Chapter XII: Introduction: I (11)

She could hear them at Gillyport: “Well, they say Honest Tansy Snow opened up his mouth at last, and the man’s a spellbinder; vow he is.” And at Barnstable: “They knew him, and they knew he meant it; he ain’t the kind to spout for spoutin’ sake, Banker Snow ain’t. And they do say there was a good many noses blowed there toward the end.”

But Elsie knew more than that. Piecing it together in her astute mind, from a hint here, an allusion there, a slip of somebody’s tongue or pen, she knew a thing that only three men in the Congressional District happened yet to know. And this was that “the party,” what with the chill of old blood and the heat of bad blood, was secretly in a bad way indeed; that it wanted a doctor, and wanted one quickly--with the autumn elections coming forward, and a member of Congress to be sent to Washington. No veteran; no silver-trumpeting old war-horse. No, a new name, a fresh fame, a clean slate.

“And where, oh, where,” thought Elsie, “where will the lightning strike?”

Selectman? Selectman of a village? That was why she smiled. Since Barlow Atkins left Congress in 1884 people in Urkey had almost forgotten that an islander could sit under the dome in Washington. “The biggest man in this town.” She remembered the young Tansy standing up straight in London Lane. Well, she’d see.

One afternoon in mid-July the Knights came over in the steamer _Senator Bates_ for their annual “time,” a clambake at Blue Goat Cove in the evening and the sail back home by moonlight later on. When they had marched the length of the shore street behind their band and got a start for the cove, they took half the population with them, but they left three of their own number behind.

The sail was all right for these three, but they weren’t much on clambakes. They’d rather loaf around the old town, looking at the houses. Perhaps they were interested in architecture. Or perhaps it was lightning-rods. They were Mr. Claude Byram of Gillyport, Captain Charlie Slocum of Barnstable, and ex-Senator Bates himself, and they were the three men in the district who knew what Elsie knew. As they strolled they talked. They talked about Henry Poor, the young lawyer in Provincetown, who, unheard of a year ago, had just won the Province-land suit for the Commonwealth. They talked of the new man who was making such a name for himself as head of the Highmarket Academy--a scholar--no taint of politics there. And once or twice, lingering near the end of the Brick Walk, “Well, here’s where _he_ lives,” they temporized. “What do we say?”

But they couldn’t seem quite to say. They had to talk it all over again. Six o’clock passed. They had a snack at Dow’s place, and then it was seven, and then it was eight. Elsie Snow wasn’t the woman to wait forever. It was in the drug store, where they had stopped for cigars, that she brought them to earth.

“Captain Slocum, as I live! And _Mr._ Byram! And--_not_ Senator _Bates_! Well, I declare, who’d have thought to find _you_ drifting around our little town, and without a soul to manage for you? I give you my word----”

She gave them her word it was an outrage, and that even if there wasn’t a committee of welcome, there was a home that would be honored by their presence, and a fresh lemon layer-cake, and a drop of rhubarb wine, put down the year she and Tansy were married. And Tansy _would_ be tickled.

It seemed providential; seemed to help to clear their minds. When they had arrived, most easily, most pleasantly, at the foot of the Snow steps, they slackened pace and let their hostess go on in ahead.

She made it simple for them. “I’ll run on and see Tansy’s fit to be looked at; he’s that much of a home body, he’s probably in slippers now.”

“I guess, Mrs. Snow,” the Senator called after her, spokesman for the three, “I guess you can tell Snow _we’ll_ be tickled to see _him_.”

All the woman could think, and that over and over, was, “This is the greatest day in Urkey’s history.”

Tansy, hearing voices, was half-way upstairs. She bustled him up the other half, the news on her tongue, but then it was too enormous to tell.

“Get into your blacks, and _hurry_,” she bade him; “there’s company.”

As she turned and swept downstairs again to put the company at its ease with ash-trays and cake and rhubarb wine, the chosen of fortune felt along the wall for the chamber door; with a sigh. Why wouldn’t people let him be?

Once inside, he started toward the window, of habit a quarter-century old. Then he remembered he was to hurry. Company. Who? Why had there been that note in her voice? Perhaps at last it was somebody about the autumn meeting and the Selectmanship. Oh, Tansy knew. He never let on, but he wasn’t a fool And he wanted it--as he’d never wanted anything. Why? For the name? Yes, in a way. More than anything in life, he wanted to be able to go to that window and throw back the taunt of that leering eye of light.

“Yah! Take a look at me--the man that’s trusted above all others! Selectman! The biggest man in this island and this town! You, and your ‘moth-millers,’ your dirty, filthy nobodies, look at me! Yah!”

But he had been told to hurry. In that funny way--hurry! It was the Selectmanship! As good as done already. Because he had been an upright citizen and an honest man. Here he was at the window, after all.

It wasn’t a “Yah!” It wasn’t a sound, nothing formed, just a formless outlashing of a life that was tired in secret; secretly, prematurely old. Then, as he looked again, he lifted a hand and drew it across his eyes.

“Fog coming in. Won’t have much of a moonlight sail, that crowd.”

He removed his hand and stared. There was no fog. The sky was as clear as glass and full of stars. He put his other hand on the bedpost. The bedpost was solid, anyway.

