Chapter III: Part 3

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 manuscript 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 manuscript 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"

Saturday 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 space 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 God'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 God'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 God 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 God--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 God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing or chastisement, 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 shirts 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.

They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church--being a brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.

Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million, his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement, where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma" set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.

We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day, a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful, masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold, unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen," and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association, and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.

And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times: whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman, that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.

It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her. From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming for the best job in town--the position of cashier and stenographer for the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs. Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he, too, saw what Morrison saw--which was nothing at all, except a man standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get you!"

The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw. But there is something in every human creature--a survival of our jungle days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The volcano was beginning to smoke.

It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office, and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper out of the encyclopaedia, and making over her black silk the third time for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time--and the neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling of the domestic waters--his wife kept her grief to herself, and even when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what she knew.

A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed. The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.

The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion, gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came. "Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go, told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes, with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride, but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods stores, giggling with the men clerks--a picture of sin that made men wet their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal, without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as the years went by.

So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by our people. And when the big house went up--a palace for a country town, though it only cost John Markley $25,000--he, who had been so reticent about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that the town would have something in the way of a house for public gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs. Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved, gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the third story.

It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use." The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his sunlight.

If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs. Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.

All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied, high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house. The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab--what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"

Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think, and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers, and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never accepted. And the town grinned.

At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants' Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives, who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up the fight for his old place on the school board.

The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day, and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it. Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then, and he had lashed himself into seventy.

However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted. She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But as the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants said--whenever the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner scheme.

So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.

One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy of the _Mexican Herald_ containing the news of his boy's death in Vera Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember him--maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful figure as he dragged himself out of the office--so stooped and weazened, and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me, anyway."

The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town, who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.

Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him, and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering--generally where there was much beer, and many risque things said, and the women were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.

One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and, in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him, rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm. Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your fist at me!"

Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John Markley upstairs to his bed.

It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office, where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A thousand times she has counted it.

To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town--out beyond Main Street, which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices--the town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving flowers all through the picture.

There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors--show streets we may as well frankly call them--and one of these leads down a wide, handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last winter one came who converted Dan Gregg--once Governor, but for ten years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained how matter had probably evolved from some one form--even the elements coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God, moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through, or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we broke up and left the office--Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost souls in the night.

VIII

"A Bundle of Myrrh"

One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics, family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him, showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.

The only person in town who knows all of our kinology--and most of that in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study--is "Aunt" Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has spread from them to the rest of the population.

She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history, and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married, and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of '60.

Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife--as she called it--and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled "Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out, and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.

Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington. Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front room and reads the book-reviews in the _Delineator_, thinks that she is cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's turkey, which was not to their discredit--everyone was poor in those days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it, until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as 'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say: 'Now _why_ do you suppose papa enjoys it?--We just can't get him to give it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't say anything against her for the world."

Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of bacon--streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down--it is this blessed place. Crowds?--why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds. The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't dance in the same set."

Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:

"Oh, child, you needn't look at me--I did both; it depended on who was looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke. "Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games. It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."

In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it, they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not heard. Aunt Martha continued:

"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots--either go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made up along church lines--except we poor Methodists and Baptists--we have to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going after us."

Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on: "Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick houses, it's all up with them--they are old married folks, and the next step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies in the society of this town."

After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of the same kind of mud.

"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work and sent the washing out for a year or more."

The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the daguerreotypes--quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture--her husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome boy--quite the beau of the State when we were married--Judge of the District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed youth in a captain's uniform--a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying: "You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation--as Emerson says."

Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's head.

When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he went away--thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home again, as one from the dead--all uncertain of the past and unfitted for the future.

And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way. She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.

One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of passion the words came forth:

"As I lay my heart on your dead heart,--Douglas, Douglas, Douglas,
tender and true----"

Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.

The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and out of the gate.

IX

Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary

No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our town--generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question, even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the opposing side.

Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good many times--every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office--that whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at six o'clock, the General swings the _Statesman_ into line against it. If he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years; and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could see that justification in the _Statesman_'s position. To us it seemed merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us more tolerant of his shortcomings.