In Our Town

Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising, drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which should have kept him like a prince; but it did not—though what he did with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning, someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala day—say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow—we had to put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and shove out the dents in his derby hat—a procedure which he called "making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of nicotine—as he called his plug tobacco—and put in his time at his desk with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or situation which held real relations with local events or home people. One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days after the Sinclair-Handy wedding—a particularly gorgeous affair in one of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother, as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner—Mehronay sat chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook before going out on his beat. It was headed A Dazzling Affair and it ran thus:

"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J. Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr. Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."

And thereafter followed this:

"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr. John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth. As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers—count them—six, ten bridesmaids—ten—a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba, made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at the unheard-of triumph.

"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted wraith through the hymeneal scene.

"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling, maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in the hypnotising picture."

There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here. However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was printed over two decades ago.

It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we suspected the truth—that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay appeared—but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.

We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr. Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them. He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive, or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back hair with their pocket combs, and he—never remembering the name of the particular ministering angel who fixed him up—called one and all of them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted, and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoölogy at the College, who is an evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.

One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.

"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it is."

The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.

"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."

With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the article that Mehronay left on the hook:

"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,' that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious young man, and they made a go of it.

"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you; it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers—one dead, one a porter in a saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to you with his bashful, halting speech, you just sit there and grin, and cut his heart to its core, for he knows you do not understand.

"It's rather up to you, Bub. In the next few months you will have to decide whether or not you are going to hell. Of course the 'vilest sinner may return' at any point along the road—but to what? To shattered health; to a mother heart-broken in her grave; to a wife damned to all eternity by your thoughtless brutality; and to children who are always afraid to look up the alley, when they see a group of boys, for fear they may be teasing you—you, drunk and dirty, lying in the stable filth! To that you will 'return,' with your strength spent, and your sportive friends, gone to the devil before you, and your chance in life frittered away.

"Just sit down and figure it out, Bub. Of course there are a lot of good fellows on the road to hell; you will have a good time going; but you'll be a long time there. You'll dance and play cards and chase out nights, and soak your soul in the essence of don't-give-a-dam-tiveness, and you'll wonder, as you go up in the balloon, what fun there is in walking through this sober old earth. Friends—what are they? The love of humanity—what is it? Thoughtfulness to those about you? Gentility—What are these things? Letteroll—letteroll! But as you drop out of the balloon, the earth will look like a serious piece of landscape.

"When you are old, the beer you have swilled will choke your throat; the women you have flirted with will hang round your feet and make you stumble. All the nights you have wasted at poker will dim your eyes. The garden of the days that are gone, wherein you should have planted kindness and consideration and thoughtfulness and manly courage to do right, will be grown up to weeds, that will blossom in your patches and in your rags and in your twisted, gnarly face that no one will love.

"Go it, Bub! don't stop for your pa's sake; you know it all. Your pa is merely an old fogy. Tell him you can paddle your own canoe. But when you were a little boy, a very little boy, with a soft, round body, your pa used to take you in his arms and rub his beard—his rough, stubby, three-days' beard—against your face and pray that God would keep you from the path you are going in.

"And so the sins of the father, Bub—but we won't talk of that."

Three months later, when the Methodists opened their regular winter revival, Mehronay, becoming enraged at what he called the tin-horn clothes of the travelling evangelist conducting the meetings, began to make fun of him in the paper; and, as a revivalist in a church is a sacred person while the meetings are going on, we had to kill Mehronay's items about the revival; whereupon, his professional pride being hurt, Mehronay went forth into the streets, got haughtily drunk, and strutted up and down Main Street scattering sirs and misters and madams about so lavishly that men who did not appreciate his condition thought he had gone mad. That night he went to the revival, and sat upon the back seat alone, muttering his imprecations at the preacher until the singing began, when the heat of the room and the emotional music mellowed his pride, and he drowned out the revivalist's singing partner with a clear, sweet tenor that made the congregation turn to look at him. Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine" with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he rose for prayers.

He came to the office chastened and subdued next morning and wrote an account of the revival so eulogistic that we had to tone it down, and for a week he went about damning, with all the oaths in the pirate's log, Dan Gregg and the College professor who taught evolution. But no one could coax him back to the revival. As spring came we thought that he had forgotten the episode of his regeneration, and perhaps he had forgotten it, but the Saturday before Easter he put on the copy-hook an Easter sermon that made us in the office think that he had added another dream to his world. It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write; indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their revivalist. But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that Mehronay wrote it. It read:

"The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving—a survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying for favour at the beginning of a new one.

"To the Christian world Easter symbolises a Divine tragedy. The coming of Easter, as it is set forth in the Great Book, is a most powerful story; it is the story of one of the deepest passions that may move the human heart—the passion of father-love.

