CHAPTER ITOO EASY MONEY
Regardless of the chagrin the reminder often cost its womenfolk, the foundation for the Ruggles family “Money” had been laid in the junk business. Junk. Exactly. Junk!
Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swapped tinware with farmers’ wives for rags and old metal and never got cheated. From gathering old metal was but a step to melting it. From melting was but another step to finding a manufactured product. So an iron works had flourished following the Civil War and canny investments had done the rest.
Amos Ruggles, Gordon’s father, called himself a barrister,—not a lawyer, but a barrister! He maintained an expensive suite of offices in one of the most prominent Springfield buildings, but no one had ever heard of his trying a case and among his fellow attorneys he was considered more or less of a joke. He looked after the family “investments” and dabbled in politics. Six months of the year he spent traveling, principally in Europe, where he demonstrated what Americans are not like at home, even at their worst.
In appearance, Amos Ruggles was a tall, ample-girthed immaculately clad man with a certain over-clean whiteness about him, a whiteness that looked unhealthy. He suggested he had been kept away from sunlight until his flesh had become bleached. His thin, silky-fine white hair was combed from the back of his head forward, and he had a perpetually surprised look in his eye as though forever startled at finding himself alive and asking, “Bless my stars! Where am I, anyhow?” He had another look on his face, a look of always being on the point of saying something tremendously important but never quite bringing himself to do it.
His political experience to date had been but a single term in the legislature. Certain questionable “interests” who wanted a “perfect dummy” in the place had been responsible, not Amos’s solicitude for the welfare of the laboring classes and his brilliant defense of the Constitution, as he had always assumed. During this single term, his Bills were versatile if not always feasible. Among those especially demonstrating the man’s brilliance may be cited (1) A Bill—to mitigate social conditions by making it a penal offense for laborers earning less than a thousand a year to have more than two children; (2) A Bill—making it a criminal violation to alight from moving street cars while facing in the wrong direction. His bills were quietly killed in committee. Still, they were good bills and if they had gone through, Amos felt that he would not have lived wholly in vain. His intentions were good, at any rate, even if the execution of his legislation may have presented difficulties insurmountable.
Margaret Ruggles, his wife, was a Theddon and even as a girl had been so wealthy she could afford to be homely. She came from “Boston and Rhode Island,” as the local society reporters quoted it, making it sound like a railroad.
In later life Margaret Ruggles’s nerve was iron and hersavoir faireflawless. Rumor had it that she instructed Amos how and when to do everything, from selling United Fruit Common to changing his waistcoat. And a local grocer had a yarn about having sent a special team out to the Ruggleses residence to deliver three lemons, and Margaret had ordered the man to wait and take back two of them because cook had discovered there were already two lemons in the house. She was a close buyer and a difficult customer and yet young Gordon—only child of these two—was allowed, from earliest boyhood, to spend money like a Monte Cristo in knickers. At three he cried for the moon but was given the earth instead, and found it so absorbing that he never gave it back. Not even when other people wanted it.
Gordon had never gone to school three consecutive years in his life. He had never shown interest in anything for two consecutive days, in his life,—except fighting. Yet he even refused to make fighting a business, or he might have turned out a notable pugilist or worked his bellicosities off to some good purpose in the Army.
Amos and Margaret absolutely refused to credit their sonwith faults. They looked at him and beheld that he had a body, a brain, a temperament and an appetite. But faults? Not a one! He committed indiscretions, irresponsibilities, sowed a few wild oats, perhaps! But that was to be expected. Why should he work when the Ruggleses already had more money than they could ever spend? Besides, why should he work when he wouldn’t work and they couldn’t make him work, even if they wanted? That he would ultimately “go in for something” as his father had “gone in” for law—and foreign travel—was vaguely understood. But the insinuation that Gordon was one whit worse than a million other boys they would not tolerate an instant. The Ruggleses—second generation—had a queer outlook on life, one which it is perhaps difficult forhoi polloito understand: The world was their personal bootjack and any one who essayed to question that fact was a “disturbing element” and “a menace against established institutions.”
Nevertheless, Gordon at twenty-six was giving Amos not a little anxiety. While a few wild oats were expected of a boy to show that he was a boy and virile—in fact, Amos had rolled in a wild oat or two himself when a boy or when his wife was occasionally elsewhere—it didn’t necessarily follow that the son should turn wholesale agriculturist and rear elevators with the family money in which to house his disturbing grain crops. Not that it offended Amos’s sense of decency—the things he had to pay for, from broken china to broken women—so much as it affected the family prestige. It was time the boy calmed down, and the boy gave no symptoms whatever of calming down. He had, in fact, calmed upward considerably of late and grown a little out of hand,—if indeed he ever was in hand. Thereat Amos, like most of his type, looking into his own experience for solution, hit upon the brilliant idea that what Gordon needed most of all to straighten him out was a brainy, strong-minded wife. The very thing. Gordon must have a wife. Then a baby or two. If a baby or two couldn’t tone Gordon down then nothing could tone Gordon down. Amos would speak to his son about it.
