Needlesand pins, needles and pins, when a man’s married his trouble begins. That’s the way the old application goes. But in the case of Jerome Bracken it didn’t go. After he married, life ran for him on very smooth rollers and there were neither needles nor pins to prick him. Possibly that was because he chose for his wife a virtuous and well-meaning woman, one a bit narrow in her views perhaps and rather stiffly opinionated, as a good many good women are who protect their own tepid moralities behind a quill-work of sharp-pointed prejudices. They are the female porcupines of the human race, being colorless and lethargic in their mentalities but acute and eager when they take a dislike. Still, the porcupine rates high among the animals. While generally not beloved, it generally is respected. And undoubtedly this lady who became Mrs. Jerome Bracken was well-meaning and remained straitly so until the end of all regulated things.
Or then on the other hand, possibly Jerome Bracken’s marriage was a success because he picked precisely thesort of woman who had the qualifications for being a suitable wife to an up-and-coming man, a man who kept on up and kept on coming until he had arrived, with both feet planted on how firm a foundation! But then Jerome always had been, as the phrase is, a clever picker. He proved that when as a very young man he moved to Dyketon and picked Queen Sears for his girl. He kept on proving it—by picking the right business, the right code of deportment before the eyes of mankind, the right church to belong to, and precisely the right father-in-law.
This Queenie Sears, now; she was not the one he married, naturally not. Queenie Sears was not the sort any man in his sane senses would marry, she being what used to be called a fancy woman. She was an inmate of Madam Carrie Rupert’s house when he first met her and it was there, under that hospitable but disreputable roof, down on Front Street in Dyketon’s red-light district, that the meeting took place.
About this first meeting there was nothing significant. He called, a stranger, and she entertained him, it being her business to entertain callers. He at this time was a shrewd but countrified youth of twenty or thereabouts. She was a little older than that, blonde, simple-minded, easy-going, rather pretty in an insipid way, with a weak, self-indulgent mouth. Already she was plump, with the certainty before her that, barring ill health to pull her down, the succeeding years would enhance her plumpness into rolls and cushions of fat.Probably, if the truth were known, she deliberately elected to take on this life she was leading. However, and be that as it may, she had the customary story to account for her present vocation when somebody who was maudlin with a sympathy based on alcohol asked her how she came to be what she was.
Hers was a stock story lacking novelty as well as sincerity—a sentimental fiction dealing with a trusting and ignorant maiden’s downfall in an orange grove vaguely described as being “away down South,” and then discovery and disgrace and a traditional proud father whose heart could be flinty and yet broken, and a shamed girl’s flight in the night and all the rest of the stage props. But sometimes it was a plantation instead of an orange grove; or if the inquirer happened to be a Southerner, it might be a ranch in the far West. Queenie was taking no chances on getting herself checked up.
As for Jerome, his tale was a short one, not particularly interesting but having the merit, as hers did not, of a background of fact. Raised on a farm in the central part of the state; poor parents; common school education; lately landed in Dyketon; stopping now at a second-rate boarding-house out on Ninth Street; working for eighteen a week as a bookkeeper at Stout & Furst’s clothing store; ambitious to better himself in both these latter regards—that, brought up to date, was young Bracken.
Nor was there any special significance in the intimacywhich followed between these two. He visited her at more or less regular intervals. Thus early he was shaping his days into a calculated and orderly routine which remained a part of him forever after. She liked him, being at heart kindly and, considering her trade, susceptible to affectionate impulses; he liked her, being lonely, and that substantially was all there was to it.
At the end of a year he began his journey up in the world. Mr. Gus Ralph, president of the Ralph State Bank, took him on as an assistant receiving teller at a hundred a month and prospects. Unknown to the newcomer, Mr. Ralph had had his eye on him for some time—a young man of good manners and presumably of good habits, bright, dignified, industrious, discreet, honest—in short, a hustler. Mr. Ralph was on the lookout for that kind. He made a place for the young man, and from the hour when he walked into the counting-house and hung up his hat Jerome was justifying the confidence Mr. Ralph put in him. If he was continuing to sow his wild oats—and privately he was—at least he sowed none during banking hours, nor did any part of his harvesting in public, which was sufficient for his new boss. Mr. Ralph often said he had been a youngster once himself, saying it with an air which indicated that he had been very much of a youngster indeed.
At the end of six months more, which would make it about eighteen months in all, young Jerome ceased his sowing operations altogether. He didn’t fray therope; he cut it clean through at a single decisive stroke.
“Queenie,” he said to her one night, “this is going to be the last time I’m ever coming down here to see you.”
“Well, Jerry,” she answered, “that’ll be all right with me unless you start going to see some other girl in some other house along the row here.”
“It’s not that,” he explained. “I’m going to quit going down the line altogether. I’m through”—he made a gesture with his hands—“through with the whole thing from now on.”
“I see,” she said, after a moment or two. “Been getting yourself engaged to some nice girl—is that the way it is, Jerry?”
“Yes,” he told her, “that’s the way it is, Queenie.”
She did not ask who the nice girl might be nor did he offer to tell her. In that ancient age—the latter decades of the last century before this one—there was a code for which nearly everybody of whatsoever station had the proper reverence. In some places—bar-rooms, for example, and certain other places—a gentleman did not bring up the name of a young lady. It was never the thing to do.
“Here, Jerry,” she said next. “I’ll be kind of sorry to say good-by, but I want you to know I wish you mighty well. Not that you need my good wishes—you’re going ahead and you’ll keep on going—but I want you to have them. Because, Jerry, if it was my dying words I was speaking I’d still say it just thesame—you’ve always been on the square with me, and that’s what counts with a girl like me. You never came down here drunk, you never used rough language before me, you never tried to bilk me or take advantage of me any kind of way. Yes, sir, that’s what counts. Even if I don’t never see you face to face again I won’t forget how kind and pleasant you’ve been towards me. And I’d die before I’d make any trouble for you, ever. You go your way and I’ll go mine, such as it is, and that’ll be all there is to it so far as I’m concerned.
“Now then, you’ve told me some news; I’ll tell you some. I’m fixing to buy out Miss Carrie. She wants to quit this business and go over to Chicago and live decent. She’s got a married daughter there, going straight, and anyhow she’s made her pile out of this drum and can afford to quit, and I don’t blame her any, at her age, for wanting to quit. But me, it’s different with. I’ve got a little money saved up of my own and she’s willing to take that much down and take a mortgage on the furniture and trust me for the rest of the payments as they fall due. And just yesterday we closed up the bargain, and next week the lease and the telephone number and all go in my name. So you see I’m trying to get along, too, the best way I can.” She lifted the glass of beer that she was holding in her hand. “Here’s good luck!”
She took the draught down greedily. Her full lips had the drooping at their corners which advertises the potential dipsomaniac.