“Good God! What’s--wh-what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Elsie couldn’t keep them occupied forever, even with cake and rhubarb wine. Minutes are minutes to such men. When fifteen had passed, and Slocum had looked at his watch twice, she went to the stairs and called. Then, laughing, “What would you do with such a man?” she marched up to find him. The bedroom was dark, and he wasn’t there. She went to the spare chamber, to the west chamber, down the back way to the kitchen. She returned to their bedroom; he _must_ be there.

She felt on the bed, the chair; she stood staring out of the window.

She shut her eyes and opened them again. A curious uneasiness, having nothing to do with the company downstairs, seemed to lay hold of her.

“Fog,” she said to herself.

She turned around. What was the matter with this room tonight? Why was everything so--so--so wrong--so lost--so funny? She touched the bedpost. It was solid enough. She glanced toward the window again.

She laughed. She saw what was wrong, and it was ridiculous. For two dozen years, without knowing it, she had depended on seeing a light there when the weather was clear. When it was thick, there was no light; no light, it must be thick. And here it was clear, and no light. Absurd, but it had given her the jumps.

That shows what habit is.

Rid of the spell, she remembered what she was about. Her lips whiter and whiter with anger, running on frantic tip-toe, she searched the house.

Coming through the parlor she was all cheer. “Tansy’ll be down directly,” she promised them, and, slipping out of the door, she was gone.

Time passed. Once or twice they heard a voice calling “Tansy! Tansy!” off in the distance, among the houses and lanes.

They got to talking. “You can’t tell me this fellow Poor hasn’t made a big impression, especially down-Cape.” “Yes, but he’s a lawyer, and that means politician to lots of people. Now this man McDowell over at the Academy----”

When Mrs. Snow reappeared it was awkward. They didn’t want to seem to run, but there was a man Byram ought to see, and there was the boat.

They got out backward, Slocum saying: “We’re right sorry not to have seen Snow,” and the old Senator adding a word of kindness: “The talk’s been up our way that your husband’s slated for the next Selectman over here. I’m glad of that; he ought to make a good one, from all I hear.”

Elsie stood staring at the closed door when they were gone.

“Selectman!” she whispered. “_Selectman!_”

All the poison of all the years came pouring out. “I’ll _see_ him Selectman! I’d kill myself first! He shall stay a stick till the day of his death, he shall. A dumb, stupid stick--stick-in-the-mud! _Ohhhh!_”

In the kitchen of the house on the Stone Fold they were playing pachisi down on the floor. The board was an old one, held together with court-plaster; most of the men were buttons, and there were only two dice left. Despite these defects, however; despite the two youngest, two babies, creeping in continually and grabbing and getting slapped; and despite the paralytic old shepherd in the chair behind the towel rack, who wanted attending to now and then--despite these handicaps they played with a quiet concentration, watching each the moves of all the others, alert for cheating, a gamin shrewdness in the eyes narrowed under the forelocks of tangled hair. It was an old game with them; yet tonight there was something new about it; as new as though it had been another game altogether, or the same game transported to heaven, where all is light.

“Better’n that old lantern!”

“Better’n two lanterns!”

“Better’n _ten_ lanterns!”

So, from time to time, between moves, carried away afresh by realization, they joined and gloated.

“Better’n a _hundred_ lanterns!”

The dogs were barking outside. An old one from under the stove sniffed toward the door, bristling. The players paid no attention, but the grandfather began to screech at the top of his lungs: “Shan’t have it! Shan’t! Ain’t nobody no decency? With _her_ there? Etta, you tell ’em go way. It’s an unholy sin--comin’ round a night like tonight--that’s what it is! Etta!”

“Shut your face!” Etta threw at him as, without haste, she got up from the floor. She was a woman of twenty-odd, the mother of one of the infants underfoot. “Remember, you, it’s my next move!” she threatened the others; then again to the old man: “Won’t you shut up, f’ gracious sake!” and finally to the door: “Well, well, ’tain’t locked, is it? _Come in!_”

The door opened. Those on the floor sat up straight. Etta retreated a step, taken aback to see a stranger.

“What d’y’ want?” she muttered.

The man kept standing there, staring at her; staring at her squat, strong-muscled figure, her lowering face, her hair, thick and matted about her head, the color of unwashed brown sheep. She didn’t like it.

“Who are ye, and what d’y’ want? Y’ dumb?”

But the old shepherd began to screech now: “_I_ know ’im! I seen ’im many’s the time over to the village. I see ye, Mr. Snow. I know ye well, Banker Snow. Well, I vow! Draw out a chair for Mr. Snow, Etta. Florry! Frank! Scabby! What a parcel o’ dummies! Git a chair for Banker Snow.”

“What d’y’ want?” Etta persisted, unmoved.

Snow lifted a hand and passed it down over his face, which looked drawn and moist. Like a man talking in his sleep, he asked: “What’s wrong with Donna?”

That seemed to loosen all tongues at once. The kitchen was as full of voices, of a sudden, as it was of the yellow glare.

“Donna’s dead.”

“Donna’s in there; wanta see ’er?”

“Ma went sick and she got worse and died off.”

“Donna ain’t boss no longer, she ain’t.”

“We got the lamp down.”

“We gone and got the lamp on ’er now, for _all_ ’er.”

“At last we got the lamp.”