Which, on a winter’s evening in March, 1915, he did. Gordon was talking about going to France and “guttin’ Fritzies” for the fun of it, and that must be nipped at any cost. Why, the boy might get shot. Amos was especially peevedat the Germans and the war, anyhow—it was making a continental colander out of all his favorite watering places and spoiling his annual trips abroad by filling the seas with submarines that actually blew people up. Not that Gordon cared anything about the moral aspects of the war. Such a venture merely promised a new thrill.
Amos called his boy into the big Ruggles library, had a Scotch and soda with him, lighted a big cigar and assumed a place on the hearth rug with one hand behind his coat tails. There he rocked on his toes and heels and became the Declaiming Parent.
“Marry!” cried Gordon. “Who the devil will I marry? Those I might marry I don’t want—I can have ’em any old day. And those I do want I can’t have, because they won’t have me. So damn all women, anyhow.”
“Tut, tut, sir!” cried Amos. “Your mother is a woman, understand!”
“Gad, so she is! Well, well! We’ll make an exception of her. Damn all the others—excepting——”
“I’d like to know,” declaimed Amos grandly, as he had expounded his two-child-a-family bill before the legislature, “I’d like to know, sir, where the woman is you might want that you can’t have? Tut, tut, sir! Do not let us fritter away our time with nonsense.”
“If you want to know straight, Pop, there’s only one skirt in these whole United States I could ever care two hamstrings for. But she’s about as interested in me as that Frances Willard dame would be to sit in on a bock-beer convention.”
“Ah! Then you have felt the possibilities in the grand passion? And may I have the lady’s name, sir? We shall see what can be done about it.”
“It’s that girl of Aunt Grace’s—Madelaine!”
“What, sir? What? The brat from the orphanage?”
“Believe me, Pop, she’s a long throw from being a brat. I guess you haven’t seen her lately.”
“Not for half a dozen years, sir, I haven’t seen her. Went to college, didn’t she? To be a lady doctor, or something?”
“She’s in Medical School now. She graduated fromRadcliffe this past June. And you can take it from me, Pop, she’sthere!”
“But, my God, sir! Do you mean to sit there and insinuate that a brat from an orphanage—a Nobody!—refuses to look with favor on the suit of a Ruggles? She cannot understand who you are, sir! You cannot have asked her seriously. Have you asked her, by the way? Have you? Seriously?”
“No. And I haven’t asked the King of Belgium to come over here and take a job driving my Stutz, either. There are some things that simply aren’t done.”
“But what has she against you, especially? Doesn’t the girl realize she’s a Nobody? Doesn’t she see how she could improve her social position by marrying my son—a Ruggles?”
“She doesn’t give a hoot for anybody’s social position. Not even her own. She’s class, Pop, with a capital C. If you could see her as she’s grown up now, you’d understand and close the door softly as you go out. I’ve got as much chance of making a hit with her as the Czar of Russia stands of being elected recording secretary of the Forest Park Home Improvement and Loan Society.”
“Do I understand you to say, sir, you want this girl—that you’d marry her, and settle down if she’d have you?”
“Will a duck swim?”
“We are not discussing ducks, sir. We are discussing women! This is most interesting and enlightening. We will look into this matter. Yes, we certainly will look into the matter. At once!”
Which Amos Ruggles at once set about. As John Alden for his boy, he was one of the most efficient steam fitters who ever tackled a job and had to go back for his tools while a boiler exploded.
Having nothing of larger consequence to attend upon, that week, Amos took a mighty trip to Boston to interview the “brat from the Orphanage” on behalf of his beloved offspring.
Madelaine, strange as the statement may appear, had never met Amos Ruggles. Rising hastily now from her book-littereddesk, she beheld her maid admit to her outer sitting room a very carefully groomed, white-faced, fastidiously caned and perfectly spatted elderly man who wore a red carnation in his buttonhole and a Facial Expression prepared for the worst.
But Madelaine’s interest was not to be compared with old “Am’s” stunned surprise when he raised his owlish eyes and saw “the brat from the Orphanage” confronting him from the opposite doorway. Subconsciously Amos had failed to conceive of that brat as anything but a brat. Certainly not a woman grown to maturity. Up to the moment of admittance he had looked vaguely forward to interviewing a knock-kneed child in pigtails and a gingham apron. He had once visited an orphanage while on a legislative committee. He had come away impressed that the crying need of the institution at the moment was to have its individual and collective nose wiped.
Instead of such a mite of parentless humanity whom he might pat on the head and suggest peanuts to, the man confronted a tall, perfectly poised, athletic young woman whose calm eyes made him wonder if he had rumpled himself anywhere in that hectic two-hour trip on the Boston and Albany.
For an instant Amos felt petulant. Persons unknown had tricked him. For Madge Theddon was grown into a “goddess.” The metaphor is Amos’s. And she “had a way with her.” Yes, she had very much of a way with her. One of her fellow students had described her: “Calm as a mountain thinking aloud; ineligible for analysis as moonlight playing on a nocturnal waterfall.”