Face to face, through the rest of her life he never did speak to her. To be sure, there were at irregular intervals telephone conversations between them. I’ll come to that part of it later. Anyhow, they were not social conversations, but purely business.
He saw her, of course—Dyketon was a small place then; it was afterwards that it grew into a city—but always at a distance, always across the wide gulf that little-town etiquette digs for encounters in public between the godly and the ungodly. Once in a while she would pass him on the street, she usually riding in a hack and he usually afoot, with no sign of recognition, of course, on the part of either. Then again, some evening at the theater, he, sitting with his wife down-stairs, would happen to glance up toward the “white” gallery and she would be perched, as one of a line of her sisters of transgression, on the front row there. The Dyketon theater management practiced the principle of segregation for prostitutes just as the city government practically enforced it in the matter of their set-apart living-quarters. These communal taboos were as old as the community itself was. Probably they still endure.
With time, even the occasional sight of his old light-o’-love failed to revive in his mind pictures of the house where he once had knowledge of her. The memories of that interior faded into a conglomerate blur. One memory did persist. Long after the rest was a faint jumble he recalled quite sharply the landlady’s twopets—her asthmatic pug-dog with its broody cocked eyes, and her wicked talking parrot with its yellow head and its vice for gnawing woodwork and its favorite shrieked refrain: “Ladies, gent’men in the parlor!”
He remembered them long after he forgot how the place had smelled of bottled beer and cheap perfumery and unaired sofa-stuffing; and how always on the lower floor there had prevailed in daytime a sort of dusky gloom by reason of the shutters being tightly closed and barred fast against sunlight and small boys or other Peeping Toms who might come venturing on forbidden ground; and how, night-times, above the piano-playing of the resident “professor” and the clamor of many voices there would cut through the shrill squeals of an artificial joy—the laughter forced from the sorry souls of those forlorn practitioners at the oldest and the very saddest of human trades.
The one he married was the only daughter of his employer, Mr. Gus Ralph; a passionless, circumspect young woman three or four years his senior. The father approved heartily of the engagement and in testimony thereof promptly promoted Jerome to a place of more responsibility and larger salary; the best families likewise gave to this match their approval. Even so, Mr. Ralph never would have advanced the future son-in-law had not the latter been deserving of it. The elder man’s foresight had been good, very, very good. Jerome was cut out for the banking business. He proved that from the start. He knew when to say no, and prospective borrowers learned that his no meant no. Personally he was frugal without being miserly and, in the earlier days at least, he had firmness without arrogance; and if personally he was one of the most selfish creatures ever created, he had for public affairs a fine, broad spirit.
He had been brought up a Baptist but almost on the heels of his wedding he joined his wife’s congregation. She was a strict Presbyterian, and in Dyketon the Presbyterians, next after the Episcopalians, constituted the most aristocratic department of piety. This step also pleased old Mr. Ralph exceedingly.
It wasn’t very long before Mr. Bracken, as everybody nearly except his intimates called him, was chief of staff down at the bank, closest adviser and right-hand-man to the owner. In another five years he was junior partner and vice-president. Five years more, and he, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, was president. Mr. Ralph had died and among the directors no other name was considered for the vacancy. His election merely was a matter of form. With his wife’s holdings and his own and his widowed mother-in-law’s, he controlled a heavy majority of the stock.
Jerome Bracken was a model to all young men growing up. Look at the way his earthly affairs were prospering! Look at his tithes to religion and to charity—one-tenth of all he made bestowed on good causes and in good deeds; a sober man laying up treasures not onlyin this world but for the world to come. Look how the Lord was multiplying his profits unto him! Mothers and fathers enjoined their sons’ notice upon these proofs. Jerome Bracken’s life was like a motto on a wall, like a burning torch in the night-time.
Still, there were those—a few only, be it said—who claimed that with increasing years and increasing powers Mr. Bracken took on a temper which made him hard and high-handed and greedy for yet more authority. This hardness does come often to those who sit in lofty seats and rule over the small destinies of the smaller fry. On the other hand, though, anyone who notably succeeds is sure to have his detractors; success breeds envy and envy breeds criticism. That fierce light which beats upon a throne brings out in clean relief any imperfections of the illumined one, and people are bound to notice them and some people are bound to comment on them.
Take, for instance, the time when that young fellow, Quinn, was caught dead to rights pilfering from the petty cash. It seemed he had been speculating in a small way at bucket-shops and, what was worse, betting on the races. It further seemed to quite a number of citizens that Mr. Bracken might have found it in his heart to be pitiful to the sinner. Not much more than a boy and his father and mother hard-working, decent people and his older brother a priest and all—these were the somewhat indirect arguments they offered in condonement. And besides, wasn’t old man Quinnready to sell his cottage and use the money from the sale to make good the shortage? Then why not let the whole messy business drop where it was? Least said soonest mended. And so on and so forth.
Mr. Bracken couldn’t see the situation in any such light. He felt sorry enough for the lad and sorrier for the lad’s family, and so stated when a sort of unofficial delegation of the pleaders waited on him. Nor was it the amount of the theft that counted with him; he said that, too. But in his position he had a duty to the commonweal and topping that, an obligation to his depositors and his patrons. He refused to consent that the thing be hushed up. He went himself and swore out the warrant, and that night young Quinn’s wayward head tossed on a cot in the county jail. Mr. Bracken went before the grand jury likewise and pressed for the indictment; and at the trial in circuit court he was the prosecution’s chief witness, relating with a regretful but painstaking fidelity the language of the defendant’s confession to him.
Young Quinn accordingly departed to state’s prison for two years of hard labor, becoming what frequently is spoken of as a warning and an example. While there he learned to make chair-bottoms but so far as might be learned never made any after his release. When last heard of he was a hobo and presumably an associate of members of the criminal classes. By all current standards of righteous men the example was now a perfected one.
Persons who found fault with the attitude Mr. Bracken had taken in the case naturally did not know of any offsetting acts of kindliness performed by him behind closed doors. Regarding these acts there was no way for them to know. Had they known, perhaps they might have altered their judgments. Or perhaps not. Behind his back they probably would have gone right on picking him to pieces. A main point, though, was that nobody berated him to his face; nobody would dare. He passed through his maturing years shielded by an insulation of expressed approval for what he said and what he thought and what he did.
This was true of the home circle, which a fine and gracious flavor of domestic harmony perfumed; and it was true of his life locally and abroad. When you get to be a little tin god on wheels, the crowd is glad to trail along and grease the wheels for you with words of praise and admiring looks. And when everybody is saying yes, yes, oh yes, to you, why, you get out of the habit ever of saying no, emphatically no, to yourself. That’s only human nature, which is one of the few things that the automobile and the radio have not materially altered.
So much, for the moment, for this man who was a model to young men growing up. It is necessary to turn temporarily to one who went down, down, down, as that first one, in the estimation of a vast majority of his fellow beings was going up and up and ever higher up.