Snow seemed to see the lamp for the first time. Like a man walking in his sleep he went to look at it. It was worth looking at. It stood on its own stand, a good four feet high; its finely swelled reservoir had variegated chasings of brass and nickel all over it; it had an extra-size chimney without a nick, and two wicks, one within the other. A lamp for any parlor in the world. All the parts that could be rubbed were as bright as a new one in the store. It had been looked after, like new; the price-tag, even, had never been taken off. It hung from the stem of the regulator, and the mark was still legible on it amongst the spotting of flies. Tansy read it.

“$6.”

Some folks have a God of Mercy. And some have a terrible God.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Copyright, 1925, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1926, by Wilbur Daniel Steele.

THE HOME TOWN[17]

By MILTON WALDMAN

(From _The London Mercury_)

High, high up in the spire of a New York office building (higher than the forty storeys which is the maximum that the foreigner’s imagination, even when abetted by observation, seems able to compass) sat a depressed and lonely little man. He was lonely because he was alone, and unaccustomed to so being; his present occupation was to discover why he was depressed.

The little man was a very important person. On the door by which one entered one might read in reverse, “Powell, Prescot and Shipton, Publicity and Advertising Engineers. Henry J. Powell, Pres.” Though the letters appeared black through the frosted pane, on the other side they were bright gold. If, after entering one looked over Mr. Powell’s head through the window beyond, where the streets and roofs of New York extended to the south, one saw a few of the things for which he was celebrated. Not many hundred yards out of that window is the famous _Lesson in Economy_, the masterpiece commissioned by the Bungalow Savings and Trust Company. It is an animated electric sign, which at night shows the reception of depositors’ money at a window of the bank, its passage to a huge transparent safe wherein the piles of currency and checks undergo a metamorphosis into bricks, lumber, bathtubs, and shrubbery, and fly away to a garden spot in the suburbs to arrange themselves into neat little bungalows of an exact pattern with rows of neighbours of similar origin. At the conclusion of the performance, which requires about three minutes, all lights go out save those in the most recent bungalow, on the steps of which are seen a man, a woman, a small boy and a dog, above the ruby caption “You can Do This Too!”

A quarter of a mile further on is visible the radiantly coloured _tableau vivant_ of the Searchlight Stores, entitled _Nothing Too Good for Milady_, which, around the charming figure of a modish young woman, exhibits, in smaller pictures, the Searchlight’s myrmidons stalking tigers, leopards and cobras’ skins in the jungles of India, ostriches’ feathers in the deserts of Africa, caterpillars’ skeins in a sleepy garden in Japan; one beholds the pearl divers in the shimmering waters of the Orient, and chained gangs of Kaffirs plucking diamonds out of the obdurate rock in Rhodesia. But a few steps further, on the other side of the street, is the striking _Don’t Be Miserable When Enjoying Yourself_, which presents an invalid and her nurse contentedly reading novels while being wafted over the worst of roads in a monotone motor, whilst on a parallel and greatly superior road a competing car and its occupants are being gradually disintegrated. The editor of a magazine for which Mr. Powell had once written an autobiographical article had presented his contributor as “The Monarch of the Upper Reaches of American Cities,” a just, but inadequate tribute to his manifold activities.

For Mr. Powell was more than a mere creator of striking advertisement displays. He was, in his way, a philosopher, and in the modern sense a poet as well. In the article referred to he expounds the philosophy of publicity as it has never been done before. He demonstrates clearly and succinctly that publicity, like all the best poetry, is a form of self-expression; only the advertiser, instead of informing the reader of the state of his private feelings, often an awkward affair to the latter, or proclaiming the beauty of Nature’s handiwork, which the public is well able to observe and judge for itself, reveals the merit of the thing which his (the advertiser’s) creative urge, and perhaps Fate, have set him to producing. Publicity thus redounds to the common weal in two ways: by holding the advertiser to a high standard and by elevating the taste of the public to a level which it could never attain without the explanatory counsels of the expert makers of the things the public required. For example, the manufacturer of rubber heels, by illustrating to the pedestrian reader the advantages of his conception, makes a promise, sets for himself an ideal which it is both his duty and pleasure to live up to; while the pedestrian, if not thus made aware of the maker’s ideal, would either be sapping his vitality by continuing to bustle about on leather heels, or his purse, by ignorantly satisfying himself with inferior rubber ones. The article concludes:

The world can’t _guess_ the work you’ve done,
’Tis _you_ must let it know,
’Twill give you then the prize you’ve won,
And, giving it, will glow.

The photograph of the author, which accompanied the article was at first sight disappointing. One anticipated that a man who had done big things would keep his appearance in harmony with his achievements; but instead of the burly shoulders, broad face, square jaw, thin lips and aquiline nose which the reader expected to see, he was confronted with the portrait of a round, stoop-shouldered little man, whose black hair was brushed back from his forehead in Beethoven fashion, whose eyes were deep-set and speculative rather than keen, and whose chin violated all the canons by merely rounding off in a perfunctory way the boyish contours of his cheeks. He wore a black coat of ministerial cut and a flowing black tie. Yet, to those who knew him, Powell’s appearance was the best possible index to his character. They were astounded by his miracles, but stood in awe of his dreams.