“I am Madelaine, yes!” she announced in response to “Am’s” suggestion that there was a mistake somewhere. “You are my mother’s brother-in-law. I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ruggles.” She moved forward, extending a lithe, cool, capable hand.
Amos took the hand and kissed it, or he believed he kissed it, at the same time annoyed that she had called him her mother’s brother-in-law instead of her own uncle.
“Madam, charmed!” And Amos made another bow. But he was not charmed. He was bumped. He was badly bumped! There was not a doubt about it.
With an amused smile, Madelaine’s maid withdrew.Amos produced a billowy silk handkerchief and began patting various exposed portions of his anatomy. He ran out of exposed portions and then accepted the chair Madelaine indicated, still in his imbecilic daze.
“Y-Y-You may think it strange that I have called, Miss Madel—Miss Madel—Miss Theddon—it is about my son. You two have become quite well acquainted in the past, I understand.”
“Quite,” returned the girl. Her tone was a trifle ironic.
Amos was at a loss.
“Yes, yes! True, true—very true.” Came another distressing pause while Amos considered. “You see, it’s like this, Miss Madel—Miss Madel—Miss Theddon—getting along famously, are we not?—nothing could please his mother and myself just now more than the knowledge that he is married and—safely in the hands of some good and firm-willed woman. And so—beautiful apartment you have here!—I decided I would come down and talk it over with you.”
“I see,” Madelaine responded. “You’ve come to enlist my aid, perhaps, in finding a wife for Gordon. Or my advice as to how to proceed; which is it?”
“Well—er—in fact, a little of both and none of either.” Amos was happily growing more at ease. He stored his handkerchief in his outside breast pocket, left a couple of inches exposed, put his pink, manicured finger tips precisely together between his knees.
“The idea is this, Miss Madelaine. The boy is—well—the boy is—deeply impressed by yourself and—purely as a father—with a father’s paternal interest, understand—I have called to appraise for myself the extent of the gulf between you and—get you to consider the matter for—er—early negotiation.”
“What matter? Just what do you mean?”
“The matter, Miss Madelaine, of—er—becoming his—wife!”
Amos breathed once more. The worst was over.
Madelaine could not control the flush that crept toward her temples.
“Did Gordon ask that you do this?” she demanded.
“Not at all! Not at all! The idea is my own entirely—absolutely my own!” Amos inferred that as an idea itcertainly had its points and on the whole he was rather proud of it.
“Then Gordon knows nothing of it?”
“Not a whittle, Miss Madelaine, not a whittle.”
The girl sat for a time in silence. Her emotions were resentful. They wanted to riot. Her lips twitched once or twice. Then came a saving sense of humor.
“Just why should I consider a marriage with your son, Mr. Ruggles? On what basis do you rear that contention?”
“I—er—I——”
Madelaine pitied his sudden distress. For the first time in his life Amos Ruggles appreciated that any reference to the Ruggles wealth would be crude and insulting, before such a woman as he confronted now.
“He’s a—he’s a—mighty fine boy, Miss Madelaine!” was the father’s compromise.
“I apologize if I seem rude, Mr. Ruggles. But that must remain a matter of opinion.”
“You mean—he isn’t a mighty fine boy?”
“Must we discuss him—his good points and his bad?”
“But he has no bad points, my dear lady. Of course, during adolescence he has been virile and erratic and perhaps indulged himself in some few indiscretions common to all boys. Why, I have even passed through such a stage myself. But there’s nothing really bad about him—nothing but what a characterful wife could eventually eradicate.”
“Mr. Ruggles, has Gordon ever recounted how very ungentlemanly—in fact, grossly insulting—his conduct toward myself has been consistently—from the moment of our first meeting?”
Incredulity, a flick of exasperation, now passed over Amos Ruggles’s features. There was a certain trick of intonation in Madelaine’s voice which quashed irrevocably any argument that Gordon had not been ungentlemanly and insulting. And yet Amos was not quite willing to subscribe to that. And argument was cheapening.
“Just how has he acted—what has he done?”
“You really wish me to tell you?”
“I should consider it in the light of a very great favor, my dear lady.”
Madelaine considered. She leaned back in the chair andput two slender fingers of each hand at a temple, her dark eyes fixed appraisingly upon her foster-uncle.
Then she told him.
She began with Gordon’s conduct and language the day ten years before, when he had violated the privacy of her bedroom. That was insipid, however, beside the later indignities she had suffered. She gave a truthful account of each situation when he had taken her at a disadvantage, forced himself upon her, defiled her lips or tried to compromise her still more seriously. The night of the bogus auto accident became but an incident in that sordid recount. The most brazen piece of insult and effrontery had been a night in a Boston hotel when Gordon had followed her, secured a room next to her own and bought a mercenary night clerk to let him scratch the girl’s name from the register and substitute “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Ruggles” instead. He then added the consecutive room numbers as a suite. Cheap witnesses had been procured to substantiate that Madelaine had apparently gone to Boston, met Gordon clandestinely and shared an apartment with him for a night. With his citadel of crazy folly thus garrisoned, the foster-nephew had brazenly offered the girl the alternative of marriage or exposure, and only an astute lawyer had contrived to squelch the scandal without publicity.