Queenie Sears was the one whose straying feet took hold on hell. Presently her establishment had a booze-artist for a proprietor and a hard and aggravating name among the police force. They called it the toughest joint in the First Ward. City court warrants were sworn out against her—for plain drunkenness, for disorderly conduct along with drunkenness, for fighting with other women of her sort, for suffering gaming and dope-peddling on her premises.
When an inmate of her house killed herself under peculiarly distressing circumstances, sermons were preached about her from at least two city pulpits, the ministers speaking of depravity and viciousness and the debauching of youth and plaguish blots on the fair burnished face of the civic shield. When she took the Keeley Cure—and speedily relapsed—those who frequented her neighborhood of ill repute had a hearty laugh over the joke of it. She was gross of size and waddled when she walked, and her big earrings of flawed diamonds rested against jowls of quivering, unwholesome bloat.
But dissipation did not destroy the beldame’s faculties for earning money—if money got that way could be said to be earned—and for putting it by. Mr. Jerome Bracken, who had known her back in those long bygone days of her comeliness, was in position to give evidence, had he been so minded, regarding her facility at saving it up. This was how he came to have such information:
Once or twice a year, say, she would call him on the telephone at his office in the bank. Across the wire to him her eaten-out voice would come, hoarse and flattened—a hoarseness and a flatness which increased as the years rolled by.
“Jerry,” she would say, following almost a set pattern, “you know who this is, don’t you—Queenie?”
“Yes,” he would answer; “what can I do for you now?”
“Same as you done the last time,” she would say. “I’ve got a few more iron men tucked away and I’m looking for a little suggestion about a place to put ’em. And, Jerry, I hope you don’t mind my calling you up. There ain’t nobody else I could depend on like I can on you.”
She never told him, in dollars and cents, how much she had for investment nor did he ever ask. If inwardly he guessed at the possible total his guess did not run to large figures. But just as he might have done in the case of any individual seeking his counsel in this regard, he would recommend to her this or that bond or such-and-such standard stock, and she would repeat the name after him until she had memorized it and then she would thank him.
“I’m mighty much obliged to you, Jerry,” she would say. “I ain’t ever lost any money yet by following after your advice. It’s awful good of you, helping me out this way, and I appreciate it—I certainly do.”
“That’s all right, Queenie,” he would tell her, in hisprecise manner of speech. “I’m glad to be able to serve you. You are free to call on me—by telephone—whenever you care to.”
“I won’t never forget it,” she would reply. “Well, good-by, Jerry.”
It never happened more than twice a year, sometimes only once in a year as they—these years—kept on mounting up.
They mounted up until Dyketon had increased herself from a sprawled-out county-seat into a city of the second class. She had 100,000 inhabitants now—only 83,000 according to the notoriously inadequate federal census figures, but fully 100,000 by the most conservative estimates of the Board of Trade—and old inhabitants were deploring that whereas once they knew by name or face everybody they met, now a fellow could take a stroll on almost every street and about every other person he ran into would be a total stranger to him.
New blood was quick and rampant in Dyketon’s commercial arteries and new leaders had risen up in this quarter or that, but two outstanding figures of the former times still were outstanding. On all customary counts Mr. Jerome Bracken was the best man in town and old Queenie Sears the worst woman. He led all in eminence, she distanced the field in iniquity. By every standard he was at the very top. Nobody disputed her evil hold on the bottommost place of all. Between those heights of his gentility and those depthsof her indecency there was a space of a million miles that seemed to any imagination unbridgeable; at least that seemed so to Dyketon’s moralists, provided they ever had coupled the honored president of the State Bankers’ Association and the abandoned strumpet of Front Street in the same thought, which was improbable.
A certain day was a great day for him who was used to great days. But this one, by reason of two things, was really a day above other great days. In the same issue of the Dyketon Morning Sun appeared, at the top of the social notes, an announcement of his daughter’s engagement to Mr. Thomas H. ScopesIII, a distinguished member of one of the oldest families in town, and, on the front page, his own announcement as an aspirant for the Republican nomination for United States Senator.
Until now he had put by all active political ambitions. From time to time, tempting prospects of office-holding had come to him; he had waved them aside. But now, his private fortune having passed the mark of two millions, and his business being geared to run practically on its own momentum and smoothly, he felt, and his formal card to the voters so stated, that he might with possible profit to the commonwealth devote the energies of his seasoned years to public service as a public servant. Quote: If the people by the expression of their will at the approaching primaries indicated him as the choice of his party for this high position, thenso be it; his opponent would find him ready for the issue. End quote.
All the morning and all the afternoon until he left his office he was receiving the congratulations of associates and well-wishers upon Miss Bracken’s engagement and likewise upon his own decision to run for Senator. His desk telephone was jingling constantly. He stopped in at his club on the way home—the Metropolis Club it was, and the most exclusive one in town—and there he held a sort of levee. Whole-hearted support was promised him by scores, literally. The most substantial men in the whole city gathered about him, endorsing him for the step he had taken and pledging themselves to work for him and predicting his easy nomination and his equally easy election. The state generally went Republican—not always, but three times out of four on an average. Under this barrage of applause he unbent somewhat, showing more warmth, more geniality, than he had shown anywhere for a good long while. He did not unbend too far, though, but just far enough.
The club cynic, an aged and petulant retired physician, watching the scene in the club library from his regular seat by the tall marble fireplace, remarked under his voice to the first deputy club cynic, who now bore him company and who would succeed him on his death:
“Haughty as hell, even now, ain’t he? Notice this, Ike—he’s not acknowledging the enthusiasm of that flock of bootlickers that are swarming around himyonder, he’s merely accepting it as his proper due. What does the man think he is anyhow—God Almighty?”
“Humph!” answered the deputy. “You rate our budding statesman too low. Down in that Calvinistic soul of his he may sometimes question the workings of the Divine Scheme, but you bet he never has questioned his own omnipotence—the derned money-changing pouter pigeon. Look at him, all reared back there with one hand on his heart and the other under his coat-tails—like a steel engraving of Daniel Webster!”
“Not on his heart, Ike,” corrected the chief cynic grimly; “merely on the place where his heart would be if he had any heart. He had one once, I guess, but from disuse it’s withered up and been absorbed into the system. Remember, don’t you, how just here the other week he clamped down on poor old Hank Needham and squeezed the last cent out of him? He’ll win, though, mark my words on it. He always has had his way and he’ll keep on having it. Lord, Lord, and I can remember when we used to send real men to Washington from this state—human he-men, not glorified dollar-grabbers always looking for the main chance. Given half a show, Hank Needham could have come back; now he’s flat busted and he’ll be dead in six months, or I miss my guess.”
These isolated two—the official crab and his understudy—were the only men in the room, barring club servants, who remained aloof from the circle surrounding the candidate. They bided on where they were, eyeing him from under their drooped eyelids when, at the end of a happy hour, he passed out, a strong, erect, soldierly man in his ripening fifties. Then, together, they both grunted eloquently.
