Helen, thy beauty is to meLike some Nicean bark of yore.
Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not the writing of such lines wasn’t worth living a life for.
Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember. One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt’s pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book he would repay the boy’s attention by saying, “You, my boy, are as far superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday afternoons.” And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much seriousness on his face, he would add, “And for the same reason. You have been, like him, under a master trainer of youth.”
One evening Sam, now grown to man’s stature and full of the awkwardness and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel at the back of Wildman’s grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that went on among the men.
Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane at Sam’s legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
“It is a theme that poets do well to write of,” he declared. “In writing of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a well-turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings most passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess of poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short, black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang. Admiring Telfer’s flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. “The night is too hot for eloquence,” he bellowed. “If you must be eloquent talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming pool.”
Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
“The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm,” he said, winking at Valmore.
Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick motion with her hand.
Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the banker.
At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had escaped her father.
“I told him I would go home with my sister,” she said, tossing her head.
Taking hold of the boy’s hand, she led him along the shaded street. For the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His tongue seemed paralysed.
Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head. Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him again and again eagerly.
Sam’s return to Wildman’s was marked by extreme caution. Although he had been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth. He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with wonder at the lighted way before him.
Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer’s barber shop, looked into Wildman’s. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy. There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough, “Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life.”
In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy’s slinking entrance. Indeed, their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the counter, smoked a cigar.
“You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night,” he said. “It wants but another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter.”
The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his agitation would pass unnoticed.
The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the country.
“I will continue this talk of love,” said Telfer, striking at weeds along the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over each other in the dusty road.
“That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. ‘Here! Here! Here!’ he cries, ‘you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a darkened room.’ Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand it—I would go to New York, to France, to Paris—To be wooed for but a passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art—uh—it is unthinkable.”
The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit, disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.
“I am not like banker Walker,” he declared. “He thinks of the growing corn in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, ‘The land is flowing with milk and honey.’ I am made happy by my thoughts not by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
“And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture. Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring in my voice to look at them. ‘These orderly armies has mankind brought out of chaos,’ I say to myself. ‘On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his home against the grim attacking armies of want.’”
Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
“Freedom Smith should hear me now,” he cried, rocking back and forth with laughter and switching his cane at the boy’s legs so that Sam had to hop merrily about in the road to avoid it. “Flung by the hand of God out of illimitable space—eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am wasted here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town.”
The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy’s shoulder, he stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted town.
“They are good people,” he said, “but their ways are not my ways or your ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat and lie—result—you will not be a little business man. What have you? You have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the town see nothing and you are tireless after those dollars—you will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.” Into his voice came a touch of bitterness. “I also was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not buy a farm and raise steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have the touch of genius without the energy to make it count.”
Sam’s mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and lighted a cigarette.
“As I promised, I will talk to you of love,” he said, making a wide sweep with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his face became serious.
“My foolishness is more than half earnest,” he said. “I think that a man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark, forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?”
The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
“If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old and undone.”
Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
“I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world’s great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week.”
Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
“My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me? Let me tell you. It has brought me to this—that at fifty I, who might have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
“If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman’s eyes and heard the pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman’s lips.”
The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith’s home and of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys’ and girls’ parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
“Now have a good time and don’t tear the house down,” they said, going off upstairs.
Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, “It is the loutish age.”
If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister’s affair with a young farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer’s speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer’s talk, thought that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.
“I will try,” he stammered, “I will try to be a man. I will try to not have anything to do with them—with women. I will work and make money—and—and——”
Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the ground.
“To Hell with women and girls,” he burst forth as though throwing something distasteful out of his throat.
In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits, came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. Hissang froidhad returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he cried joyfully, “We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed.”
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy’s incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of gain.
“It is money makes the mare go,” he said with a kind of reverence as banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of Wildman’s grocery.
Of John Telfer’s attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
“That’s right,” he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their achievements, “Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world! Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!”
And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted, “Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies asleep!”
Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
“It is the place for a live young man,” they said.
Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported them.
In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
“I will be richer than any man in town here,” he declared in his pride. “I will be richer than Ed Walker.”
Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger’s drug store a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.
In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
“Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon,” he said, pushing a paper into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. “Recipes for cooking new dishes,” he urged to the farmer’s wife. “There is a page of new fashions in dress,” he told the young girl.
Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day’s business.
And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
“I will take you into business with me,” announced Freedom Smith, stopping him as he hurried by. “You are getting too old to sell papers and you know too much.”
Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded his head as he hurried away.
“It is the end of romance,” shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith before Geiger’s drug store and who had heard the offer. “A boy, who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome by the thought.”
The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to Sam of the matter at length.
“For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,” he declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. “For any boy I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her.”
Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
“No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes many virtues that are forever on men’s lips,” he declared fiercely as though trying to down an opponent. “It is one of the virtues that proves man not a savage. It has lifted him up—not money-making, but the power to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into men’s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
“Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great wealth,” he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. “No doubt the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man’s city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying.”