Amos was dumbfounded. She waited for him to comment. But he held his peace. Then Madelaine laughed good-naturedly.
“And after such persecution—I hope you’ll permit me to call it that, Mr. Ruggles—ten or twelve years of it!—you come to me and suggest I marry your son because he’s really ‘not such a bad fellow, after all!’”
“Don’t you believe—a good woman—can reform a man?” Amos demanded quickly.
“That all depends on the man. In some cases, absolutely not. The material must first be there to work upon. As a general proposition, I consider it thankless nonsense. There may be some good men who have been bruised and buffeted and almost wrecked by life’s cruellest vicissitudes. They may have lost their moorings and their faith in human nature. All they require is kind and loving care, and tenderness and proper ministration to bring them back tonormal. In so far as that is ‘reform’, I believe it possible and admirable and well worth the effort. But taking a man who has never had a care or worry and whose career has been one long fling in self-indulgence, and endeavoring to make a man of him—the woman who will waste her time trying it displays evidences of imbecility.”
“Then I take it—there’s no hope—for Gordon?”
“I haven’t said so. I’ve said that Gordon, or any man who wants my respect and ministration, must prove to me first that, in popular language, he’s ‘got the stuff in him.’ I’ll say this much: When your son Gordon has proved to me he’s sincerely penitent and made of the material that perhaps hasn’t had a fair chance to develop, he stands as good a chance to gain my favor as any man. That’s all the ‘encouragement’ I can give. Just now I’ve too much to occupy my time to think of matrimony, anyway. It doesn’t enter into my plans. I’m studying to be a physician.”
“Yes, yes, I know! Very commendable. I wish Gordon had some interest in life—some——”
“I’ll even go further, Mr. Ruggles. I’ll say that all the vulgarity and insult which I’ve suffered consistently from your son will not handicap him if he turns over a new leaf and shows he’s really made of stuff worth while. In fact, I’d be inclined to count it in his favor, strange as it may sound. For it will be a criterion of what he has overcome.”
“Thank you,” said Amos. “Thank you very much!”
All the week that call of Gordon’s father perturbed Madelaine. Or rather, it accentuated emotions which the nature of her activities and the demands upon her time were forcibly keeping latent.
She had reached twenty-four and was still heart-free. Yet there were times when she distrusted herself. She wanted to shed tears without exactly knowing why. She felt herself groping out for a Something she could not give a name? Was it love? It troubled her.
She had met men, all types and varieties and temperaments.She had golfed with them, danced with them, ridden with them, crossed social swords with them at house parties and on yacht cruises. She had looked at them frankly and fearlessly; assayed them; asked herself with a cold brain if she could think of herself as wife to any of them,—with all which wifehood, to a girl like herself, implied. The answer had always been negative, from repulsion or indifference. She mothered them, she sistered them, she heard their troubles, she even allowed a few of the elect to flirt with her,—in a harmless, blue-blooded way. But as for meeting a man in whose personality she could abandon herself, whom she could tolerate beside her always, in every situation that life might hold, most of all in its great privacies, there had never been such a man. She wondered at times if there would be.
The young architect had gone to the Argentine. For a time he had corresponded with her. She felt a queer little pang and breathed a sigh when news came back one autumn of his marriage to the daughter of an American consul. There had been a young artist whom she had met in Paris. He had grasped her roughly in his arms one night and covered her face and throat with kisses. Strange to relate, she had felt neither insult nor repulsion. But she had discovered him a week later doing the same with another woman. She had laughed a queer little laugh and considered herself the butt of a rather good jest.
She and her mother had completed their world trip; had come back across America; and she had begun her college studies. She had counseled other girls’ love affairs. She had been bridesmaid at many weddings. She had beheld love in all its wealth of tenderness and idealism; and she had seen it defiled and degraded to brutish lust. She knew what love could do, that it was very beautiful and much to be desired. Yet she had a feeling that when she loved, it would be with a force and passion that would melt down the world—her world—and recast it. She must proceed carefully and tolerate no blunders.
The name “Old Mother Hubbard” still clung to her. She could not always approach her medical studies in that cold, impersonal way she felt was necessary for professional success. Human beings were always human beings, never biological cases for the application of abstract logic or theworking out of a theorem. At times she wondered if she were constituted to make a success of medicine, particularly obstetrics. She almost believed a course in nursing would have supplied that hunger in her heart to alleviate suffering. But there were so many nurses—the life was at times so proscribed and mechanical——
It was queer that Amos Ruggles had chosen that particular time to make his call. Because a month before, her roommate of the past year had suddenly abandoned her studies to become a wife, had written back from Japan how much her life had been changed and enriched, contending that the course which Madelaine had elected was unnatural and would never wholly bring her Woman Happiness. That hurt most of all. Because of late Madelaine had begun to doubt it herself. And yet, marrying Gordon! Anybody but Gordon!