In a fine glow of contentment Jerome Bracken walked to his house. He wanted the exercise, he wanted to be alone for a little while with his optimism.
He was almost home when a city hospital ambulance hurried past him, its gong clanging for passage in the traffic of early evening. Just after it got by he saw a white-coated interne and a policeman wrestling with somebody who seemed to be fastened down to a stretcher in the interior of the motor, and from that struggling somebody he heard delirious sobbing outcries in a voice that was feminine and yet almost too coarsened and thick to be feminine.
Vaguely it irked him that even for a passing moment this interruption should break in on his thoughts. But no untoward thing disturbed the household rhapsody that night. There, as at the office, the bell on the telephone kept ringing almost constantly, and, being answered, the telephone yielded only felicitating words from all and sundry who had called up.
A man who had no shadow of earthly doubt touching on his destinies slept that night in Jerome Bracken’s bed. And if he dreamed we may be well assured that his dreams were untroubled by specters of any who had besought him for mercy and had found it not. Aconscience that is lapped in eider-down is nearly always an easy conscience.
It was the fifth day after the next day when, with no warning whatsoever, Jerome Bracken got smashed all to flinders. He was in his office at the rear of the bank going over the morning mail—it mostly was letters written by friendly partisans over the state, including one from the powerful national committeeman for the state—when without knocking, his lawyer, Mr. Richard Griffin, opened the door and walked in followed by his local political manager, who also happened to be the local political boss. The faces of both wore looks of a grave uneasiness, the manners of both were concerned and unhappy.
“Morning, gentlemen,” said Mr. Bracken. “What is pressing down on your minds this fine day?”
Yankee-fashion, Mr. Griffin answered the question by putting another.
“Bracken,” he said, “how long have you been knowing this woman, Queenie Sears?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Mr. Bracken sharply.
“What I say. How long have you known her? And how well?”
“I don’t understand you, Dick.” The other’s tone was angry. “And by what right do you assume—”
“Bracken,” snapped Griffin sharply, “I’m here as a man who’s been your lifelong friend—you must knowthat. And Dorgan here has come with me in the same capacity—as a friend of yours. This thing is serious. It’s damned serious. It’s likely to be about the most serious thing that ever happened to you. I’ll repeat the question and I’m entitled to a fair, frank answer: How long have you been acquainted with Queenie Sears?”
In his irate bewilderment Mr. Bracken could think of but one plausible explanation for this incredible inquiry. He started up from his chair, his hands gripping into fists. He almost shouted it.
“Has that dirty, libelous, scandal-mongering rag of an afternoon paper down the street had the effrontery this early in the campaign to attempt to besmirch my character? If it has I’ll—”
“Not yet!” For the first time the politician was taking a hand in the talk. “But it will—before sundown tonight. Catch a Democrat outfit passing up a bet like this! Sweet chance!” He looked toward the lawyer. “You better tell him, Griffin,” he said with a certain gloomy decision. “Then when you’re through I’ll have my little say-so.”
“Probably that would be best,” agreed Griffin resignedly. “Sit down, won’t you, Bracken? I’m going to hand you a pretty hard blow right in the face.”
His amazement growing, Mr. Bracken sat down. Through what painfully followed, the other two continued to stand.
“Bracken,” stated Griffin, “I’ll start at the beginning. Something like a week ago Queenie Sears was taken from her dive down on the river shore to the municipal infirmary. She had delirium tremens—was raving crazy. She’d had them before, it appears, but this attack was the last one she’ll ever have. Because it killed her—that and a weak heart and bad kidneys and a few other complications, so the doctors say. Anyhow, she’s dead. She died about an hour ago.
“Well, early this morning her mind cleared up for a little while. They told her she was going, which she probably knew for herself, and advised her to put her worldly affairs—if she had any—in order. It seems she had considerable worldly affairs to put in order, which was a surprise. It seems from what she said that she had upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all in gilt-edged securities, all tucked away in a safe-deposit box, and all of it, every red cent of it, coined from the blood and the sweat and the degradations of fallen women. No need for us to go into that now. God knows, enough people will be only too glad to go into it when the news leaks out!
“As I say, they told her at the hospital that she was dying. So she asked for a lawyer and they got one—a young fellow named Dean that’s lately opened up an office. And he came and she made her will and it was signed in the presence of witnesses and will be offered for probate without delay. Trust some of our friends of the opposition to attend promptly to that detail. And, Bracken—take it steady, man—Bracken, she leftevery last miserable cent of that foul, tainted one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to you.”
“What!” The cry issued from Bracken’s throat in a gulping shriek.
“I’m saying she left it all to you. I’ve just seen the will. So has Dorgan. I sent for him as soon as the word reached me about half an hour ago and we went together and read the infernal thing. It says—I can almost quote it verbatim—that she’s leaving it to you because for thirty-six years you’ve been her best friend and really her only friend and her one disinterested adviser. And furthermore because—with almost her dying breath she said it—because you were solely instrumental in helping her to save and preserve her earnings.... God, but that’s been hard! Now then, Dorgan, it’s your turn to speak.”
So Dorgan spoke, but briefly. Five minutes later, from the door on the point of departure, he was repeating with patience, in almost the soothing parental tone one might use to an ailing and unreasonable child, what already he had said at least twice over to that stricken figure slumped in the swivel chair at the big flat desk.
“Sure,” he was saying, “I’ll believe you, and Griffin here, he’ll believe you—ain’t he just promised you he would?—and there’s maybe five or six others’ll believe you—but who else is goin’ to take your word against what it says in black and white on that paper? And her lookin’ into the open grave when she told ’em toset it down? Nope, Bracken, you’re through, and it’s only a mercy to you that I’m comin’ here to be the first one to tell you you are. You can explain till you’re black in the face and you can refuse to touch that dough till the end of time, or you can give it to charity—if you’re lucky enough to find a charity that’ll take it—but, Bracken, it’s been hung around your neck like a grindstone and it was a dead woman’s hands that hung it there and it makes you altogether too heavy a load for any political organization to carry—you see that yourself, don’t you? And so, Bracken, you’re through!”
But to Bracken’s ears now the words came dimly, meaning little. Where he was huddled, he foresaw as with an eye for prophecy things coming to pass much as they truly did come to pass. He saw his wife—how well he knew that lukewarm lady who was not lukewarm in her animosities nor yet in her suspicions!—saw her closing a door of enduring contempt forever between them; he saw the breaking off of his daughter’s engagement to that young Scopes, who was the third bearer of an honored name, and his daughter despising him as the cause for her humiliation and her wrecked happiness; he saw himself thrown out of his church, thrown out of his bank, thrown out of all those pleasant concerns in which he had joyed and from which he had rendered the sweet savors of achievement and of creation. He saw himself being cut, being ignored, by those who had been glad to kowtow beforehim for his favor, being elbowed aside as though he were a thing unclean and leprous.
