Hempfield

How often have I heard him since that memorable time! He does it very impressively, with his right thumb hooked into the buttons of his vest, his beautiful shaggy head thrown well back, and his somewhat shabby frock coat drawn up on the left side – for it is his left hand that he holds so tremulously and impressively aloft – that mighty director of public opinion, that repository of freedom, that palladium of democracy, that ruler of the nation. Whenever I hear the Captain, I can never think of the press without trembling a little at its incredible prescience, without being awed by the way in which it soaks up the life of the community and, having held it for a moment in solution, distributes it – I quote the Captain – "like dew" (sometimes manna) "upon the populace, iridescent with the glories of the printed word." Nor do I ever hear him these days, especially in his moments of biting irony, when he considers those "contemners of the Press" (mostly Democrats) who never tire of "nefarious practices," without thinking of that first morning I spent in the printing-office – and the look in Anthy's eyes.

Events after the departure of the mild-eyed Bucky moved swiftly. Anthy walked down the room, and Fergus, after hesitating for a moment, followed her. I suppose I should have departed promptly, but I couldn't – I simply couldn't. After the solitude of my farm and my thoughts, I cannot tell how fascinating I found these stirring events.

The little drama which followed was all perfectly clear to me, though I heard not a word, except the last exclamation. As Fergus followed Anthy, he drew a lean tobacco bag slowly out of his hip pocket – and thrust it quickly back again, hesitated, then spoke to Anthy. She shook her head vigorously, and stood up very straight and still. Fergus's hand went back to his pocket again, hesitated, plunged in. He took a bill from the lean bag and fumbled it in his hand. Every line in Anthy's firm body said no. She looked out of the window expectantly. Fergus's looks followed hers. It was evident that they both expected and desired something very much.

"There he is now!" exclaimed Anthy, and that was the exclamation I heard.

He didn't come in crying "Fudge!" as I half expected, but it was none the less a dramatic moment for me. I heard the preliminary thump, thump, of his cane on the porch. I heard him clear his throat stentoriously, as was his custom, and then the Captain, stepping in, looked about him with a benignant eye.

"Anthy, Anthy," he called. "Where are you, Anthy?"

"Here, Uncle! Glad to see you. The insides are at the station, and we need – "

"Anthy," interrupted the Captain, impressively waving his hand, "I have determined upon one thing."

He took off his broad-brimmed hat, and, having with some determination forced the cat from the editorial chair, sat down. There was evidently something unusual on his mind. He sat up straight, resting one hand, which was seen to hold a paper-covered parcel, upon the edge of the desk. If he saw me at all, he gave no sign. I have never thought he saw me.

"Anthy – "

He paused a moment, very dignified. Anthy said nothing.

"I have determined," he continued, "that we must economize."

A swift flash swept over Anthy's expressive face, whether of sympathy or amusement I could not tell. I never knew a time in Anthy's life, even when the heavy world rested most heavily upon her (except once), when she wasn't as near to laughter as she was to tears. She had the God-given grace of seeing that every serious thing in life has a humorous side.

"You're right, Uncle – especially this very morning – "

"Yes, Anthy," he again interrupted, as though he couldn't afford to be diverted by immediate considerations. "Yes, we must economize sharply. Times are not what they were when your father was alive. 'Wealth accumulates and men decay.' The country press is being strangled, forced to the wall by the brute wealth of the city. The march of events – "

"Yes, Uncle."

He stopped in the midst of his flight and repeated:

"We must economize —and I've begun!"

He said it with great dramatic force, but the effect on Anthy was not what an unprejudiced observer might have expected. I thought she looked a bit alarmed.

The Captain cleared his throat, and said with impressive deliberation:

"I've given up smoking cigars!"

Anthy's laugh was clear and strong.

"You have!" she exclaimed.

"And from now on," said the Captain, still very serious, "I shall smoke a pipe."

With that he took notice for the first time of the package in his hand. It contained a case, which he opened slowly.

"Isn't it a beauty?" he said, holding up a new briar pipe.

"Yes," she replied faintly; "but, Uncle, how did you get it?"

He cleared his throat.

"One must make a beginning," he said; "economy is positively necessary. I bought it."

