In Our Town Part 9

There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, d.u.c.h.ess of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's n.o.bility as the Pretender, began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real auth.o.r.ess from Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, with its old furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.

Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin, garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man leave home to follow it. She pa.s.sed cigars at the table, and after the guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.

The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements, ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.

For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it, just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a bra.s.s warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy objects in the temple.

But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs, made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris, began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of England, affecting to scorn the impudence of King Edward in sitting on another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshipped under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.

The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry Goods store people double rates to put their special sale advertis.e.m.e.nts on that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her, was in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices, who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful a mien, that to be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beat.i.tudes as we called them--were entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was living in a Sunday supplement.

The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily for every plate, and every gla.s.s, and every salt-cellar, and--here the mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight b.u.t.ter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks, forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain "W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so they ate in peace.

When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her thousand-dollar gown, worshipped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory, where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one else in our town was so admirably qualified for "National Vice" as Mrs.

Worthington," and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin to suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.

Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues, Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring this end to pa.s.s. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes into the town.

There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the potsherds.

XV

"And Yet a Fool"

The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar friends as the years pa.s.s. One who reads these papers regularly comes to know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy until he has found it.

One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"

is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising, restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:

"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross & Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired the following unusual inscription: '_Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6, 1840, and died ----." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good at anything and yet a fool._"'"

We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the waste-basket, looking for his New York _Sun_, and, after Colonel Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no one disturbed him as he looked off into s.p.a.ce. Finally he sighed:

"And yet a fool--a motley fool! Poor old Samp--kept it up to the end! I take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"

We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson "like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.

"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you please."

Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had the Colonel's story taken down as he told it--to be rewritten into an obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:

"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin, and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole senior cla.s.s into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer--a mighty good lawyer for that time--and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or less in the army--they all did 's far as that goes--but he kept it up in a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main business of life, which was being a good fellow.

"And he was a good fellow--an awful good fellow. We were all young then; there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to load up the whole bunch and go hunting--closing up the stores and taking the girls along--and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would always lead the singing--being just a mite more lubricated than the rest of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey--as they used to say.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He made a lot of money and blew it in"]

"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And--say in two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and begun in a way to settle down--Samp took up with the next set coming on; he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year--say, election or Fourth of July--he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down about noon the next day:

"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and jolly his way down the street to his office.

"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off--it only changed. He didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice.

Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try a case, the fellows--and you know who the fellows are in a town--the fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to 'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."

Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:

"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature.

They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out, for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous.

But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement.

He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then, when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him--more or less.

"Where was I?" asked Colonel Morrison of the stenographer when she had finished sharpening her pencil. "Oh, yes, along in the eighties came the boom, and Samp tried to get in it and make some money. He seems to have tried to catch up with us fellows of his age, and he began to plunge. He got in debt, and, when the boom broke, he was still living in a rented house with the rent ten months behind; his partnership was gone and his practice was cut down to joint-keepers, gamblers, and the farmers who hadn't heard the stories of his financial irregularities that were floating around town.

"Yet his wife stuck to him, forever explaining to my wife that he would be all right when he settled down. But he continued to soak up a little--not much, but a little. He never was drunk in the daytime, but I remember there used to be mornings when his office smelled pretty sour.

I had an office next to his for a while and he used to come in and talk to me a good deal. The young fellows around town whom he would like to run with were beginning to find him stupid, and the old fellows--except me--were busy and he had no one to loaf with. He decided, I remember, several times to brace up, and once he kept white shirts, cuffs and collars on for nearly a year. But when Harrison was elected, he filled up from his shoes to his hat and didn't go home for three days. One day after that, when he had gone back to his flannel shirts and dirty collars, he was sitting in my office looking at the fire in the big box stove when he broke out with:

"'Alphabetical--what's the matter with me, anyway? This town sends men to Congress; it makes Supreme Court judges of others. It sends fellows to Kansas City as rich bankers. It makes big merchants out of grocery clerks. Fortune just naturally flirts with everyone in town--but never a wink do I get. I know and you know I'm smarter than those jays. I can teach your Congressman economics, and your Supreme judge law. I can think up more schemes than the banker, and can beat the merchant in any kind of a game he'll name. I don't lie and I don't steal and I ain't stuck up. What's the matter with me, anyway?'

"And of course," mused Colonel Morrison as he relighted the b.u.t.t of his cigar, "of course I had to lie to him and say I didn't know. But I did.

We all knew. He was too much of a good fellow. His failure to get on bothered him a good deal, and one day he got roaring full and went up and down town telling people how smart he was. Then his pride left him, and he let his whiskers grow frowsy and used his vest for a spittoon, and his eyes watered too easily for a man still in his forties.

"He went West a dozen years ago, about the time of Cleveland's second election, expecting to get a job in Arizona and grow up with the country. His wife was mighty happy, and she told our folks and the rest of the women that when Horace got away from his old a.s.sociates in this town she knew that he would be all right. Poor Myrtle Kenwick, the prettiest girl you ever saw along in the sixties--and she was through here not long ago and stayed with my wife and the girls--a broken old woman, going back to her kinfolk in Iowa after she left him. Poor Myrtle! I wonder where she is. I see this Arizona paper doesn't say anything about her."

Colonel Morrison read over the item again, and smiled as he proceeded:

"But it does say that he occupied many places of honour and trust in his former home in Kansas, which seems to indicate that whisky made old Samp a liar as well as a loafer at last. My, my!" sighed the Colonel as he rose and put the paper on the desk. "My, my! What a treacherous serpent it is! It gave him a good time--literally a h.e.l.l of a good time.

And he was a good fellow--literally a d.a.m.ned good fellow--'d.a.m.ned from here to eternity,' as your man Kipling says. G.o.d gave him every talent.

He might have been a respected, useful citizen; no honour was beyond him; but he put aside fame and worth and happiness to play with whisky.

My Lord, just think of it!" exclaimed the Colonel as he reached for his hat and put up his gla.s.ses. "And this is how whisky served him: brought him to shame, wrecked his home, made his name a by-word, and lured him on and on to utter ruin by holding before him the phantom of a good time. What a pitiful, heart-breaking mocker it is!" He sighed a long sigh as he stood in the door looking up at the sky with his hands clasped behind him, and said half audibly as he went down the steps: "And whoso is deceived thereby is not wise--not wise. 'He's good at anything--and yet a fool'!"

That was what Colonel Morrison gave the stenographer. What we made for the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not be printed here.

XVI

A Kansas "Childe Roland"

One of the wisest things ever said about the newspaper business was said by the late J. Sterling Morton, of Nebraska. He declared that a newspaper's enemies were its a.s.sets, and the newspaper's liabilities its friends. This is particularly true of a country newspaper. For instance, witness the ten-years' struggle of our own little paper to get rid of the word "Hon." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as "Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we dropped the t.i.tle even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a favour would pause before going out to say:

"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know--I know--but Ab likes it, and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning tells about who has 'august antic.i.p.ations, of a dim splendour ever on before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him blue."

And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh, and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.

For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still looks after him.