In a Little Town Part 43

And she did! Took ten dollars from the hiding-place where she banked her wealth, and took the boy to an Oscawanna preacher, and telegraphed home that he was hers and she his and both each other's.

The news spread like oil ablaze on water. Mrs. Hippisley had consented to take lessons of Prue, but she had never dreamed of losing her eldest son to her. She and Serina had quite a "run-in" on the telephone.

William and the judge almost had a fight-out--and right on Main Street, too.

Each accused the other of fathering a child that had decoyed away and ruined the life of the other child. Both were so scorched with helpless wrath that each went home to his bed and threatened to bite any hand that was held out in comfort. Judge Hippisley had just strength enough to send word to poor Olive that she was fired.

XVI

The next news came the next day. Oscawanna had been famished for a sight of the world-sweeping dances. It turned out in mult.i.tudes to see the famous Carthage queen in the new steps. The opera-house there had not held such a crowd since William J. Bryan spoke there--the time he did not charge admission. According to the Oscawanna _Eagle_: "This enterprising city paid one thousand dollars to see Peerless Prue Pepperall dance with her partner Otto Hipkinson. What you got to say about that, ye scribes of Carthage?"

Like the corpse in Ben King's poem, Judge Hippisley sat up at the news and said: "What's that?" And when the figures were repeated he "dropped dead again."

The next day word was received that Perkinsville, jealous of Oscawanna, had shoveled twelve hundred dollars into the drug-store where tickets were sold. Two sick people had nearly died because they couldn't get their prescriptions filled for twelve hours, and the mayor of the town had had to go behind the counter and pick out his own stomach bitters.

The Athens theater had been sold out so quickly that the town hall was engaged for a special matinee. Athens paid about fifteen hundred dollars. The Athenians had never suspected that there was so much money in town. People who had not paid a bill for months managed to dig up cash for tickets.

Indignant Oscawanna wired for a return engagement, so that those who had been crowded out could see the epoch-making dances. Those who had seen them wanted to see them again. In the mornings Prue gave lessons to select cla.s.ses at auction prices.

Wonderful as this was, unbelievable, indeed, to Carthage, it was not surprising. This blue and lonely dispeptic world has always been ready to enrich the lucky being that can tempt its palate with something it wants and didn't know it wanted. Other people were leaping from poverty to wealth all over the world for teaching the world to dance again. Prue caught the crest of the wave that overswept a neglected region.

The influence of her success on her people and her neighbors was bound to be overwhelming. The judge modulated from a contemptuous allusion to "that Pepperall cat" to "my daughter-in-law." Prue's father, who had never watched her dance, had refused to collaborate even that far in her ruination, could not continue to believe that she was entirely lost when she was so conspicuously found.

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the world is so wholesome and so well balanced that n.o.body ever attained enormous prosperity without some excuse for it. People who contribute the beauty, laughter, thrills, and rhythm to the world may do as much to make life livable as people who invent electric lights and telephones and automobiles. Why should they not be paid handsomely?

Prue, the impossible, unimaginable Prue, triumphed home safely with several thousands of dollars in her satchel. Orton bought a revolver to guard it with, and nearly shot one of his priceless feet off with it.

They dumped the money upon the shelf of the banker who had refused to lend Prue five hundred dollars. He had to raise the steel grating to get the bundle in. The receiving teller almost fainted and had to count it twice.

Clint Sprague alone was disconsolate. He had refused to risk Prue's expenses, had forced her to take the lioness's share of the actual costs and the imaginary profits. He almost wept over what he might have had, despising what he had.

Prue ought to have been a wreck; but there is no stimulant like success.

In a boat-race the winning crew never collapses. Prue's mother begged her to rest; her doctor warned her that she would drop dead. But she smiled, "If I can die dancing it won't be so bad."

Even more maddeningly joyful than the dancing now was the rhapsody of income. To be both Salome and Hetty Green! Mr. Dolge figured out her income. At any reasonable rate of interest it represented a capital far bigger than Tawm Kinch's mythical hundred thousand. Mr. Dolge said to William Pepperall:

"Bill, your daughter is the richest man in town. Any time you want to borrow a little money, get her name on your note and I'll be glad to let you have it."

Somehow his little pleasantry brought no smile to William's face. He snapped:

"You mind your own business and I'll mind mine."

"Oh, I suppose you don't have to borrow it," Dolge purred; "she just gives it to you."

William almost wept at this humiliation.

Prue bought out Jake Meyer's restaurant. She spent a thousand dollars on its decoration. She consoled Ollie with a position as her secretary at twenty-five dollars a week and bought her some new dresses.

Her mother scolded poor Ollie for being such a stick as not to be able to dance like her sister and having to be dependent on her. There was something hideously immoral and disconcerting about this success. But then there always is. Prue was whisked from the ranks of the resentful poor to those of the predatory rich.

Prue established Horace as cashier of the restaurant. She wanted to make her father manager, but he could not bend his pride to the yoke of taking wages from his child. If she had come home in disgrace and repentance he could have been a father to her.