The fellow had a dread influence over her. She could not describe it. It was cruelly mesmeric. It seemed to have persisted, in spite of all the man’s behavior, since the first day she had beheld his hot young gaze upon her. He had challenged her foster-mother that in the end he would win her, by fair means or foul. Consistently through the past decade he had kept in touch with her. Something in his eyes declared, “Fight as much as you wish, my pretty lady; I’ll have my way in the end.” Now it was plain that Gordon wanted her, as a man; he must have conveyed that desire to his family or Amos never would have made his call. If Gordon persisted long enough, would he break through her defenses and bear her away in spite of herself? No, no, no!
Romance! What was romance?
The girl went back to her study table and tried to continue her thesis. It was banal and lifeless and drab.
Romance! What was romance!
She threw down her fountain pen and cupped her cheeks with her hands.
Straight before her on the wall was a long, narrow, copper-hued frame. Inside it, a liberal expanse of brown mapping. In the center of the mapping was a faded strip of news-print.
Why was she saving that poem? Who was Nathaniel Forge and why should he write such a poem?
Unconsciously she read over the lines again. And when she had come to the name signed at the bottom, Madelaine Theddon did a strange thing, for Madelaine Theddon. That wonder who Nathaniel Forge might be, and why he should have written such a poem, started her thoughts romancing. That romancing crystallized in a concrete decision. What harm could there be in making a trip up to this Paris, Vermont, in the week of vacation beginning Monday, and learning what she might of Nathaniel Forge—even looking into his face, perhaps—provided she did not declare her identity or divulge her errand?
The more she thought about it, the more the novelty of the proposal grew upon her. She had saved that poem so long, it had meant so much, that she wanted that wonderment answered.
Could it be possible that Kismet had ordained that the poem purposely should find its way into her life for a beautiful purpose? She would see. Why not?
She put away her ponderous books with their long, italicized words and abstruse meanings. She would go to Paris, Vermont, that following Monday, telling no one.
Madelaine arrived in our town at four o’clock of a drab, depressing winter’s afternoon. The weather was treacherously balmy. The snow was thin, hard-packed and dirty. Paris in no other season of year looked less attractive or more mediocre. She alighted from the Junction train and walked down the length of the station platform with a little dread. Did she want to know about Nathaniel Forge, after all? Did she really want to see him? Suppose he was hopeless, that the poem had simply been a trick of circumstance and coincidence? Would it not be better to let him remain ever as she had idealized him, whoever and whatever he was, perhaps the One-Who-Might-Have-Been. Then she condemned herself for an emotional, sentimental little weakling, afraid to face facts. She wandered up Depot Street to East Main, carrying a light traveling bag, looking for the hotel.
In her trim tailored suit of green worsted and smallmannish hat, she resembled a hundred traveling saleswomen or demonstration women of the better class. Half a dozen drummers so “placed” her before she had been in the Whitney House ten minutes. With a room secured, she started out to see the town.
The town! She wandered up one side of Main Street and down the other. She saw a jumble of drab, discouraged, discordant, chaotic blocks and buildings such as border Main Street in every town of ten thousand inhabitants from the Presidio to Plymouth Rock. Its people were a painfully self-conscious, muddy-shoed procession of everybody not mentioned in Who’s Who and never likely to be mentioned in Who’s Who. The sky was smothered with depressing mist. It shut out the distant mountain sky line. The sordidness and commonness of the community grated—horribly.
A single-track car line wound through Main Street, not much caring whether cars went over it or not. The People’s National Bank, the Bishop Jewelry with the sidewalk clock that was never correct, Joe Service’s News Room, Edwards Brothers’ Cigar Store, The Red Front Grocery, the Michalman Misses-and-Ladies-Suits, the Bon Ton Millinery, the Woolworth Five-and-Ten, theDaily Telegraphoffice with bulletins about the latest developments on the Somme, the Masonic Temple, the Y. M. C. A., Williams Clothing Emporium,—a thousand towns had them and would always have them until America ceased to be. She was glad she possessed a sense of humor. And yet what a dispirited, uninteresting, plodding sort of existence. The plainness and crudity of everything bothered her. It was piteous.
She saw a greasy barber shop next door to the Élite Lunch Room with a fly-speckled sign in the window of the latter: “Eat Here or We Both Starve.” She caught glimpses of rakishly barbered heads moving about pool tables behind a foggy window filled with wrestling-match placards and announcements of dance carnivals. A basket of eggs marked “Fresh at 17c” was set down close to the glass in the window of the Metropolitan Drug Store. A small boy with an enormous fur cap clanked the iron tie-ring in front of a gift shop with a torn awning. A washed-out woman in a hideous hat waited in a sleigh while her husband smoked a five-cent cigar and then came to untiethe huge-rumped horse with his big fingers and take his place beside her beneath a ponderous buffalo robe. A long curb-line of carefully groomed young bucks with no place to go but home assayed her figure as she passed in front of the Olympic Movie and commented about her ankles.