He heard, not Dorgan passing a compassionate but relentless sentence on him and his dearest of all hopes, but rather he seemed to hear the scornful laughter of unregenerate elderly libertines, rejoicing at the downfall of an offending brother exposed at his secret sins; and he seemed to hear derisive voices speaking—“Walking so straight up he reared backwards, and all the time—” “Well, well, well, the church is certainly the place for a hypocrite to hide himself in, ain’t it?” “Acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but now just look at him!” “His life was an open book till they found out where the dark pages were stuck together, he, he, he!” Thus and so he heard the scoffing voices speaking. He heard aright too, and as his head went down into his hands, he tasted in anticipation a draft too bitter for human strength to bear.
Griffin was another who did not hear the third repetition of Dorgan’s judgment. He had gone on ahead like a man anxious to quit a noisome sick-room and to one of the assistant cashiers in the outer office he was saying: “I advise you to get your chief to go home and lie down awhile. It might also be a good idea to call up his family doctor and get him to drop over here right away. From the looks of him, Mr. Bracken’s not a well man. He’s had a shock—a profound shock. His nerves might give way, I’d say, any minute. I’m afraid he’s in for a very, very hard time!”
ThisChristmas was going to be different. So far as Mr. and Mrs. Bugbee were concerned the Christmas before had been a total failure, disillusioning, disappointing, fraught with heart-burnings. But this coming one—well, just let everybody wait and see. They’d show them.
“It’s going to be so dog-goned different you’d be surprised!” said Mr. Bugbee. He said it after the plan had taken on shape and substance and, so saying, raised a hand in the manner of a man who plights a solemn troth.
But first the plan had to be born. It was born on a day in October when Mr. Bugbee came into the living-room of their light-housekeeping apartment on West Ninth Street just around the corner from Washington Square. The living-room was done in Early Byzantine or something—a connoisseur would know, probably—and Mrs. Bugbee was dressed to match the furnishings. She was pretty, though. Her friends said she reminded them of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna, which either was or was not a compliment dependent on whatprivately the speaker thought about the Pre-Raphaelite school. Still, most of her friends liked it, being themselves expertly artistic. She had the tea things out—the hammered Russian set. This was her customary afternoon for receiving and presently there would be people dropping in. She lifted her nose and sniffed.
“Whew!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? You smell like a rancid peppermint lozenge.”
“Been down in the storeroom in the basement getting out my winter suits,” he said. “Messy job. I broke up a party.”
“Whose?” she asked.
“Mr. and Mrs. Moth were celebrating their woolen wedding,” he explained. “They furnished the guests and I did the catering. You ought to see that heavy sweater of mine. It’s not heavy any more. I’m going to write a chapter to be added to that sterling work ‘Advice to an Expectant Moth-er.’”
“Oh dear!” she said. “That’s the trouble with living in one of these old converted houses.”
“This one has backslid,” he interjected. “Insectivorous, I call it. There were enough roaches down there to last a reasonable frugal roach-collector for at least five years. Any entomologist could have enjoyed himself for a week just classifying species.”
“And I fairly saturated your clothes with that spraying stuff before I packed them away,” she lamented. “And as for camphor balls—well, if I used up one camphor ball I used ten pounds.”
“You must have been a poor marksman. So far as I can judge you never hit a single one of ’em. And so all summer, while we flitted from place to place, gay butterflies of fashion that we are, they’ve been down there intent on family duties, multiplying and replenishing my flannel underwear, as the Scriptures so aptly put it. Devoted little creatures, moths! They have their faults but they have their domestic virtues, too. I wish they didn’t have so much of my golf sweater. It looked like drawn-work.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Gave it back to them. All or none—that’s my motto. But I piled the rest of the duds on my bed. By prompt relief work much of it may be salvaged.”
“Then for heaven’s sake close the door before I choke.”
He closed the door and came and sat down near her and lighted a cigarette. He wore the conventional flowing Windsor tie to prove how unconventional he was. But he did not wear the velveteen jacket; he drew the line there, having a sense of humor. Nor were his trousers baggy and unpressed. They were unbagged and impressive. Mr. Bugbee was a writer, also a painter. He was always getting ready to write something important and then at the last minute deciding to paint instead, or the other way around. What between being so clever at the two crafts he rarely prosecuted either.
But then as regards finances this pair did not haveto worry. There was money on both sides, which among our native bohemians is a rare coincidence. He had inherited some and Mrs. Bugbee had inherited a good deal. So they could gratify a taste for period furniture and practice their small philanthropies and generally make a pleasant thing of living this life without the necessity of stinting.
It was agreed that they had such happy names—names to match their natures. His was Clement and hers was Felicia. It was as if, infants at the baptismal font though they were, they had been christened and at the same time destined for each other. Persons who knew them remarked this. Persons also made a play on their last name. While these twain were buzzing about enjoying themselves, their intimates often called them the Busy Bugbees. But when an idealistic impulse swept them off their feet, as occasionally it did, the first syllable was the one that was accented. It was really a trick name and provided some small entertainment for light-hearted members of the favored circle in which the couple mainly moved. It doesn’t take much to amuse some people.
“Just to think!” mused Mrs. Bugbee. “It seems only a week or two ago since we were wondering where we’d go to spend the summer. Time certainly does fly.”
“And what a small world it is,” amended Mr. Bugbee. “Why, we were sitting right here in this room when that subject first came up and, lo and behold, only five short months afterward we meet again on the very same spot. Where do they get that stuff about a fellow so rarely running into an old friend in New York?”
“You’d better save that cheap wit of yours for somebody who’ll appreciate it,” said Mrs. Bugbee, but she smiled an indulgent wifely smile as she said it. “Yes, indeed, time does fly! And here winter is almost upon us.” She lifted her voice and trilled a quotation: “‘And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?’” Mrs. Bugbee loved to sing. She sang rather well, too. About once in so often she thought seriously of taking up grand opera. Something always happened, though. With the Bugbees something always did.
“Don’t you be worrying your head about him,” said Mr. Bugbee. “Being a wise old bird, the robin will be down in Georgia dragging those long stretchy worms out of the ground. I wish they’d put as good a grade of rubber into elastic garters as they do into those Southern worms. It’s what we’ll be doing ourselves, poor things, that gives me pause.”
“First thing anybody knows Thanksgiving will be here.” She went on as though she had not heard him. “And then right away I’ll have to begin thinking about Christmas. Oh dear!” She finished with a sigh.
“Damn Christmas!” Mr. Bugbee was fervent.