The blossoming of what had been Jake Meyer's place into what Carthage called the "Palais de Pepperall" was a festival indeed. The newspapers, in which at Horace's suggestion Prue advertised lavishly, gave the event head-lines on the front page. The article included a complete catalogue of those present. This roster of forty "Mesdames" was thereafter accepted as the authorized beadroll of the Carthage Four Hundred. Mrs.

Hippisley was present and as proud as Judy. But the judge and William Pepperall were absent, and Prue felt an ache in a heart that should have been so full of pride. She and Orton rode home in a hack and she cried all the way. In fact, he had to stick his head out and tell the driver to drive round awhile until she was calm enough to go home.

A few days later, as Prue was hurrying along the street looking over a list of things she had to purchase for her restaurant, she encountered old Doctor Brearley, who was looking over a list of subscribers to the fund for paying the overdue interest on the mortgage on the new steeple.

He was afraid the builders might take it down.

In trying to pa.s.s each other Prue and the preacher fell into an involuntary tango step that delighted the witnesses. When Doctor Brearley had recovered his composure, and before he had adjusted his spectacles, he thought that Prue was Bertha Appleby, and he said:

"Ah, my dear child, I was just going to call on you and see if you couldn't contribute a little to help us out in this very worthy cause."

Prue let him explain, and then she said:

"Tell you what I'll do, Doctor: I'll give you the entire proceeds of my restaurant for one evening. And I'll dance for you with my husband."

Doctor Brearley was aghast when he realized the situation. He was afraid to accept; afraid to refuse. He was in an excruciating dilemma. Prue had mercy on him. She said:

"I'll just announce it as an idea of my own. You needn't have anything to do with it."

The townspeople were set in a turmoil over Prue's latest audacity. Half the church members declared it an outrage; the other half decided that it gave them an opportunity to see her dance under safe auspices. Foxy Prue!

XVII

The restaurant was crowded with unfamiliar faces, terrified at what they were to witness. Doctor Brearley had not known what to do. It seemed so mean to stay away and so perilous to go. His daughter solved the problem by telling him that she would say she had made him come. He went so far as to let her drag him in. "But just for a moment," he explained. "He really must leave immediately after Mr. and Mrs.

Hippisley's--er--exercises." He apparently apologized to the other guests, but really to an outraged heaven.

He trembled with anxiety on the edge of his chair. The savagery of the music alarmed him. When Prue walked out with her husband the old Doctor was distressed by her beauty. Then they danced and his heart thumped; but subtly it was persuaded to thump in the measure of that unholy Maxixe. He did not know that outside in the street before the two windows stood two exiled fathers watching in bitter loneliness.

He saw a little love drama displayed, and reminded himself that, after all, some critics said that the Song of Solomon was a kind of wedding drama or dance. After all, Mrs. Hippisley was squired by her perfectly proper and very earnest young husband--though Orton in his black clothes was hardly more than her shifting shadow.

The old preacher had been studying his Cruden, and bolstering himself up, too, with the very Scriptural texts that Prue had written out for her stiff-necked father. He had met other texts that she had not known how to find. The idea came to the preacher that, in a sense, since G.o.d made everything He must have made the dance, breathed its impulse into the clay.

This daughter of Shiloh was an extraordinarily successful piece of workmanship. There was nothing very wicked surely about that coquettish bending of her head, those playful escapes from her husband's embrace, that heel-and-toe tripping, that lithe elusiveness, that joyous psalmody of youth.

Prue was so pretty and her ways so pretty that the old man felt the pathos of beauty, so fleet, so fleeting, so lyrical, so full of--Alas!

The tears were in his eyes, and he almost applauded with the others when the dance was finished. He bowed vaguely in the direction of the anxious Prue and made his way out. She felt rebuked and condemned and would not be comforted by the praise of others. She did not know that the old preacher had encountered on the sidewalk Judge Hippisley. Doctor Brearley had forgotten that the judge had not yet ordered his own decision reversed, and he thought he was saying the unavoidable thing when he murmured:

"Ah, Judge, how proud you must be of your dear son's dear wife. I fancy that Miriam, the prophetess, must have danced something like that on the banks of the Red Sea when the Egyptians were overthrown."

Then he put up the umbrella he always carried and stumbled back to his parsonage under the star-light. His heart was dancing a trifle, and he escaped the scene of wrath that broke out as soon as he was away.

For William Pepperall had a lump in his throat made up of equal parts of desire to cry and desire to fight, and he said to Judge Hippisley with all truculence:

"Look here, Judge! I understand you been jawin' round this town about my daughter not being all she'd ought to be. Now I'm goin' to put a stop to that jaw of yours if I have to slam it right through the top of your head. If you want to send me to jail for contemp' of court, sentence me for life, because that's the way I feel about you, you fat old--"

Judge Hippisley put up wide-open hands and protested:

"Why, Bill, I--I just been wonderin' how I could get your daughter to make up with me. I been afraid to ask her for fear she'd just think I was toadyin' to her. I think she's the finest girl ever came out of Carthage. Do you suppose she'd make up and--and come over to our house to dinner Sunday?"