Now, for the first time in forty years of activity, he felt lonely and depressed. His success, achieved always in the company of men and by dint of untiring effort, had hitherto left no room for either emotion. There was always something to do, somebody to see, at best and worst some pleasant creative vision to think about. But a week since, business being dull, his associates had departed in a body and gone their separate ways to observe the ritual of Old Home Week. This latter, a ceremony springing jointly from native sentimentality and respect for humble beginnings, requires that the men in the cities who have made their way in the big world should retrace their steps to the towns and villages which have given them birth and join in tribute to its virtues. All the absent are welcome, but the occasion is dedicated rather to the successful than to the prodigal sons.

So Prescot and Shipton and the younger partners, Wynn, Jacobson, Bottinelli, Senkowsky, and the rest took leave, and now, five days later, the head of the firm sat in his studio of gleaming mahogany, leather and brass, perusing their exuberant accounts of the various local festivities. Prescot wrote from a little desert village in the Southwest of a Chamber of Commerce dinner in his honour, of a political conference for the selection of a congressional candidate in which his opinion was deferred to, of being asked to lead the subscription towards a War Memorial in the public square. Wynn, in his best “copy” manner, chronicled a round of rustic frolics in Minnesota. Bottinelli sent him a clipping from a newspaper in a Southern California town, which related the installation of a stained glass window in the church where the young Italian had been christened and in which he now made the dedicatory address. And so on, each in his turn contributing to his chief’s forlorn sense of being out of it all. He had few friends besides associates, and they were absent on similar missions, as he knew from a week of solitary luncheons and dinners. It was a dreadful thing, he reflected, for a man to have no interests outside his profession. These others had something to carry them on, to look forward to. It made life more complete, more harmonious, to have the roots of one’s aspirations in one’s beginnings, to wish to honour one’s past by means of one’s future.

He looked back and recalled the early years from which his manhood had so completely divorced itself. Born in a village in southeastern England, he had emigrated with his father, long since dead, to New York. Many other images now intervened between himself and the one he was trying to reconstruct, the dormant blur of red roofs and green fields which was Edginden as he had last seen it. Gradually the focus became clearer and he saw a valley and two intersecting roads which wound their yellow lengths rapidly away over the surrounding hills and disappeared. At their intersection was a gray church steeple, a few shops clustered in two rows on the north-and-south road, some grey, some yellow, some burnt red, a few timbered or brick houses more openly spaced, then the fields beyond, with the white wall or tiled gable of a farmhouse revealed through the trees--old, old trees, sycamores, tall oaks, chestnuts in full white bloom; he wondered what an Old Home Week would be like in Edginden.

He doubted that it would be a success. Very few of Edginden’s sons went away. Those that did seldom came back, never for the purpose of paying a tribute of sentiment to their birthplace. Besides, there was little that Edginden wanted, very little indeed. It grumbled extensively, but seemed only in need of those things which Providence alone could supply. He tried to picture himself returning to join with other absent ones in receiving welcome and admiration, in dispensing bounty of cheer and money. He found that he could not even recall the faces of any absent ones, or in fact of any one likely to be still alive. Of what good----

He went to the window. Over the roofs and spires of New York he could see the Atlantic glittering in the setting sun. A slim silvery object was moving rapidly out into the bay, its ribbon of smoke settling slowly down on the unruffled water behind it. He unconsciously put his hands behind his back, in Napoleon fashion, and narrowed his eyes. It was worth the trying, anyway, he decided; at least he knew that nothing else would ease the new-born ache in his heart.

* * * * *

London pleased and puzzled him. It gave him an impression, first, of vast size; through mile upon mile of small brick houses, one just like the other, the train raced to Waterloo Station--so many miles of repetition; he felt as one does in a semi-dream, when time loses all proportion; only his watch showed him that the row he was seeing at any instant was an actual extension in space, not in his imagination, of all the others he recalled seeing. The bustle of the station, huge and ugly, the ceaseless, punctuated buzz of queer vocal inflections that awoke old echoes, the enormous taxicab, more like a private car, save for its dirt and decrepitude, and again rows of houses as like as peas. It was endless--infinitely larger than New York, with its variety and its immovable water boundaries. It was late at night when he finished his dinner, and he was too tired to leave the hotel for further investigation, but he fell asleep with the curious reflection that all comparisons he had seen or heard of between New York and London were the exact reverse of the truth ... the latter was infinitely the greater in its mass of teeming life, but rough, inchoate, not nearly so finished as the former.

Next day confirmed his impression. He sauntered about, examining everything attentively, minutely, reconstructively, he might have said, the while unconscious of the curious glances he attracted; the broad black hat which he affected intensified the peculiar inward concentration of his eyes and enhanced the contrast with the youthful, indecisive curve of the lips and jaw above the negligé collar and flowing black tie. What opportunities to remake this enormous London, to shape this formless monster’s endless possibilities! The buildings seemed stunted, totally inadequate to house the world-famous businesses whose clumsy signs he saw on them. He found his London correspondents, a firm of indisputable skill, importance and solvency, in a side street, occupying a narrow house four storeys high, and entered by a former servants’ doorway; its floors sagged, its stairways creaked, and no amount of paint and electricity could raise it to his conception of what was due to the business it housed. After long search he stumbled by mere chance on the offices of a periodical with which he annually spent thousands, to find its affairs placidly going on in a converted stable in an old courtyard. The narrow streets offered, on a larger scale, the tangle of horse, vehicle and pedestrian to be seen in any American farm town overcrowded by market day. The electric signs of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square which would have caused his associates to guffaw, brought a frown to his forehead. So many people, so much riches--and how carelessly employed.