“Why, Clem Bugbee, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
So he altered it: “Well, then, damn the kind ofChristmas they have in this vast and presumably intellectual city! Giving other people things they don’t want that cost more money than you can afford to spend, because they are going to give you things you don’t want that cost more than they can afford to spend. Every retail shop turned into a madhouse with the inmates all running wild. Handing out money on all sides to people who hate you because it’s not more and you hating them right back because you’re being held up this way. Everybody and everything going stark raving crazy on Christmas Eve. Nervous prostrations. Jams in the streets. Sordidness, greed, ostentation, foolish extravagance. Postmen and clerks and expressmen dying on their feet. Truck-drivers spilling the sort of language that’s still regarded as improper except when spoken on the stage. Then it becomes realism, but the truck-driver, not being artistic but just a poor overworked slob of a vulgarian, he’s maybe arrested for using obscenity.
“Christmas Day, and you go around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on your lips and murder in your heart. And drink egg-nogs made out of amateur whisky. And eat too much. And go to fool parties where you’re bored stiff. Then the bills piling in. And the worthless junk piling up around the flat. And everything. Do I seem bitter? I do? Well, I am!”
“It’s easy enough to talk—goodness knows every rational human being deplores the commercialism and the—the mercenaryism—”
“Where did you get that word?”
“Made it up. It’s a good word and it’s mine and I like it. And don’t interrupt. As I was saying, we all deplore the mercenaryism and the materialism and the senseless display that’s crept into Christmas, and a lot of people spout about it just as you’re doing, but nobody does anything to try to reform it. At least nobody has since they started the custom of sending Christmas cards instead of gifts. But that was a mistake; it’s been overdone into an evil. There’s a passion to see who can buy the most expensive cards; and you spend weeks beforehand making up the lists and addressing the envelops, and the cards cost as much as the presents used to cost and make ever so much more bother getting them out. Look at what happened to us last Christmas! Look at what’s sure to happen this Christmas! And all you do is stand there—sit there, I mean—and spout at me as though I were to blame. Suggest a way out, why don’t you? I’d be only too delighted if you would.”
“I will,” proclaimed the challenged party. He thought hard. “We’ll run away from it—that’s what we’ll do.”
“Where do we run?”
“That’s a mere detail. I’m working out the main project. In advance we’ll circulate the word that we’re escaping from the civilized brand of Christmas; that on December twenty-fifth we’re going to be far, far beyond the reach of long-distance telephones, telegraph lines, wireless, radio, mental telepathy, rural free delivery routes, janitors with their paws out for ten-dollar bills and other well-wishers; that we’re not going to send any presents to our well-to-do friends and are not expecting any from them; that we’re not even figuring on mailing out a single, solitary, dad-busted greetings card. There’s plenty of time ahead of us for putting the campaign through. We’ll remember our immediate relatives and your pet charities and any worth-while dependents we can think of. And then we’ll just dust out and forget to leave any forwarding address.”
“We could try Florida again,” suggested Mrs. Bugbee.
“The land of the sap and the sapodilla—we will not! What’s Florida now except New York with a pair of white duck pants on?”
“Well, the climate there is—”
“It is not! It’s all cluttered up with real-estate agents, the climate is. Besides I never could see the advantages of traveling eighteen hundred miles in mid-winter to get into the same kind of weather that you travel eighteen hundred miles in midsummer to get out of.”
“Well, then, we might run up to Lake Placid or the Berkshires. Of course it’ll be too early at either place for the regular season, but I suppose there’ll be a few people we know—”
“You don’t grasp the big theory at all. This is notto be an excursion, it’s an exploring expedition. We’re not a couple of tourists out for winter sports and chilblains on our toes. We’re pioneers. We’re going forth to rediscover the old Christmas spirit that’s sane and simple and friendly. If there is a neighborhood left anywhere in this country where the children still believe in Santa Claus we’re going to find it. And we’ll bring the word back when we come home and next year thousands of others will follow our examples, and generations yet unborn will rise up and bless us as benefactors of the human race. I shouldn’t be surprised if they put up monuments to us in the market-place.”
“You might as well be serious about it. And not quite so oratorical.”
“I am serious about it—I was never more serious in my life. Beneath this care-free exterior a great and palpitating but practical idea has sprouted to life.”
“Well, since you’re so practical, kindly sprout the name of the spot where we’re to spend Christmas. I’m perfectly willing to try anything once, even against my better judgment, but you can’t expect me to get on a train with you without at least a general notion as to the name of the station where we get off.”
Mr. Bugbee’s brow furrowed; then magically it unwrinkled. “I have it!” he said. “We’ll take the Rousseau cottage up at Pleasant Cove. The Rousseaus are sailing next Tuesday for Europe to be gone until spring. Only yesterday Rousseau offered me the use of hiscamp any time I wanted it and for as long as I pleased. I’ll see him tomorrow and ask him to notify his caretaker that we’ll be along about the second week in December.”
“But it’s eight miles from the railroad.” Her tone was dubious.
“So much the better. I wish it was eighty miles from one.”
“And right in the middle of the mountains.”
“You bet it is. I want to be right in the heart of the everlasting peaks. I hope to get snowed in. I crave an old-fashioned white Christmas. I’m fed up on these spangled green, blue, red, pink, purple and blind ones. I want to mingle with hardy kindly souls who have absorbed within them the majesty and the nobility of their own towering hills. I want to meet a few of the real rugged American types once more. I’m weary of these foreigners you see in the subway reading newspapers which seem to be made up exclusively of typographical errors. I yearn to hear the idioms of my native tongue spoken. You remember that gorgeous week we spent with the Rousseaus six summers ago, or was it seven? Anyhow you must remember it—those quaint ruralists, those straightforward sturdy honest old mountaineer types, those characters redolent of the soil, those laughing rosy-cheeked children?”
“I seem to recall that some of them were sallow, not to say sickly-looking.”
“December’s winds will remedy that. December’s eager winds will—”
“How about servants? We’ll need somebody surely. And I doubt whether Emile and Eva would be willing to go.”
“Gladly would I leave behind those two whom you have heard me, in sportive moments, refer to as our Dull Domestic Finnish. Being aliens, they wouldn’t match the surroundings. No doubt some sturdy country lass would be glad to serve us.” Mr. Bugbee reverted again to the elocutionary. “We’ll throw ourselves into the Yuletide joy of the community. We’ll get up a Christmas tree. We’ll hang up our stockings. We’ll finance a holiday festival for the grown folks—it won’t cost much. You can organize a band of singers and teach them carols and Christmas waits. We’ll live and revel, woman, I tell you we’ll live.”
Before his persuasive eloquence the lingering traces of Mrs. Bugbee’s misgivings melted away. Herself, within the hour, she called up Mrs. Rousseau to inquire regarding housekeeping details in the bungalow on the slopes behind Pleasant Cove.
