over that knob off to the
left, the shadow of those two oaks used to just touch the stone wall on
the western border of father's property, and when the sun was just
crawlin' into bed behind those woods off yonder the shadow of the oaks
just overlapped the rail fence on the eastern border? That's all my
father left me--that and the mortgage. That's all I brought you home to,
Maw. I'm not disparaging my father. He was a great man. When he left his
own home in the East and came out here all this was woods, woods, woods,
far as you can see. Even that pond wasn't there then. My father cleared
it all--cut down everything except those two oak-trees. He used to call
them the Twin Oaks, but they always seemed to me like man and wife. I
kind o' like to think that they're you and me. And like you and me
they're all that's left standin' of the old trees. They were big trees,
too, and those were big days."

The greatness of his thoughts rendered him mute. He was a plain man, but
he was hearing the unwritten music of the American epic of the ax and
the plow, the more than Trojan war, the more than ten years' war,
against forests and savages. His wife brought him back from
hyper-Homeric vision to the concrete.

"Thank Heaven, Susan's finished gossipin' and started home."

The mail-carrier in his little umbrellaed cart was vanishing up the
hill, and the sunbonnet was floating down the road. The sky was an
unmitigated blue, save for a few masses of cloud, like piles of new
fleece on a shearing-floor. Green woods, gray road, blue sky, pale
clouds, all were steeped in heat and silence so intense it seemed that
something must break. And something broke.

Appallingly, abruptly, came a shattering crash, a streak of blinding
fire, an unendurable noise, a searing blast of blaze as if the sun had
been dynamite exploded, splintering the very joists of heaven. The whole
air rocked like a tidal wave breaking on a reef; the house writhed in
all its timbers. Then silence--unbearable silence.

The old woman, made a child again by a paralytic stroke of terror, found
herself on her knees, clinging frantically to her husband. The cheek
buried in his breast felt the lurch and leap of his pounding heart.
Manlike, he found courage in his woman's fright, but his hand quivered
upon her hair; she heard his shaken voice saying:

"There, there, Maw, it's all over."

When he dared to open his eyes he was blinded and dazed like the
stricken Saul. When he could see again he found the world unchanged. The
sky was still there, and still azure; the clouds swam serenely; the road
still poured down from the unaltered hills. He tried to laugh; it was a
sickly sound he made.

"I guess that was what the fellow calls a bolt from the blue. I've often
heard of 'em, but it's the first I ever saw. No harm's done, Maw,
except to Susan's feelings. She's pickin' herself up out the dust and
hurryin' home like two-forty. I guess the concussion must have knocked
her over."

The old woman, her heart still fluttering madly, rose from her knees
with the tremulous aid of the old man and opened her eyes. She could
hardly believe that she would not find the earth an apocalyptic ruin of
uprooted hills. She breathed deeply of the relief, and her eyes ran
along the remembered things as if calling the roll. Suddenly her eyes
paused, widened. Her hand went out to clutch her husband's arm.

"Look, Paw! The oaks, the oaks!"

The lightning h

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