Before long he began to wish that he could start at the beginning and put some system into this amiable, haphazard metropolis. His desire was extremely practical. He knew it would not do to take the whole thing down and build it up again on carefully planned lines. That would be too expensive, and he was aware that there might be prejudices against so drastic a proceeding. He merely desired earnestly to use in a proper manner the material now being so sinfully wasted. As an instance, one couldn’t straighten the Thames, of course, useful as that might be; but one could put to better purpose the many open spaces of its bridge-heads to relieve their uninformative blackness at night--although in this respect he saw immature efforts at improvement. He wanted to knock out the dingy shop windows that prevailed everywhere, even in the West End, and replace them with something worthy of Fifth Avenue.

Even outside the question of rebuilding, on small scale or large, Powell was pained by the neglect of opportunities that fairly shrieked at him for recognition and adoption. To disregard them indicated either lack of vision in the English, or downright sloth. Perhaps it was due to the race’s well-known self-satisfaction. But what just a little imagination could do. He recalled with what eagerness he had undertaken the publicity for a New York restaurant which boasted seventy-five years of active life. “The stock which conquered the West and fought the Civil War found sustenance at this historic hostelry. Lincoln ate here while on his arduous campaign for the Presidency; it was Grant’s first stopping place after being banquetted in all the palaces of the world. Three-quarters of a century’s experience in the polite art of entertaining ensures you those amenities which, to the epicure, are _sine qua non_ when dining out.” And here almost hourly he saw restaurants scattered from Richmond to the City whose weatherbeaten signs diffidently proclaimed three hundred years of uninterrupted cookery. What could they not boast of in the way of association, of rich material for justifiable _réclame_. Without doubt there were still extant tables in those places under which Cromwell and Wellington had put their boots, pegs on which plumed Cavalier and stiff Puritan hats had hung side by side. A complacent smile lingered for a moment as he recalled how neatly he had effected the sale of Schindler, the antique dealer’s, two colonial chairs, in which Clay and Webster were supposed to have sat while visiting a famous Concord wit. _The Seats of the Mighty_ was the neat caption by which the attention of newspaper readers was attracted to the photograph of the chairs convincingly occupied by the shades of the departed statesmen, and within twenty-four hours a millionaire had purchased them for ten thousand dollars.

He made profound calculations on the revenue Westminster Abbey would derive from the proper dissemination of facts regarding its peculiar relation to the nation’s great dead; a quantity of judiciously prepared, wisely distributed newspaper paragraphs illustrating in word and picture the glory of _The Fane of Fame_, as he mentally entitled it, would probably, in the course of ten years or so, enable it to double its available space for coronations, etc. He wandered about the Tower with a guide and a compatriot, and received the latter’s cordial agreement to a suggestion that a special ’bus line from Charing Cross would not only make the great monument more accessible, but would soon pay for itself if the vehicles were made in the form of tumbrils (he was not quite sure whether sixteenth-century England employed tumbrils, but that could be adjusted later), and the driver and the conductor attired, say, as Walter Raleigh and a headsman.

He left Victoria Station in the morning, having purchased half-a-dozen magazines to beguile the journey, but as the train issued into open country, which he had previously traversed in the dark, he forgot them in an unexpected interest in the countryside. In a very few minutes he had gained a more favourable impression of British advertising capacities than a week in London had given him. The signs were, indeed, fewer to the mile than in the best parts of the United States, but they were undeniably on the increase. From a professional point of view he found them sufficiently large and colourful, and on the whole well designed as regards employment of space. His only criticism was directed at their literary weakness. Here, for instance, was a blue background, a red and white tin, and the legend “Buy Tucker’s Tinned Spinach--it saves Time.” The alliteration was not bad, but the idea was primitive, an archaism in advertising. Here, a mile further along, was a merry Roundhead in a green coat offering the passer-by a glass of liquid with the words “I drank it in 1650--it’s even better today.” That was all right to begin with, he thought, his lips pursed like an infant’s in doubt, but more could be made of it. He reflected a moment, and smiled happily to himself as the vision of the board repainted flashed on him:

We distilled our first whisky in 1650.
We have averaged 10,000 cases a year since.
No customer of ours ever voted for Prohibition.

It was only a rough sketch, but it pleased him, and he looked forward to his mission with content.

He arrived at Edginden before he was aware, and for a moment looked about him in bewilderment. What had been an adventurous descent forty years ago had passed unnoticed in the railway carriage, and the little grey railroad station failed to fit into the picture. He passed down the stone platform, noticing coloured posters inviting one to exotic south coast watering places he had never heard of, engaged a lonely Ford and in a quarter of an hour found himself at the Unicorn. As he stepped out of the car the smoke of the railroad train was just fading into the trees at the brow of the hill to the west. It vanished, and Edginden seemed to appear from behind it unchanged from half-a-century before. The Unicorn himself, imperceptibly faded, was pawing with his forelegs one side of the shield-shaped sign from the top of which his horn protruded. Through the low curtained bow-window was still faintly visible the portrait of a rubicund gentleman in wig and red coat; the only sounds might have been echoes from the past--chickens flapping their wings in a nearby yard, the rumble of a distant cart, the creak and drip of water being drawn from a well. Suddenly he heard a winnowing machine; he lifted his head, detected a faint odour of petrol, looked about inquiringly, and pushed the green door of the inn.