Their train got in at six-tenA. M., which in December is generally regarded as being veryA. M.indeed. But the Bugbees didn’t much mind having to quit their berths at five-thirty. The sunrise repaid them. There was an eastern heaven that shimmered with alternating, merging, flowing bands of tenderpinks and tenderer greens. Mrs. Bugbee said right off it reminded her of changeable silk. Mr. Bugbee said it reminded him of stewed rhubarb. He also said that when he reflected on the pleasing prospect that by coming up here they would miss the Baxters’ annual costume ball on Christmas night he felt like halting about once in so often and giving three rousing cheers.
He furthermore said he could do with a little breakfast. He did with a very little. Mrs. Bugbee had brought along a vacuum bottle of coffee and four sandwiches but they were rather small—sandwiches of the pattern usually described in cook-books as dainty; and the stopper of the vacuum bottle could not have been quite air-tight, for the coffee had turned lukewarm during the night.
They emerged from the smelly sleeper into a nipping morning. There was snow on the ground, not a great deal of snow but enough. The two adventurers rather had counted on a sleigh-ride through the woods but here they suffered a disappointment. A muffled figure of a man clunked in rubber boots toward them from the platform of the locked-up station. This was the only person in sight. The stranger introduced himself with a broad yawn and a fine outgushing of frosty breath.
“Name’s Talbot,” he stated when the yawn had run its course. “I look after the Rousseau camp winters. Boss writ me word to meet you folks. Huh, got quite a jag of baggage, ain’t you? I could go round theworld twice’t with less than that. Well, let’s be joggin’.”
He relieved Mrs. Bugbee of her two hand-bags and led the way to a bespattered flivver which crouched apprehensively in a maze of frozen wheel tracks behind the shuttered building, Mr. Bugbee following with a heavy suitcase in either hand and a blanket-roll swung over his shoulder by its strap.
“Likely you’ll be a mite crowded, but that’s your own fault, fetchin’ so much dunnage with you,” stated their guide. “You two had better ride in the back there and hold a couple of them biggest grips on your laps. I guess I kin wedge the rest of it into the front seat alongside of me. All set?” he asked. “Let’s move then.”
The car slewed on its tires, then settled deeply into the frozen ruts, jouncing and jerking.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier traveling with a sleigh?” inquired Mr. Bugbee, speaking rather brokenly between jolts.
“Don’t do much sleddin’ in this country any more—not till later, anyway, when the weather gits set,” vouchsafed Mr. Talbot. “A thaw’s liable to come and then where would you be with your sled runners? Besides, purty near ever’body up here keeps an ottermobile. Set tight!” he commanded. “We’re about to hit a rough place.”
But by the time he had uttered his warning they had hit it.
“Yes, indeed,” went on Mr. Talbot, “ottermobiles is come into quite general use. You folks ever been here before? Yes? Then prob’ly you remember the old Turnbull Tavern that used to stand at the forks over to the Cove? Well, it’s gone. Tore it away to put up a fillin’ station. We got two fillin’ stations—that one and one other one—and they’s talk of a third one in the spring.”
Above the obstruction of a suitcase which he balanced precariously upon his knees, Mr. Bugbee peered across a landscape which so far as the immediate foreground was concerned mainly consisted of vistas and aisles of stumps, with puddles of ice and spindly evergreens interspersed and a final garnishing of slashed-off faded limbs.
“My recollection is that the wilderness used to come right down to the tracks,” he said.
“Ef by wilderness you mean standin’ spruce timber, then your recollection is right,” answered Mr. Talbot over his shoulder and through the folds of a woolen throat comforter. “But it’s mostly been lumbered off for pulp. They’re figgerin’ some on strippin’ the ridges of the hard woods next,” he added with a touch of local pride for local enterprise.
The car took the first steep rise into the range, buck-jumping and slewing like a skittish colt. Frequently it seemed to shy from bump to bump. The task of steering engaged Mr. Talbot. He addressed his vibrating passengers but rarely.
“Got a party booked to chore for you,” he told Mrs. Bugbee over his shoulder. “Name of Anna Rapley. Widder woman. Had quite a job of it gittin’ her to agree to do it. She told me to tell you her wages would be twenty-five a week fur ez long ez you stay.”
“Twenty-five a week?” echoed Mrs. Bugbee rather blankly.
“That’s whut she says. Says it’s her reg’lar price fur a special job like this one is. Says to tell you to take it or leave it, just ez you please. Says it don’t make a bit of difference to her either way. Independent, that’s her.”
“Oh, I’m sure we won’t quarrel over the wages!” Mrs. Bugbee hastened to explain. “Of course she’s competent?”
“Oh, spry enough so fur ez that goes, but strictly between you and me, watch her!” He twisted his head and punctuated the speech with a slow, significant wink.
“Watch her for what?”
“I ain’t sayin’. I ain’t even hintin’ at nothin’. All I’m tellin’ you in confidence is—watch her. She’s a good friend of my folks so mebbe I shouldn’t ’a’ said that much. Just keep your eyes open, that’s all.”
On through to their destination there was silence between the visitors—the silence of two persons engrossed in inner contemplations. As for Mr. Talbot, he was concerned with restraining his mettlesome conveyance.
At their journey’s end, the bungalow where itnestled against a background of mountains half a mile on beyond the clumping of small houses that was the village, made a gladdening sight for the Bugbees, what with its broad front windows shining redly in the clear cold and a slender spindle of smoke rising straight up the air from the mouth of its big stone chimney. Mrs. Bugbee hurried inside to establish liaison with the widow who was a friend to the Talbot family. Her husband tarried on the snow-piled veranda with his belongings piled about him.
“Let’s see, now,” Mr. Talbot said speculatively. “There’s your fare over from the depot—we’ll call that six dollars even for the two of you. And two dollars more fur your valises, I guess that’d be fair, considerin’. That comes to eight. Then there was some odds and ends I done myself fur you yistiddy ez an accommodation—shovelin’ out this path here and so forth. That’ll be about six dollars, I sh’d say.”
Mr. Bugbee unpocketed a fold of bills.
“Hold on,” bade Mr. Talbot. “Then I got you in three cords of firewood at ten dollars a cord; that mounts up to thirty more. You’re lucky I ain’t chargin’ you full city prices,” he continued, studying Mr. Bugbee’s expression. “There’s some around here would, namin’ no names. But you folks bein’ sent on by Mr. Rousseau I’m makin’ you a rate on that firewood. Thanky.”
He accepted payment.
“Oh, yes, there’s an order of provisions in the house,too, but the account fur them’ll be rendered in your reg’lar weekly bills. I’ll make the deliveries without extry cost,” he promised generously. “Just call freely fur more stuff ez you need it. I run the leadin’ grocery down below, you understand. There’s an opposition grocery but I wouldn’t recommend no stranger to do his tradin’ there unlessen he checked off the statements mighty close. Well, good-by and see you later.”