She stopped in front of the hotel again and tried to decide what one thing was the keynote to the place and its people. She finally decided it must be the dilapidated Ford truck with a torn and dirty horse blanket thrown over its radiator. The truck was left, headed into the curb in a hay-strewn gutter, in front of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Store. A flock of pigeons about it were being extremely bothered by the sidewalk traffic.
Madelaine was neither prig nor snob. Yet she wondered how people could possibly pass all their lives in such a place. Especially she pitied the women. She went inside the hotel at last and found that the “Ladies’ Parlor” overlooked the street. Before she made any inquiries as to Nathan, she sank into one of the rockers. As she meditated, with a little ache of excitement in her heart, other scenes came to her,—scenes she unconsciously compared with the lot of the town’s women here. The first lamps of evening blinked on and found her still meditating.
The shape of a hansom clopping through the London fog; a careless laugh floating back on a French boulevard in the hush of a soft, spring night; evening on the Grand Canal with the eternal slap, slap, slap of the water and the memory of a weird song mixed with the musty decay of old palaces; blue-toned Greece where the landscapes were as clear and sharp as far-flung cameos of mountain size; the heat-soaked Holy Land; Sunday morning from the Mount of Olives; breakfast in a Persian camp; noon on a Chinese river; twilight and a Japanese moon riding mystic above eucalyptus trees,—what did the women of such a landlocked little town know of the world’s beauties and its far places? Or the men either? The men! Who was Nathaniel Forge and why should he have written such a poem? She wondered if she was beginning to understand.
She had no appetite for dinner—they called it supper up here, she supposed—at least in the dining room where all the first arrivals would leer at her. She went back down to the lobby and approached Pat Whitney, the proprietor.
“I wonder if you could assist me,” she said, “in finding a certain type of person in this town for whom I’m looking,”
Pat did not remove his two-inch toothpick. He did try to button his vest.
“Shoot, lady!” he answered.
Madelaine smiled to herself, then “shot.”
“I’d like to be directed to some elderly man or woman who has lived a long time here and is acquainted with most of the town’s people. Especially those who lived here about ten years ago. I’m hunting a friend. Yet I don’t want my business made public. I’d prefer some elderly, accommodating man——”
“That’s a cinch!” returned Pat. “Skin around the corner and see Uncle Joe Fodder.”
“Uncle Joe Fodder?”
“Yeah; he runs the livery stable. He knows everybody from way back, who their grandmothers was and what the family et for supper the night they was born.”
“That’s very good of you,” returned Madelaine. And she thanked him.
“I’m all yours, Missie,” was Pat’s rejoinder. He meant no offense. He dealt so with all the “lady drummers”.
Madelaine picked her way into the puddle-dotted, straw-strewn livery yard. A single light burned over the big stable door. Another shone through the murky windowpanes of a tiny office at the left.
Three men were in that office with a kindly old fellow who looked exactly as William Cullen Bryant might have looked if William Cullen Bryant had conducted a livery stable in one Vermont community for half a century. He wore a blue gingham shirt, patched trousers and soiled suspenders. But Madelaine liked his eyes.
“Mr. Fodder?” the girl asked.
Three jaws lowered. Three pairs of eyes stared. Three pairs of front chair legs clumped to the floor. Taking their cue, three specimens of bewhiskered humanity “hoofed along ’bout their business.”
“Mr. Whitney at the hotel sent me to you,” Madelaine declared when they were alone and the soft-eyed old philosopher had dusted a chair and pushed the “spit-box” from sight. “He said you were well acquainted in Parisand could assist me in getting information about a particular person who may, or may not, live here at present. My name is Howland—Allegra Howland—and I come from Springfield, Mass. But my visit here and my business must remain unknown. I’d like you to assure me you’ll keep it confidential before I go further.”
The old man stroked his whiskers gently and his blue eyes smiled.
“Pat claimed I knowed everybody, did he? Wal, wal! He does manage to tell the truth once in a dog’s age. What is it you want to know, daughter?”
“It’s about a man named Forge. Has such a man ever lived here in Paris?”
Madelaine caught the startled expression which for a moment chilled the kindly laughter in those lackluster eyes.
“Which Forge, daughter? Nat or the old man?”
“There are two, then?”
“Nat and Johnathan. Nat’s the boy. Johnathan’s the dad. Which you want to know about?”
“The one called Nathaniel. He—he—several years ago—he—wrote a poem. It interested me greatly. So much so I thought if I ever happened up this way, I’d stop and compliment the poet.”
“Pshaw, now! That’s too bad!”
“Why is it too bad?”
The expression of trouble deepened on the old hostler’s face.
“It’s been quite a spell since Nat writ poetry. His dad sort o’ discouraged it. Nat give it up.”
“He’s a young man, then?” Why did the girl’s heart leap?
“Let’s see, Nat was ten or so when he come to Paris from over Foxboro way. That was in ninety-nine. Now it’s nineteen-fifteen. That’d make Natie ’bout twenty-six at present, wouldn’t it?—yaas, twenty-six!”