"Uncle, you didn't spend Frank Toby's subscription for a pipe!"

The Captain looked a little offended.

"Anthy, it was a bargain. It was marked down from two dollars."

Anthy turned partly aside, quite unconscious of either Fergus or me, and such a look of discouragement and distress swept over her face as I cannot describe. But it was only for an instant. The Captain was still holding up the pipe for her admiration. She laid her hand again quickly on his shoulder.

"It is a beauty," she said.

"I knew you'd like it," exclaimed the Captain benevolently. "When I saw it in the window I said, 'Anthy'd like that pipe.' I knew it. So I bought it."

"But, Uncle – how we did need the money this morning of all mornings! The insides are here, we must have them – "

"So I say," said the Captain with great firmness, "we must economize sharply. And I've begun. Let's all get down now to work. Fergus, I've answered the fellow on the Sterling Democrat. I've left nothing of him at all – not a pinfeather."

With that he took a new pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and began to fill his new pipe. The cat rubbed familiarly against his leg.

Silence in the office, interrupted a moment later by the second appearance of that villain, Bucky Penrose, who thrust his head in the door and called out:

"Lend a hand, Fergus. I got the insides."

Fergus looked at Anthy. She had grown pale.

"Go on, Fergus."

It is this way with me, that often I think of the great thing to do after I get home and into bed. But it came to me suddenly – an inspiration that made me a little dizzy for a moment – and I stepped into the story.

"I forgot a part of my errand," I said, "when we were – interrupted. I want to subscribe to your paper, right away."

Anthy looked at me keenly for a moment, her colour slowly rising.

"Whom shall we send it to?" she asked in the dryest, most businesslike voice, as though subscriptions were flowing in all the time.

For the life of me I couldn't think of anybody. I never was more at sea in my life. I don't know yet how it occurred to me, but I said, suddenly, with great relief:

"Why, send it to Doctor McAlway."

"He is already a subscriber, one of our oldest," she responded crisply.

We stood there, looking at each other desperately.

"Well," said I, "send it – send it to my uncle – in California."

At that Anthy laughed; we both laughed. But she was evidently very determined.

"I appreciate – I know," she began, "but I can't – "

"See here," I said severely. "You're in the newspaper business, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Then I propose to subscribe for your paper. I demand my rights. And besides" – it came to me with sudden inspiration – "I must have, immediately, a thousand envelopes with my name printed in the corner."

With that I drew my pocketbook quickly from my pocket and handed her a bill. She took it doubtfully – but at that moment there was a tremendous bump on the porch, and the voice of Fergus shouting directions. When the two men came in with their burden I was studying a fire insurance advertisement on the wall, and Anthy was stepping confidently toward the door.

I wish I could picture the look on Fergus's face when Bucky presented his book and Anthy gave him a bill requiring change. Fergus stood rubbing one finger behind his ear – a sign that there were things in the universe that puzzled him.

While these thrilling events and hairbreadth escapes had been taking place, while the doomed Star was being saved to twinkle for another week, the all-unconscious Captain had been sitting at his desk rumbling and grumbling as he opened the exchanges. This was an occupation he affected greatly to despise, but which he would not have given over for the world. By the time he had read about a dozen of his esteemed contemporaries he was usually in a condition in which he could, as he himself put it, "wield a pungent pen." He had arrived at that nefarious sheet, the Sterling Democrat, and was leaning back in his chair reading the utterly preposterous lucubrations of Brother Kendrick, which he always saved to the last to give a final fillip to his spirits. Suddenly he dashed the paper aside, sat up straight, and cried out with tremendous vigour:

"Fudge!"

It was glorious; it came quite up to my highest expectations. But somehow, at that moment, it was enough for me to see and hear the Captain, without getting any better acquainted. I wasn't sure, indeed, that I cared to know him at all. I didn't like his new pipe – which shows how little I then understood the Captain!

As I was going out, for even the most interesting incidents must have an end, I stepped over and said to Anthy in a low voice:

"I'll see that you get the address of – my uncle in California."