Mr. Bugbee, mechanically holding a depleted roll in his numbed grasp, watched the flivver as it lurched back down the highway. “But at least the sunrise was an unqualified success,” he remarked softly to himself. He further comforted himself with the philosophies that first impressions did not necessarily count and that a poor beginning often made a good ending and that to all rules there were exceptions, et cetera, et cetera.
Lack of space forbids that we should trace our two sojourners step by step and day by day through the ensuing fortnight. A few vignettes, a few small thumb-nail views of them, taken in the privacy of their fireside, will suffice, this chronicler hopes, progressively to suggest the course of developments in pursuance of their ambitions for the happiness of the dwellers in that isolated hamlet of Pleasant Cove.
For example, an intimate little scene was enacted before the hearthstone on the second evening but one following their arrival.
Mr. Bugbee was wrestling manfully with a cigar of an exceedingly formidable aspect. That morning hehad made a lamentable discovery. It was that he had forgotten to bring along two boxes of his favorite brand of specially cured Havanas which were purchased expressly with that intent. His pocket case was almost empty when he became aware of the oversight. He looked upon it in the light of a tragedy; a confirmed smoker will appreciate how laden with tragic possibilities such a situation might become. He had wired for a supply to be forwarded immediately, but in these parts immediately might be a relative term. So to bridge over the emergency he had procured some substitutes from Mr. Talbot’s somewhat restricted stock.
It was with one of the substitutes that now he contended. He freed an intake of smoke and choked slightly, then coughed fretfully.
“It is called ‘Jake’s Choice,’” he said. “I read it on the box. It was an exceedingly beautiful box—a regular whited sepulcher of a box. I wonder who Jake was? Probably a friend of the manufacturer. But I’ll say this much for him—he was no customer! It may have its good qualities. It’s certainly very durable and it has splendid powers of resistance—fights back every inch of the way. But for smoking purposes it is open to the same criticisms that a rag carpet is.”
“Why don’t you throw it in the fire, then?” suggested Mrs. Bugbee. “When I came in here a minute ago I thought for a second the flue must be defective.”
“I’d have you know I’m not to be daunted by anenemy that I could crush—maybe—in the palm of my hand. Besides, it’s easy enough for you to give such advice—you with plenty of your favorite cigarettes on hand. But cigarettes are not for me—I’m what they call a man’s man.”
“Speaking of cigarettes—” began Mrs. Bugbee, but got no further. It would seem that Mr. Bugbee was not to be diverted from his present morbid mood.
“Now you take Jake’s peculiar Choice,” he went on. “I wish I’d had the job of christening this article. I’d have labeled it the ‘R. C. N. W. M. P.’”
“What does that stand for?”
“Royal Canadian Northwestern Mounted Police—to give the full title.”
“I don’t see the application.”
“You would if you knew the motto of that magnificent force—‘Always Gets Its Man.’” Again he coughed.
“Speaking of names, Anna—”
“You were speaking of cigarettes a moment ago.”
“I tried to but you interrupted. Anyhow, cigarettes and Anna are all mixed up with what I wanted to say in the first place.”
“You refer to our culinary goddess?”
“Of course.”
“Does she smoke?”
“No—never.”
“Then why drag in Anna’s cigarettes, if she doesn’t use ’em?”
“I didn’t. It’s my cigarettes.”
“Well, why then Anna as a factor in this discussion?”
“I’m coming to that. Speaking of names—”
“We are not speaking of names any more. Pray be coherent.”
“We are—at least I am. Speaking of names, do you know what she calls me? She calls me ‘Miss Fleeceyou,’ like that.”
“In view of the salary Anna is drawing down I’d call that a touch of subtle irony,” stated Mr. Bugbee. “But I see no reason why she should address me as ‘Mr. Clammy.’ I’m not clammy—I leave it to any impartial judge. I’ll not start complaining yet, though. I have a foreboding of worse things to follow. I foresee that when the feeling of formality wears off and we get on an easier social footing she’ll call me ‘Clam.’ I decline to be just plain Clam to Anna or anybody else. If I’ve got to be a clam I’m going to be a fancy one.”
“You drift about so! What I’ve been trying for the last five minutes to tell you was that Anna has been confiding to me that some of the older inhabitants are taking exception to us—to me, rather. It seems they’ve already found out that I smoke cigarettes. They regard that as sinful or at least highly improper. There’s been talk. She told me so.”
“I wonder how they learned of your secret vice!” mused Mr. Bugbee. “It can’t be that Anna is a gossip—heaven forbid! Have you been detected in any other shameful practice?”
“Not exactly detected—but, well, criticized. She tells me that certain persons, including one of the two ministers—the Reverend Mr. Peters is the one—have been discussing my costume.” She glanced down at her trim riding-breeches and her smart high-laced boots, which with her soft flannel shirt gave her the look of a graceful, good-looking boy. “And I thought I was dressed so appropriately!”
“I believe there is still a prejudice in certain remote districts against the human female leg,” said her husband. “Just what fault do the merry villagers find with your get-up?”
“One man at the post-office spoke of these”—she touched a slender Bedford-corded thigh—“of these as choke-bore pants. He said there ought to be a law against a woman parading the public streets with a pair of choke-bore pants on. He said it this afternoon and Anna heard about it and came right straight and told me.”
“Strong language for a minister of the Gospel to be using,” commented Mr. Bugbee. “Still, the comparison is apt. Choke-bore, eh? Not so bad for a backwoods preacher. The man has traveled and seen the world.”
“It wasn’t the minister, stupid! It was another man. At that the minister—I mean the Reverend Mr. Peters, not the other one—glared at me today as though hewere thinking unutterable things. I thought then he might be miffed because I’d been to see the other minister first. He behaved so—so stand-offish and sort of hostile when I told him about our plan for having a joint Christmas tree for both Sunday Schools. But since I talked with Anna I’m pretty sure it must have been my clothes he didn’t like. I’m afraid some of these people are going to be rather difficult, really I am!”
“I’m going to be a trifle difficult myself unless those cigars get here soon,” said Mr. Bugbee. “Say, they seem to be having unusually long and silent nights up here this winter, don’t they?” he added. “I never thought I’d become so city-broke that I’d miss the plaintive call of the taxicab mooing for its first-born. Gee—it’s nearly nine o’clock. If the lights in this house aren’t turned out pretty soon some unacquainted passers-by—if any such there be—will suspect the presence of burglars on the premises.”
It was on Friday afternoon of that week that a female villager called. She had a keen and searching gaze—that was the first thing to be noticed when the door had been opened in response to her knock. And the second striking thing about her was that on taking a seat she seemed to sink into herself sectionally rather in the style of certain nautical instruments.
The collapsible-looking lady stayed on for upwards of an hour. Upon leaving, she uncoupled joint byjoint, as it were, becoming again a person of above the average height. Mr. Bugbee, who after a mumbled introduction and a swift appraisal of the visitor had betaken himself to another part of the house, reentered the living-room upon her departure.