"Once there lived in the desert a man and his little child—a very little boy, who sometimes was a bad little boy, and who did not do as he was told. On a day when the father was away about his business the child, playing, wandered out on the desert and was lost. From home the desert beckoned the little boy; it seemed fair and fine to adventure in. When the boy had been gone for many hours the father returned and could not find him, and knew that the child was lost. But the father knew the desert; he knew how it lured men on; he knew its parching thirst; he knew its thorns and brambles, and its choking dust and the heat that beats one down.

"And when he saw that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father, father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house where the little boy had played was silent.

"Then the father went to the desert, and neither the desert fire murmuring at his brow, nor the sand that filled his mouth, nor the stones and prickles that cut his feet, nor the wild beasts that lurked upon the hillsides, could keep out of his ears the bleat of that little child's voice crying 'Father, father!' When the night fell, still and cold and numbing, the father pressed on, calling to the child in his agony; for he thought it was such a little boy, such a poor, lonesome, terror-stricken little boy out in the desert, lost and in pain, crying for help, with no one to hear.

"And wandering so, the father died, with his heart full of unspeakable woe. But they found the wayward child in the light of another day. And he never knew what his father suffered, nor why his father died, nor did he understand it all till he had grown to a man's stature, and then he knew; and he tried to live his days as his father had lived, and to lay down his life, if need be, for his friend.

"This is the Easter story that should come to every heart. The Christ that came into the desert of this weary life, and walked here foot-sore, heart-broken and athirst, came here for the love that was in His heart. Who put it there—whether the God that gave Shakespeare his brain and Wagner his harmonies, gave Christ His heart—or whether it was the God that paints the lily and moves the mountains in their labours—it matters not. It is one God, the Author and First Cause of all things. It is His heart that moves our own hearts to all their aspirations, to all the benevolence that the wicked world knows; it is His mind that is made manifest in our marvels of civilisation; it is His vast, unknowable plan that is moving the nations of the earth.

"Whether it be spirit or law or tendency or person—what matter?—it is our Father, who went to the desert to find His sheep."

All day Saturday, in order to square himself with the printers who set up his sermon, and to rehabilitate himself in the graces of the others about the office who knew of his weakness, Mehronay turned in the gayest lot of copy that he had ever written. There was an "assessment call of the Widowers' Protective Association to pay the sad wedding loss of Brother P. R. Cullom, of the Bee Hive," whose wedding was announced in the society column; there was a card of thanks from Ben Pore to those who had come with their sympathy and glue to nurse his wooden Indian which had blown down and broken the night before, and resolutions of respect for the same departed brother, in most mocking language, from the Red Men's Lodge. There was an item saying seven different varieties of Joneses and three kinds of Hugheses were in town from Lebo—the Welsh settlement; there was a call for the uniformed rank of head waiters to meet in regalia at Mrs. Larrabee's reception, signed by the three men in town who were known to have evening clothes, and there was a meeting of the anti-kin society announced to discuss the length of time Alphabetical Morrison's new son-in-law should be allowed to visit the Morrisons before the neighbours could ask when he was going to leave. But when the paper was out Mehronay got a dozen copies from the press and sent them away in wrappers which he addressed, and the piece his blue pencil marked was none of these.

For many days after Mehronay wrote his Easter sermon the gentle, low, beelike hum that he kept up while he was at work followed the tunes of gospel hymns, or hymns of an older fashion. We always knew when to expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay—which meant an article into which he put more than ordinary endeavour—for his bee-song would grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle. When he began writing the music would die down, but when he was well under sail on his "piece," the steam of his swelling emotions would set his chin to going like the lid of a kettle, and he would drone and jibber the words as he wrote them—half audibly, humming and sputtering in the pauses while he thought. Scores of times we have seen the dear old fellow sitting at his desk when a "piece" was in the pot, and have gathered the men around back of his chair to watch him simmer. When it was finished he would whirl about in his chair, as he gathered up the sheets of paper and shook them together, and say: "I've writ a piece here—a damn good piece!" And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he would tell us in most profane language what it was all about—quoting the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the street.

As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual. And then the horrible report came to the office that Mehronay had been seen by one of the printers walking by night after bed-time under the State Street elms with a woman. Also his items began to indicate a closer knowledge of what was going on in society than Mehronay naturally could have. In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease Mehronay. For no one knew who she was.

Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue. Then for the first time in his three years' employment on the paper he asked for two show tickets! The entire office lined up at the opera house—most of us paying our own way, not to see the Macbeths, but to see Mehronay's Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean, Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us had seen before, a clean paper collar—and the boy, who probably was mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt—in a bundle which he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley—late in her forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two hairpins to wink—Miss Merley might have done it—but she had no kith or kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on the collar and tie, and as for the shirt–