An ample, white-haired old lady gave him an unsmiling welcome, ignored his request for a room with a bath, informed him that dinner would be cold and served at half-past seven, and disappeared. A red-faced maid, in black calico dress and white apron immediately issued from another door and led the way up a flight of narrow, steep and noisy stairs. Her long legs moved so rapidly that his short ones were unable to keep up, and he only found his room by searching around until he perceived his black patent leather bag on a bed almost as high as himself. The maid had gone, but reappeared several moments later with a pitcher of hot water, following her own knock so closely that he had no time to recover the substantial portion of his garments he had already removed.

The window of his room gave on the hills; for a long time he stood regarding their smooth rectangular patches of emerald and bronze; his eye followed the road past fence and house and barn to the purple of the crest; and a feeling of forlornness came over him compared to which the lonesomeness of the week in New York was vague and feeble. It being due merely to the absence of people he cared about, their return sooner or later would have made it right. For this there was no cure; it came out of the essential isolation in which all human beings live, that terrible isolation against which men devise the most fantastic activities, in order to avoid facing it. It was like his first illness after his mother’s death, when his pains and fears seemed to mean nothing to any one. He decided to go downstairs and have a drink with the landlady.

The latter had no objection to his drinking, but declined to join him. The bar was empty, it being outside of hours. He ordered a whisky and soda, and drank it slowly; he detested the stuff and was a teetotaller on principle, but lacked the courage to drink his favourite orange squash in this environment. Besides he realised that the latter was not an avenue to the sociability he craved.

“Nice place you have here,” he began.

“There’s worse,” she replied.

Not being in a position to debate this he began afresh.

“Do you get many Americans here?”

“Some. Are you an American?”

He warmed at this first indication of personal interest slight as it was. “Yes--that is, I live there. As a matter of fact, I was born in England.”

“Couldn’t tell it any more,” she commented, wiping up the counter and significantly setting out a fresh glass. “Which part?”

He had braced himself for this moment. “Right here, in Edginden,” he said, in the soft voice he reserved for the announcement of his most startling projects.

This time she was clearly interested. She scrutinised him carefully and said, “It’s queer I don’t remember you. I know everybody who has ever lived in these parts this sixty years.”

“My father was George Powell.”

She reflected an instant. “I remember,” she finally declared. “He was from Portsmouth and married Jacob Gunn’s girl; the old man set them up in a shop there, but it didn’t go and they came here to live on the farm. I remember when you were born; you were only a little fellow when your mother died and your father took you off to America.” She mused a moment. “Just fancy, you being Sarah Gunn’s boy.” In her abstraction she returned the glass to its place on the shelf behind her.

Thus was Powell welcomed home. In a general way his reception elsewhere resembled Mrs. Unicorn’s (This being the name by which he thought of the landlady). Those that remembered him as a boy, like those that did not, viewed him with curiosity as a tripper rather than as a son come home. When he gave an impressive sum toward the restoration of the church roof, which had for years bided this event, relying meantime on the slender revenue derived from the solicitation of a torn sheet of paper in the vestibule, he received a formal letter of thanks from a committee and a shy, grateful handshake from the rector, but neither mentioned his sentimental reason for the act, nor treated it as other than the gift of a whimsically-minded rich man.

The end of a week found him as far removed from the end of his mission as if he had never come. By now he had company to drink with him in the bar and most of the natives greeted him in the street, pointing him out as the donor of the large sum toward the church’s restoration; but any of this might have happened to any stranger. He wanted to be there as of right, to be at home while he remained, regretted as a departing son when he left. He realized that thus far he had moved little towards that happy goal. He had made no enduring impression; these people were as far from understanding the warm impulse he felt to pour out his energies in their behalf, to receive their cordial assurance of mutual bond and kinship, as he was from understanding how they found life permanently tolerable without electric light, gas or bathtubs. He wanted earnestly to plant some seed which would not only blossom into a thing of utility and beauty for Edginden, but would in its very nature prove to succeeding generations of its children that only one of themselves could have conceived the idea of it.

Numerous tentative projects floated through his brain, but the most favoured children of his imagination all seemed ill-suited to his purpose. The best, the only gift worthy of the name was the power of growth, and he could see no possibility of expansion in Edginden. He might set on foot tactfully a wide publicity campaign to set forth the unique advantages of the place, but he frankly doubted that it had any. There was no manufacturing, and no logical reason why any enterprising manufacturer should choose it for a site. He was reasonably certain that it would not, unlike the thriving small towns of America, buy up tracts of land and offer them gratis as an inducement. Nor could he conceive that the local squire, a stentorian fox-hunting giant who owned the land at both ends of the village, would sanction the placing of signboards, no matter how artistic, and for no matter what public purpose, in his domain. He was sure that these people wanted their town to grow, that was only human. But how to achieve it, how to overcome their dimly perceived prejudices and make them all pull together toward this end, for that he was beginning to despair of finding a solution.

