In Our Town Part 3

"Let's go home," s.h.i.+vered Larmy. They started north, which was the short way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No, let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and it's dark down there."

And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on without words.

V

The Coming of the Leisure Cla.s.s

We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of Beverly Amidon, our leisure cla.s.s consisted of Red Martin, the gambler, the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and, excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town, and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made him easily the "gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on and the mould of form" not only in our little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well fixed."

[Ill.u.s.tration: And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society]

But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the society column Sat.u.r.day without him, for he was a continuous social performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas, full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and when under that gala facade he came tripping into the office in his white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business, would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud."

To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so sarcastic! I have a little item for you."

The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with one hand--and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd a.s.sembled for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls, before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real devilish.

He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he gave a j.a.panese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself in the church where he was accustomed to pa.s.s the plate on Sundays. Miss Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of the Ministerial Alliance.

The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coa.r.s.e.

One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.

Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes, and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along, telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families and its week-end house-parties.

The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food Baby?"

But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a young woman's waist.

"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young man who will put his arm around a girl will go further--yes, Miss Larabee--much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and shook it at the awful thought.

Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:

"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"

He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.

He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the autumn, and checkers in the winter.

That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country Club--so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.

For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office.

Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted, "but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family, through reduced circ.u.mstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly a.s.sociated with people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as I do, that it is far more refres.h.i.+ng socially to partake of the gracious hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an account of the wedding.

In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their s.h.i.+rt-sleeves in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.

In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure cla.s.s will be obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work at four o'clock. Those were great days--"the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome."

VI

The Bolton Girl's "Position"

When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing committee of the town council--and she found ways to make them ask if we couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed, she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a name for herself.

She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that John Jones of Lebo--that is to say, red John, as distinguished from black John--or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie, "other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X; they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of mobs"--to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes--"others, with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"--and she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity--"but in our little local paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for suns.h.i.+ne cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way, so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is good for ten dollars of our money every Sat.u.r.day night.

Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a chance! It would be just lovely--simply grand, and she knew she could do it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that made her quiver with antic.i.p.ation. Whereupon she went out and came back in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty--then it is that entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said: "You'll never make anything out of her--she's a handholder! When a girl begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue]

But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We explained that what we wanted was short items--two or three lines each--little references to home doings; something telling who has company, who is sick, who is putting s.h.i.+ngles on the barn or an "L" on the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so pa.s.sionately that it seemed as though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.

The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her--give her something to do--she was sure she could show us how well she could do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table, said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League convention.

Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She said that she so longed for intellectual companions.h.i.+p that she felt sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a s.h.i.+rtwaist Madonna.

But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle through my blood like wine. I know I could write them--such sublime things--but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to her highest ideal, so she set them a task--and, oh, a lot more about what they did; I haven't thought that out--but anyway she married the red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."

No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coa.r.s.e when one looks at it closely.

We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M.

B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their business to a.s.sume a courts.h.i.+p. They should know that there are souls on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a subscriber."

The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon--pink and blue and white and yellow--in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same pa.s.sionate fervour on her hemst.i.tching and tucking that she had wasted on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."

The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from Maybelle and a tightly-rolled ma.n.u.script tied with blue baby-ribbon. In the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up her own wedding--recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte in letters." We handed the ma.n.u.script to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"

VII

"By the Rod of His Wrath"

Sat.u.r.day afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit, after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street, where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity drifting through s.p.a.ce by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."

The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names, and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how G.o.d's rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth G.o.d's while to sort us over for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of G.o.d at all, but the prejudice of the neighbours.

When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we have generally ended by wondering whether G.o.d--or whatever one cares to call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether G.o.d moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing or chastis.e.m.e.nt, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him, it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.

Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year, which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and grey-eyed, whose wife always made his s.h.i.+rts and, being a famous cook in town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"

it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties came--one girl went to California and the boy to South America;--and when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures--which is almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours--he and his wife were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.