“He’s still living here, then?”
“Yaas—he’s still livin’ here. Just now, we’re sort o’ sorry to say, he’s livin’ in jail.”
“In—jail!”
It was a diaphragm blow. Madelaine could hear, see, feel, but she could not move. “Why is he in jail?” she asked faintly.
“It’s a long story, ma’am. ’Tain’t exactly a pleasant one. You see, Nat come down here from Foxboro and his old man started a shoe place over next to the Red Front Grocery. Him and his woman always had trouble and I guess ‘twa sort o’ hell for the Forge kids. Nat went to school here a piece, and then was pulled out and set to work for Gridley to the tannery. Old Cal took pity on him, the boy bein’ a good sort o’ kid, and put him in the office. Nat writ poems just after leavin’ school. They tickled old Gridley. He got Hod to print ’em in theTelegraph.”
“Gridley? Why, I know a girl named Gridley! And she came from up around here, too. She went to school with me at Mount Hadley.”
“That’s the one! Bernice! Went abroad for a spell, didn’t she? Then married a millionaire feller from somewhere out Chicawgie?”
“Yes,” said Madelaine faintly. “Please go on! It was her father, then. And what about Nathaniel?”
“Well, Johnathan got sick o’ cobblin’ folkses’ shoes. Had a chance to buy Dink Campbell’s box-shop. Didn’t do very well till young Nat got stuck on a girl from A-higher. Commenced workin’ like the devil then, Nat did, to get a stake so’s he could marry her. Caleb coached him, I guess. Leastwise the town says so, and Cal ain’t never denied it. That was ’fore his woman, the Duchess, died, and Cal started travelin’. Anyhow, Nat worked like sixty down to the box-shop and planned when he was twenty-one he’d marry the kid from A-higher. It was sort o’ too bad. She give him the Grand Bounce, married another feller. Pore Natie got it square between the eyes the night he turned twenty-one. He was plannin’ on marryin’ her the comin’ Christmas. Rotten deal! Hurt him awful!”
Madelaine’s throat was dry. She nodded.
“Care if I smoke, daughter?” the old man asked.
“Please do,” begged the girl. He was that type of picturesque old fellow who looks at a loss without a corncob pipe. Uncle Joe pulled a package of black shag from his hip, took his cob from off his desk and for several moments meditated as he applied the shag to the bowl and tamped it hard with a gnarled forefinger.
“’Course,” he went on, as the match flame leaped several times upon being applied to the top of the pipe, “it’s onlynatcheral that Natie should ‘a’ been sort of upset and all. Still, we didn’t calculate he’d turn so quick and crazy-like, and pull off the stunt he did. I s’pose he was just homesick for a woman, his Ma being pretty much a jawbones and the home life at sixes and sevens. Anyhow, that very night when Natie learned the other girl had married another feller, he goes plumb to work and marries ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ eldest girl, Milly—the dumpy one that was always sloppy ’bout her shoes.”
“Married! He’s—married—then?”
“Oh, yaas, he’s married. Got a kid—girl kid! Been married—let’s see—been married better’n five year now. Kid’s pretty good size. Goes to school, I think.”
“Go on,” said the girl listlessly. “You said he was in jail.”
“Yaas—box-shop’s busted—high, wide and handsome.”
“Just how do you mean?”
“Well, Nat got going pretty good there, for a piece. He was working for a stake to marry the A-higher girl like I said, and when a kid’s got his back up to do something big for a girl, there’s times when a team o’ hosses can’t hold him. He was keen enough, too, for a kid. He’d probably come out all right if he hadn’t been sidetracked by marryin’ that dumpy Richards thing. Anyhow, he’d had the business incorporated and hittin’ the high spots and it was making so much money for a spell that lots o’ folks hereabouts bought stock. Bought some myself! But it reached its peak the first year o’ Nat’s marriage. Guess the boy lost heart. Then again, his old man give him trouble. What John didn’t know about business, any kind of business, would fill a dam’ big book. So they pulled and they hauled and they sawed, and with a baby comin’, the boy couldn’t very well break away. Then him and Milly didn’t get along—him bein’ a poet and she bein’ a cow. Taken altogether, the box-works commenced to slide.”
“And now it’s reached bankruptcy?”
“’Twouldn’t have gone into bankruptcy if old John hadn’t had one last walloper of a fight with his woman, and one mornin’ showed up missin’. The girl Edith—that’s Nat’s sister—she holds out for marryin’ a feller by the name o’ Dubois—French feller from Montreal. Folks objected, her folks. They objected so much she ran off with him onenight and the old man couldn’t have the marriage busted ’cause there was a fambly comin’. John’s woman got scrappin’ and blamin’ him for makin’ a mess o’ things generally and so, well—last week he simply pulled his stakes and blowed.”
“But why should they put the son in jail?”