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
“The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself,” he declared. “And the really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the very art for which he starves.”
After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught Freedom’s imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business, backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the cashier telling of Sam’s record as a depositor, and the seven hundred dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom, Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen the silent suggestive power of cash.
The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice, roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man, woman and child he knew and liked. “Old Maybe-Not” he called Windy McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in the top. To Sam’s knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying. Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton’s best streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing and roaring about it. “Good morning, Mary,” he would shout at the neat German woman across the street. “Wait and you’ll see me clean up about here. I’m going at it right now. I’m going to brush the flies off the fence first.”
Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the county.
Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine, several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the neighbourhood joined Freedom’s four and ran howling and shouting over and under the mass.
Freedom’s wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom treated him with great respect.
As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom’s purchases.
There is a little of Windy McPherson’s grotesque pretentiousness in every man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam’s day, farmers did not watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the men with whom he traded.
The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
“Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy,” he would shout to the loafers in the store.
Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom’s affairs, but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was through Freedom’s efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into larger affairs.
One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood taking the harness off his horse.
“Here is a chance for you, my boy,” he said, putting his hand affectionately on Sam’s shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom’s stable wishing that he also might be gone.
Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
“I will be glad to go,” he said heavily.
Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen. He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with regrets.
By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who, putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street, Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom’s hand and the slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand. At the front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on the gate and looking at the sky.
“We shall have a rain,” he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer went along a narrow path into the house.
The incident brought a smile to Sam’s lips followed by a kind of weariness of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky. The man was one of Sam’s old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman’s and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man’s life seemed to Sam amusing and in some way sad.
“To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to a day—to look forward to and depend upon that—what deadliness!” he thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big outside world to him.
In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought on by his mother’s approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful. The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
“I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer,” he thought.
The three years in Freedom Smith’s service had taught Sam not to doubt his ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother’s life had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon a dog and a thermometer.
“Indeed,” he said to himself, pursuing the thought, “it has been worse. She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing playthings.” The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother. During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her instead of going to Wildman’s to sit with the four friends and hear the talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the grass plot at the front of the house.
The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane’s illness continued to go off after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone, regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman and the wife.
“She has been the most wonderful woman in the world,” he told himself and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of Freedom Smith’s house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before her illness. Freedom’s wife had given him the picture and he had been carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he went about his work.
Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy’s mind. She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school teacher, and of her marriage to Windy—then John McPherson.
Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the town’s life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
“And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and unhappiness for me,” the sick woman had told her son.
After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into the sheriff’s hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and strutting upon the little stage.
“And all winter he did not send me a penny,” the sick woman had said, interrupting his thoughts.
Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth, the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote, touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she had been a fool to come.
At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
“She knocked him out, too,” he said, “knocked him cold upon the ground and then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town declaring her the finest woman in the state.”
In the darkness by the broken shed Sam’s mind turned from thoughts of his mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night when, getting a rig from Culvert’s livery, she had driven off alone into the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding ring.
Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. “What a sum it must have cost,” he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover, turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother’s eyes, but had pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.
“Don’t go telling,” she had said.
“Then don’t go pretending,” the boy had answered.
Sam thought that his sister’s indiscretion, which had brought her a babe and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and presently returned, bringing a daughter.
There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The thought amused and saddened him.
“You would have thought her safe,” he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of nervousness.
In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.
“My wife—my wife is dying. She may die any day,” he wailed, tears standing in his eyes.
The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to rain.
“He has got into the wrong street,” thought the boy stupidly.
Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother’s ironing board stood against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering in Sam’s heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate’s wedding, when Windy had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick with humiliation.
The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy’s anger. Sam began thinking again of his mother’s life.
The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now seemed utterly fruitless. “I would like to repay him,” he thought, shaken with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned his face and stared at the wall.
He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith’s house. Freedom had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.
A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the big dining room in Freedom’s house came back into the mind of the boy now sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had finished the table was bare.
How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.
“My mother never knew anything like that,” he thought.
The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking loudly—some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of the cost of school books.
“They change the books in the school too often,” he declared in a loud voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an audience. “It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I will not stand it.”
Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a message upon it.
“Be silent,” he wrote. “If you say another word or make another sound to disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the street.”
Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his pocket.
“A dog is dead, eh?” he shouted. “Well you’re getting too big and smart, lad. What do I care for a dead dog?”
Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
“I must not kill,” he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a stranger. “I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill.”
In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise, struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
“I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so little extra pressure,” he thought.
The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of drunken carousing.
“If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks now all the days of my life,” thought the boy.
In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road. Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.
“I will go for Mary Underwood,” he thought, his mind returning to the friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer’s tirades against all women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare head.
“We need a woman in our house,” he kept saying over and over to himself. “We need a woman in our house.”