In Our Town

But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to church every Sunday evening—the Presbyterian church, mind you, where there is no foolishness—and that after church Mehronay always spent exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met upon the street. He always called her sister.

And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps—and now we know—that he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:

"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond—the bond of fear and sympathy and sorrow—than any other item has done for a long time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fé, and the mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night, when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined—either dead or living—and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.

"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver.

"And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands about it and go down—forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best. It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also eternal.

"It is a desperately lonely home, that Yengst home, with the little girl gone away on a long journey; but how tight and close other fathers and mothers hugged their little ones last night when their hearts came back from the house of sorrow. And the little ones, feeling no fear, unconscious of the pang of terror that was shooting through the souls about them—the children played on, and maybe, before dropping to sleep, wondered a little at anxious looks they saw in grown-up eyes.

"This is the faith of a little child, curious but implicit, in the goodness of those things outside one's self. And 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'"

A day or so after the wedding someone said to him: "Mehronay, sometimes your pieces make me cry," and he replied with all the fine sincerity of his heart showing in his eyes: "Yes—and if you only knew how they make me cry! Sometimes when I have written one like—like that—I go to my bed and sob like a child." He turned and walked away, but he came into the office whistling "The Dutch Company."

After his wedding we made brave, in a sly way, to rail at Mehronay about his love affair, and he took it good-naturedly. He knew the situation just as it was; his sense of humour allowed him no false view of the matter. One afternoon when the paper was out, George Kirwin, the foreman, and one of the reporters and Mehronay were in the back room leaning against the imposing-stones looking over the paper, when Kirwin said: "Say, Mehronay, how did you get yourself screwed up to ask her?"

It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay looked at the floor in a study as he said:

"Well, to be honest—damfino if I ever did—just exactly." He smiled reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'—I called her that for short—'why in the devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned if I don't believe I will.'"

He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into her mouth she would have strangled him—even then.

We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding. Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to New York—which they sometimes do—they visit with Mehronay at his office, and sometimes—if there is time for due and proper notice of the function in writing—there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches their pockets for the tempter.

Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work, writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song—so that men do not like to room with him at the office—and has learned to keep himself fairly well buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was—who used to edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York—told us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.

It was not for him!

XVIII

Sown in Our Weakness

When one comes to know an animal well—say a horse or a cow or a dog—and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men, and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole town knew what he was.

Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin, whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office, was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.

Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the girls—which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have worked in the shop—that they were girls we were proud of—all but Ethelwylde Swaney.

She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red Martin—which was her own mistake—this habit of blaming others for her faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her; also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily. Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands—she was eternally drying her hands—and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from his work to help her—and then there would be more conversation.

But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a comma and a period—though she never really learned; and we were still patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out that night in a gust of musk—in her picture hat and sweeping cloak, with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing—and the office knew her no more forever.

About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark stairway on South Main Street.

When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and forever talking about their "latest."

It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another we had kept track of the girl—sometimes through her father, who, being a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers made him a storage battery of social information.

It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother was a Rutherford—a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney, who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!

But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon, wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work, looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her, and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But," added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every kitten becomes a cat."

The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to watch her out of sight

From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty dollars—the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the town's history—he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather, and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning, still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main Street.

The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children. Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls, and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she used to devote to her clothes.

Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else who seemed to make her story possible.