Then, one day, he unexpectedly found it. He was passing Roger Martin’s shop and decided to drop in. Martin was his most intimate acquaintance in Edginden. Each vaguely remembered the other as a boyhood playmate, and each had a dislike of whisky, which drew them together in a corner of the Unicorn’s cosy pub. Martin had an unlimited curiosity about the New World, and Powell a tireless pleasure in gratifying it.

The shop, in a more pretentious locality, would have been called an antique shop. Here it served a more humble and daily need; though filled with quantities of old vases, pots, bowls, urns, cups and other household articles in copper, pewter and brass, with a fair sprinkling of old chairs, tables and chests in oak and walnut, its chief business was to supply Edginden homes, and particularly its kitchens, with the commonplace utensils necessary for containing and cooking. The sale of old things was subordinate to their mending, and to the making of new things.

Powell enjoyed watching almost any form of human activity, and found his place in Martin’s old wing armchair soothing; it was where he always sat while exchanging sentences with the latter between the agreeable strokes of hammer on copper. The place was silent, however, as he entered, and its owner was standing by his work-table, which was pushed against the rear windows of the shop, overlooking a tiny walled garden now abloom with red tulips and purple iris. Martin was a little man, smaller even than Powell; his grey hair was thin at the top, but thick, crisp and curly over his neck and ears; his distinguishing features were red, wrinkled cheeks which dimpled when he smiled, merry twinkling eyes, a disorderly white and black moustache, and prominent upper teeth. At the moment he was attentively examining a bronze vase, in the form of a cylinder imposed on the flattened top of a sphere. He nodded over his shoulder to his visitor.

“This has just come over from your country,” he said. “A lady who passed this way once and bought some of my things sent it to me from San Francisco to see if I could copy it. She wants to make them both into lamps. Isn’t it a beauty?” He lovingly fingered the dull patine of the bronze, lifting it in both hands.

Powell was impressed by something else, however. So this little fellow had a clientele extending to San Francisco. Strange. “Do you often sell things in America?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” responded the smith, still caressing the vase “I’ve a number now to go to New York and Boston. There are some of my things in India and Australia, too,” he added proudly. “Hardly a month passes without my getting an order from abroad.”

Powell remained silent, thinking rapidly. So there was an activity of Edginden with a fame beyond its confines. These bits of brass and copper were known and desired by folk living at the ends of the earth.

“Why do you keep such a small shop?” he demanded suddenly.

Martin set the vase down; it gave the deep-toned ring of the G string of a violin gently brushed in passing. “It’s bigger than I need now,” he said, turning round in surprise.

“But you could extend the business, couldn’t you? If you already have customers in San Francisco and Sydney, in New York and--” the alliteration failed him and he hurried on, “Why man, you could make a big thing of this.”

Martin had before this failed to follow the American’s mental flights; now he stood puzzled, his hands holding the shoulder-straps of his long blue apron, his head on one side like a sparrow’s, looking down on the other.

“But all that doesn’t keep me and Jim busy full time.” Jim, the assistant, was at this moment occupied in wheeling a crying infant up and down the walk in front of the shop, the while its mother was at the chemist’s two doors away. “I’ve had more work outside of Edginden this year than ever before, and I still have plenty of space and time to spare.”

“Yes, but listen, man!” Powell was in the full ecstasy of sudden inspiration. He got up and walked over to the other; his eyes seemed to come out of their shadowy retreat and were flashing. “Don’t you see that if there is a little demand for your stuff, you can make a big one? It isn’t as if you were limited to this place. Put your wares out into the world. Advertise! I’ll bet all I’ve got you can triple your business in a year and make it a hundred times as big in three. People are going in for the old-fashioned stuff. Why, I’ll do the job for you for nothing. I’ll make your shop and Edginden famous. This is the chance I’ve been looking for. Give me a free rein and Martin’s Brass and Copper will be known wherever English is spoken, and then some!” He was aflame with his vision. He saw himself at last in his proper rôle, his ordained relation to his native place.

“But how?” persisted the bewildered little shopkeeper. “If you just doubled the business it would be too big for me; I couldn’t do the work.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” snapped the other; then, lowering his voice and putting his hand on the other’s shoulder, continued, “Quantity production! That’s the answer. It’s my function in the world to show people how to sell large quantities of things. That’s efficiency, economy. It makes more and better things, and everybody happier. We’ll instal the proper equipment, and you will just watch and see that the thing’s done right. We’ll put up a model plant, get in outside labour--why man, can’t you see what this will mean to you and your town?”

But Martin’s troubled expression, instead of vanishing, became more anxious. “I don’t think you can make these things with machinery,” he explained plaintively, “I’ve made most of the metal utensils in the village myself, but sometimes they buy them outside, and very soon they are brought in for repair. Most often they are not worth the trouble. They are like that table in the garden--when Jim came to help me we were too busy to make one for him, so I had that one sent down from London. It’s no good after two years. You can see how the top is warped and the legs have gone to pieces. This one I’m using my grandfather made.”