“Wal, seems Johnathan got the idea from somewheres that because he was president and had started the business, it belonged to him, ‘specially the funds. He forgot there was stockholders been interested. He gets peeved and draws out a rotten lot o’ the company’s workin’ capital. Cripples it so it can’t pay its bills. He takes it with him, and God knows where he’s gone. The bank folks here certainly’d like to. The stockholders get together and bein’ pretty hot under the collar and all, they thinks Nat might blow too, and they claps him in the hoosegow. The bank puts figgerers ont’ the books and they found the shop’s been losing money for most three years—just eatin’ into its capital and eatin’ and eatin’. John’s skippin’ out sorter pulled down the temple. The boy’s helpless, ’cause they set his bail so high there won’t nobody go it, though they do say old Caleb in California, or somewheres, has wired he’d come back and lend a hand to straighten things out. But there ain’t much hope o’ re-openin’ the business. Won’t pay fifteen cents on the dollar. Feel like a fool about it myself. Had in fifty dollars.”
“And how does his mother and wife take it?” Madelaine asked. Not that she particularly cared, but she had to say something.
“Oh, John’s woman’s mad at the boy; she and Milly don’t get along. Then agin, Nat got into the mess by bein’ in business with his father—and Anna always did hate his father. She owns the Longstreet property up on Vermont Avenue—leastwise it was put in her name a while back and the courts can’t get it. She could go Nat’s bail if she would. But she won’t. She says it’s ‘good enough for him.’ Let him rot in jail a piece and think it over. Good revenge on John, Nat bein’ his son. It’s makin’ a heap o’ talk ’round the village. Milly—Gawd, she ain’t got brains enough to boil water; all she can do is wring her hands and weep. Folks say a chap named Si Plumb is shinin’ around her—used to be in love with her before she married Nat. ButI’m thinkin’ that’s talk. No, the boy ain’t got much help from his women folks. Never did have, for that matter. Sad case, sad case!”
“What became of the sister?”
“She’s off up to Montreal. Dubois got a job up there in a paper mill. Ordinary sort o’ feller—makes two-seventy-five a day, maybe.”
Old Fodder puffed on his pipe for a time. Madelaine could hear his horses munching their evening oats out in the low-studded stable. Finally she drew a deep sigh.
“Then I guess it would be somewhat embarrassing for me to congratulate him on his poetry just now, wouldn’t it? Satisfy a woman’s curiosity, Mr. Fodder. What sort of looking man is he? I’ve drawn a picture of him from his poem and I’d like to know how far I’m correct.”
“Fair-lookin’ chap!” Uncle Joe poised his shining pipe-stem in mid-air. “Had a fight with this Plumb who they sez is sashayin’ round his wife, just now—long time ago. Got a busted ear. Used to have fifty million freckles but them sort o’ faded out. Been goin’ about the village sort o’ seedy-lookin’ lately—guess his woman spent a pile, thinkin’ he had gobs o’ money. Got fair eyes, but sort o’ hounded-lookin’. Yes, fair sort o’ feller but kinda ordinary. Feel sorry for him myself.”
Madelaine laughed. She affected an indifference she did not feel.
“I’m awfully obliged to you, Mr. Fodder. This information has forestalled an awkward situation. And you’ll forget I came to see you, won’t you?”
“Sartin! Sartin! Stoppin’ in the place long?”
“No, I’m going down-country to-night.”
“Well, glad to metcher. Ever stoppin’ here again, look me up. Want me to say anythin’ to Nat ’bout you callin’, if he wins out all right?”
“No, no! It was only idle curiosity. He doesn’t know me anyway and never will.”
“Well, good night. And watch the ice in the yard. Mare broke a leg there Thursday. Dam’ nice mare, too. Had to be shot. Got twelve dollars for her hide. Good night.”
Madelaine went out again to Main Street. She strolled about for a time in thought. Her walk brought her in front of the Court House. Nathaniel Forge, the man who hadwritten the little poem that had meant much in her life, was down in a basement cell at that moment—two hundred feet away—ten thousand miles.
She entered the hotel and found she still had no appetite for supper. She asked what time she could catch a train back to the Junction.
“Find yer man?” demanded Pat Whitney.
“Oh, yes,” Madelaine answered cheerily enough. “The person I hoped to find isn’t here any longer.”
Twenty-four hours later she stood in her apartment and took down the copper frame from the wall.
“Married!—A wife and little girl!—In jail!And all the time I might have asked Bernice! Oh, well!”
She laughed and called herself a silly fool. She ripped off the backboard of the copper frame and extracted the poem. She found a photograph of her mother and cut it to fit. The frame restored, she picked up the mapping with the slip of news-print pasted thereon. She started to tear it. She did tear it once across. She had started another tear when she stopped. She smoothed the torn pieces out. She found an envelope that would hold them and tucked it away in a bottom drawer.
“Oh, why did I go?” she cried, as she turned once again to her work. “I shot my Bird of Paradise!”
She fell to thinking,—dry-throated, hard-eyed. So Gordon Ruggles wanted to marry her, did he? The rotter!
Romance! What was Romance?