CHAPTER III

ANTHY

It is one of the strange things in our lives – interesting, too – what tricks our early memories play us. What castles in fairyland they build for us, what never-never ships they send to sea! To a single flaming incident imprinted upon our consciousness by the swift shutter of the soul of youth they add a little of that-which-we-have-heard-told, spice it with a bit of that-which-would-be-beautiful-if-it-could-have-happened, and throw in a rosy dream or two – and the compound, well warmed in the fecund soil of the childish imagination, becomes far more real and attractive to us than the drab incidents of our grown-up yesterdays.

Long afterward, when we had become much better acquainted, Anthy told me one day, very quietly, of the greatest memory of her childhood. It was of something that never could have happened at all; and yet, to Anthy, it was one of the treasured realities of her life, a memory to live by.

She was standing at the bedside of her mother. She remembered, she said, exactly how her mother looked – her delicate, girlish face, the big clear eyes, the wavy hair all loose on the pillow. They had just placed the child in her arms, and she was drawing the small bundle close up to her, and looking down at it, and crying. It was the crying that Anthy remembered the best of all.

And the child that Anthy saw so clearly was Anthy herself – and this was the only memory she ever had of her mother. That poor lady, perhaps a little tired of a world too big and harsh for her, and disappointed that her child was not a son whom she could name Anthony, after its father, tarried only a week after Anthy was born.

"You see," said Anthy, "I was intended to be a boy."

After that, Anthy remembered a little girl, a very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the stairs. There were curious urns filled with flowers on the wall paper, and her two friends, Richard and Rachel, came out of the wall near the dining-room door and looked through the stair spindles at her. Rachel had lovely curly hair and Richard wore shiny brass buttons on his jacket, and made faces. She used to whisper to them between the spindles, and whenever any one came they went back quickly through the wall. She liked Rachel better than Richard.

There was a time later when her hero was Ivanhoe – just the name, not the man in the book. She read a great deal there in the lonely house, and her taste in those years ran to the gloomy and mysterious. The early chapters of an old book called "Wuthering Heights" thrilled her with fascinated interest, and she delighted in "Peter Ibbetson." Sometimes she would take down the volume of Tennyson in her father's library and, if the light was low, read aloud:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood

As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.

Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the parlour.

Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office through the golden haze of later events.

It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.

Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper: "John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."

Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events, just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep way – for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the ideal – these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she loved with all the devotion of her young soul.

He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life well – all of it – and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.

"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.

He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.

As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her father had written them).

"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."

He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by the window in his long apron, a composing stick in his hand, with the tears rolling unheeded down his face.

I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, passed through the fire of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier – he was too young at the time – the most impressionable years of his boyhood were saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them, the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's assassination.

There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and another over the mantel in the dining-room – the one that played so important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.

Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his throat:

You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier;You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,Broad for the self-complaisant British sneer,His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,His lack of all we prize as debonair,Of power or will to shine, or art to please…

When he had finished reading, he would take off his spectacles and wipe them, and say to Anthy:

"Lincoln was the greatest man this country has ever produced."

He was a curious combination of hardheadedness, of ironical wisdom, and of humour, and somewhere, hidden deep within, of molten sentiment. He was a regular Yankee.

One night he got more than ordinarily tired, and just stopped. They found him in bed the next morning, his legs drawn up under the coverlet, a volume of Don Quixote open on his knees, his empty pipe fallen from his lips, the lamp dying out on a table near him. At his elbow were two of the inevitable yellow slips:

Squire Baker of Arnoville was a visitor at Lawyer Perkins's on MondayApples stopped yesterday at Banks's store at 30 cents a peck – on their way up (adv)

He never knew what a hero he was: he had made a living for thirty years out of a country newspaper.

Anthy came home from college to the forlorn and empty and ugly house – and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. This period of loneliness made a deep impression upon her later years. When at last she could bear to open the envelope labelled: "To Anthy – in case of my death," she found this letter:

Dear Anthy: I am leaving the Star to you. There is nothing else except the homestead – and the debts. Do what you like with all of them – but look after your Uncle Newt.