The American cogitated a moment. “I don’t see that,” he affirmed presently. “Copper is copper, and brass is brass, and if you get the right material and see that it’s made right, you will have done your part of the job. You can turn out the same designs a thousand times faster, and give employment to a thousand more men. Can’t you see the difference it will make? We’ll get the railroad to run right into the town instead of three miles off--why we’ll put the place on the map!”

Martin became of a sudden very serious. “I--I’m not sure we want that. We had a hard time keeping the railroad out of here in the first place, and I’m afraid we couldn’t do with a lot of strangers. It would turn things upside down. I’ve always done my best to please the people here and I know what they like. And when I bought a bed from Sam Greene or clothes from Bartlett or medicine from Rollo Hines I knew they were giving me their best, just what _I_ wanted. We are sort of used to each other and understand each other. I don’t think we should get along so well if we had a lot of new people to deal with.” He was apologetic, diffident, eager to explain his position, but underneath, Powell felt, stubborn in his prejudices; for the first time he began to be slightly exasperated. Convinced not only of the worth of his intentions but of the soundness of the plan that had taken hold of him, feeling himself on the verge of bringing a great boon to Edginden, he was annoyed at the other’s failure to fall into step with him. He was already visualizing the miraculous, mushroom growth with which he was familiar, for which he had often been largely responsible, and the unlooked for opposition dumbfounded him. He had often had difficulty in selling an idea, in convincing people that they would get their money’s worth; he had never as yet encountered, even remotely, opposition to his underlying philosophy. It had never occurred to him that men might look otherwise on expansion. Martin, sweet of temper, and shy in manner, began to symbolise an obtuse, almost sullen unresponsiveness in the people he was so eager to serve. If only he could come to some common ground, if he could argue against objections he could understand. His hopes were being dashed to pieces on a rock so unsubstantial that he could not even see it.

“But what would the world be like if everybody--” he began, when the door opened and the proprietress of the Unicorn joined them, her parade to the back of the shop punctuated by the clatter of furniture and the toppling of metal ware. The aisle was narrow and irregular, Mrs. Unicorn very wide and quite direct in her progress. She carried in her hand a copper tea-kettle of unusual pattern, the spout coming from the top of the kettle and issuing through a large, graceful handle.

She ignored Powell and addressed Martin directly.

“Roger, that girl of mine has gone and smashed this kettle against the stove,” she said, exhibiting a gash in the fair copper surface. “Can you mend it?”

He took it from her and examined it carefully. A pathetic look of distress settled on his face. “I’ll try, Miriam,” he observed finally, “I shall let you know if I can’t.”

“Well, do it as soon as you can, and don’t let it cost too much,” she said pointedly, and took her departure.

As soon as she was out of the door Powell laughed. “Serve her right if you made her scrap this and sold her another kettle,” he remarked, “she’s tight as a vice.”

Martin did not reply for a moment. He continued to examine the kettle, real pain showing in his eyes. He put aside the vase from San Francisco, selecting some tools, lit his brazier. Finally he said to his companion, “I hope I can make this right. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever turned out of this shop.” He turned back to his work.

Powell’s smile faded. The three-coloured, full-page advertisement he had been inwardly contemplating, which was to blazon to the world “Edginden for Excellence--Martin’s Metalware is as durable and beautiful as the English village in which it was made” crumpled up and disappeared as if it had been dropped into a large fire. He pondered the other’s words a moment, noting keenly at the same time how he fondled the injured utensil. An expression of understanding crept slowly over his face, and he stole out softly without disturbing the absorbed craftsman.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Copyright, 1926, by Milton Waldman.

FIRE AND WATER[18]

By GLENWAY WESCOTT

(From _Collier’s Weekly_)

I

The sky rolled from side to side like an animal in pain, outstretched on the soft, saturated trees. Now and again there was a groan of thunder, and lightning flickered with a glitter of enormous eyes, rolling in their sockets.

I was driving back to my father’s farm from the village. The downpour beat on the buggy-top, splashing to the ground and spattering the rubber laprobe. I disliked the smell of the wet harness leather and the sweating horse, wishing to enjoy the sour fragrance of the vegetation half-floating, half-rooted, in the fields. The lantern hanging from the dashboard hollowed out a space in the darkness into which the rain poured as bright as tin.

As I crossed a small bridge the lantern-light fell for a moment on the dripping hat and red face of a man who was leaning against the cement rampart. It was a neighbor named George Stearns. Should I have stopped to give him a lift? He was less than half a mile from home; he would be drunk and troublesome, furthermore I should have had to wake his wife and daughter, while he alone would roll quietly into the hay-mow.

It was his custom to return from the village in this condition three or four nights in the week, always on foot, since his daughter Amelia would not let him take the horse. His drunkenness was proverbial, and every one who used that road had seen him stumbling through the underbrush, collapsing backwards into a ditch, or drawn up patiently out of the way of hoofs and wheels. Weather meant nothing to him; he dug his way through the drifts, lay in the mud, lurched into cold creeks, but always got home. He was well liked by his neighbors, who took a certain pleasure in pardoning a manly weakness, and praised his good nature whenever his bad habit was mentioned. One autumn, having swigged too frequently from a bottle behind a beam in the wagon-shed, he dropped his pitch-fork into the hopper of a threshing-machine, spoiling the blades which cut the twine; but after the owner had cursed and threatened, he was not even forced to pay for the damage.