Windy McPherson's Son

Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The minister’s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of which he got but one thought.

“Find truth,” he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind play with the idea. “The best men are all trying to do that. They spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.”

He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the interpretation he had put upon the minister’s words. The terrible moments in the kitchen followed by his mother’s death had put a new look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public affairs.

“He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour’s wife,” said John Telfer.

Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank—built to that during his years with Freedom Smith—he might soon become one of the town’s solid men.

He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train and be off.

One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.

A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed by two women.

“Here, watch these,” he said to the women, setting the bags upon the platform; “I will go for the tickets,” and disappeared into the darkness.

The two women resumed their interrupted talk.

“Ed’s wife has been poorly these ten years,” said one of them. “It will be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be train-sick.”

Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John Telfer’s old talks with him.

“They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.”

He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending shoes on a side street back of Geiger’s drug store and the two women, one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and were Eleanor Telfer’s only competitors.

“Well, the town knows her now for what she is,” said the tall woman. “Milly Peters says she won’t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm. Milly’s mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly says–”

The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.

“Stop it!” growled Sam, beating the two heads together, “stop your dirty lies!—you ugly she-beasts!”

Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin. Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.

“They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,” he shouted. “She tried to save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.”

The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.

“What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?” he growled.

Hurrying through the streets Sam’s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.

“To be saying that of her, of that white soul!” he exclaimed aloud in the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.

He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane McPherson’s funeral.

“It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,” he thought.

For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on their tongues.

In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes—only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.

In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” At their worst they are to be seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct. They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell—the call to the one being brother to the call of the other—crying upon the troubled air of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity, “The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul.” Along streets they go lifting heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal. Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity—and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.

Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the days before his mother’s illness and to get again the strong belief in his own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He didn’t succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and, turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: “I will go and talk to Mary Underwood.”

While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual, half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money maker, one without dreams.

Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the land at the end of winter.

“What is it, boy?” asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety. The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at herself and said tenderly, “You are an old fool.”

Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad station.

“Something kept telling me not to go away,” he said. “It must have been in the air—this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work. Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy.”

Mary Underwood laughed quietly.

“I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you a man at work upon the things of the mind,” she said. “The sense of privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer’s method was better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a flourish.”

Sam shook his head.

“Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,” he said stoutly. “Here is something at you—it is tearing at you—it has got to be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one way and we must take it. You and I will have to marry.”

Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.

“What a proposal!” she cried.

On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through the quiet night.

  “He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,”

she sang, and laughed again.

“You should come like that,” she said, and then, “you poor muddled boy. Don’t you know that I am your new mother?” she added, taking hold of his two arms and turning him about facing her. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t want a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and covered with mud. As for these women—away with them—I’ll face them down—I did it once before and I’ll do it again. Go to your city and make your fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman’s fight.”

“It is horrible. You don’t understand,” Sam protested.

A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood’s face.

“I understand,” she said. “I have been on that battlefield. It is to be won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would make the matter worse.”

The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.

“But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him,” she said aloud, putting her hand on Sam’s arm.

Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to play, but he could see no alternative.

“After all,” he reflected, “it is sensible—it is a woman’s battle.”

Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms and gave her a great hug.

“Good-bye, little Mother,” he cried and kissed her upon the lips.

And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her tears she called after him.

“Did you crack their heads hard, boy?” she asked.

From Mary’s house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the Caxton Argus, and roused him out of bed.

“I’ll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won’t cost you anything,” Comstock promised. “But why run it? Let the matter drop.”

“I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago,” Sam thought.

Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore’s suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter’s jewelry store. For an hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the counter Telfer made a speech.

“I will talk straight to that boy,” he declared, laughing. “I am not going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn’t make money in that Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him.”

Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along the street to Eleanor’s shop. He strutted through the display room and into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.

“What am I going to do, Eleanor?” he demanded, standing with legs spread apart and frowning down upon her, “what am I going to do without Sam?”

A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running from door to door along the street.

“I shall have to be adopting a new son,” he said musingly.

After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of his nightgown.

“On the night of my mother’s death,” ran the statement, “I sat in the kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth.”

Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks, who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of the news and advertising for The Argus.

“Ain’t that a slasher?” he asked, handing her the statement Sam had written.

“Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary Underwood,” she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with The Argus, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, “Poor Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any spunk they would finish the job.”

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom Smith, bought the farmers’ products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in Wildman’s, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.

In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the farmer’s widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose—the same John Telfer had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.

Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore’s shop as the blacksmith walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.

“What has happened to Sam—he has changed so much?” he asked, dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. “Already the city has changed him,” he added regretfully.

Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.

“He bites off his words,” continued Valmore; “he sits for an hour in the store and then goes away, and doesn’t come back to say good-bye when he leaves town. What has got into him?”

Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been hurled at him.

“If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all right,” he exploded. “He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it.”

For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing, hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money-maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.