Now, Anthy's earliest memories were bound up with the printing-office. There was never a time that she did not know the smell of printer's ink. As a child she had delighted to tip over the big basket and play with the paper ribbons from the cutting machine. Later, she had helped on press days to fold and label the papers. She was early a pastmaster in the art of making paste, and she knew better than any one else the temperamental eccentricities of the old-fashioned Dick labeller. She could set type (passably) and run the hand press. But as for taking upon herself the activities of her tireless father – who was at once editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, advertising solicitor, and father confessor for the community of Hempfield – she could not do it. There is only a genius here and there who can fill the high and difficult position of country editor.

The responsibility, therefore, fell upon the Captain, who for so many years had been the titular and ornamental editor of the Star. It was the Captain who wrote the editorials, the obituaries, and the "write-ups," who attended the political conventions, and was always much in demand for speeches at the Fourth of July celebrations.

But, strangely enough, although the Star editorials sparkled with undimmed lustre, although the obituaries were even longer and more wonderful than ever before – so long as to crowd out some of the items about Johnny Gorman's pigs and Mrs. Hopkins's visits to her sister, although the fine old Captain worked harder than ever, the light of the luminary of Hempfield grew steadily dimmer. Fergus saw it early and it distressed his Scotch soul. Anthy felt it, and soon the whole town knew of the decay of the once thrifty institution in the little old printing-office back from the street. Brother Kendrick, of that nefarious rag, the Sterling Democrat, even dared to respond to one of the Captain's most powerful and pungent editorials with a witticism in which he referred to the Weakly Star of Hempfield, and printed "Weakly" in capital letters that no one might miss his joke.

It was at this low stage in the orbit of the Star that I came first to the printing-office, trying to discover the man who could shout "Fudge" with such fine enthusiasm – and found myself, quite irresistibly, hitching my wagon to the Star.

CHAPTER IV

ENTER MR. ED SMITH

It is only with difficulty thus far in my narrative that I have kept Norton Carr out of it. When you come to know him you will understand why. He is inseparably bound up with every memory I have of the printing-office. The other day, when I was describing my first visit to the establishment of Doane & Doane, I kept seeing the figure of Nort bending over the gasoline engine. I kept hearing him whistle in the infectious low monotone he had, and when I spoke of the printing press I all but called it "Old Harry" (Nort christened the ancient Hoe press, Old Harry, which every one adopted as being an appropriate name). I even half expected to have him break out in my pages with one of his absurd remarks, when I knew well enough that he had no business to be in the story at all. He hadn't come yet, and Anthy and Fergus and the old Captain were positively the only ones there.

But Nort, however impatient he may be getting, will have to wait even a little while yet, for notable events were to occur in the printing-office just before he arrived, without which, indeed, he never could have arrived at all. If it had not been for the ploughing and harrowing of Ed Smith, painful as it was to that ancient and sedate institution, the Hempfield Star, there never would have been any harvest for Norton Carr, nor for me, nor for Anthy. So good may come even out of evil.

As I narrate these preliminary events, however, you will do well to keep in your thought a picture of Nort going about his pleasures – I fear, at that time, somewhat unsteadily – in the great city, not knowing in the least that chance, assisted by a troublesome organ within called a soul, was soon to deposit him in the open streets of a town he had never heard of in all his life, but which was our own familiar town of Hempfield.

The thought of Nort looking rather mistily down the common – he was standing just in front of the Congregational Church – and asking, "What town am I in, anyhow?" lingers in my memory as one of the amusing things I have known.

Late in June I began to feel distinctly the premonitory rumblings and grumblings of the storm which was now rapidly gathering around the Star. It was a very clever Frenchman, I believe – though not clever enough to make me remember his name – who, upon observing certain disturbances in the farther reaches of the solar system, calculated by sheer mathematical genius that there was an enormous planet, infinitely distant from the sun, which nobody had yet discovered.

It was thus by certain signs of commotion in one of its issues that I recognized a portentous but undiscovered Neptune, which was plainly disturbing the course of the Star. A big new advertisement stared at me from the middle of the first page, and there was a certain crisp quality in some of the reading notices – from which the letters "adv" had been suspiciously omitted – the origin of which I could not recognize. The second week the change was even more marked. There were several smart new headings: "Jots and Tittles from Littleton," I remember, was one of them, and even the sanctity of the editorial column had been invaded with an extraordinary production quite foreign to the Captain's pen. It was entitled: