Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been
at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with
her father and a man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle
factory. The three got out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see
Hugh's new invention, the hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named
Alfred Buckley went to the rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone
with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer gown and her cheeks
were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench near an open window and listened
while she talked of how much the town had changed in the three years she
had been away. “It is your doing, every one says that,” she declared.
Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began
asking questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. “When
everything is done by machines, what are people to do?” she asked. She
seemed to take it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply
on the subject of industrial development, a subject on which Kate
Chanceller had often talked during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh
spoken of as one who had a great brain, she wanted to see the brain at
work.
Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry
Clara. In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the
farmhouse and talked of the town and the big things that were to be done
there. They spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow
with a long jaw and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City,
suggested schemes for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan
on foot to get control of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an
advantage over Steve Hunter.
The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry
him and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal
thing, not at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a
partner for life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined
upon marriage. The New York man was at her father's house several
evenings every week. She had never walked about with him nor had they in
any way come close to each other. He seemed too much occupied with work
to be personal and had proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara
got the letter from the post-office and it upset her so that she felt
she could not for a time go into the presence of any one she knew. “I am
unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am
new here and you do not know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of
proving my merit. I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and
ask you to do me so great an honor I feel I must prove myself worthy,”
the letter said.
Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and
later got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into
the hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The
horse jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every
cross road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When
she reached the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into
the barnyard and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after
a moment's conversation having nothing to do with the subject that
occupied both their minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the
matter out. She became convinced that her father had something to do
with the proposal of marriage that he knew about it and had waited for
her to come home in order to see how it had affected her.
Clara wrote a reply that was as non-committal as the proposal itself.
“I do not know whether I want to marry you or not. I will have to become
acquainted with you. I however thank you for the offer of marriage and
when you feel that the right time has come, we will talk about it,” she
wrote.
After the exchange of letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father's
house more often than before, but he and Clara did not become better
acquainted. He did not talk to her, but to her father. Although she
did not know it, the rumor that she was to marry the New York man had
already run about town. She did not know whether her father or Buckley
had told the tale.
On the front porch of the farmhouse through the summer evenings the two
men talked of the progress, of the town and the part they were taking
and hoped to take in its future growth. The New York man had proposed
a scheme to Tom. He was to go to Hugh and propose a contract giving the
two men an option on all his future inventions. As the inventions were
completed they were to be financed in New York City, and the two men
would give up manufacture and make money much more rapidly as promoters.
They hesitated because they were afraid of Steve Hunter, and because Tom
was afraid Hugh would not fall in with their plan. “It wouldn't surprise
me if Steve already had such a contract with him. He's a fool if he
hasn't,” the older man said.
Evening after evening the two men talked and Clara sat in the deep
shadows at the back of the porch and listened. The enmity that had
existed between herself and her father seemed to be forgotten. The man
who had asked her to marry him did not look at her, but her father did.
Buckley did most of the talking and spoke of New York City business
men, already famous throughout the Middle West as giants of finance, as
though they were his life-long friends. “They'll put over anything I ask
them to,” he declared.
Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey
he was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two
or three times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was
something sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog,
a hound perhaps. As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in
pursuit of a rabbit. His hair was carefully parted and his clothes
fitted him like the skin of an animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His
long jaw, it seemed to her, was always wagging. Within a few days after
the receipt of his letter she had made up her mind that she did not want
him as a husband, and she was convinced he did not want her. The whole
matter of marriage had, she was sure, been in some way suggested by her
father. When she came to that conclusion she was both angry and in
an odd way touched. She did not interpret it as fear of some sort of
indiscretion on her part, but thought that her father wanted her to
marry because he wanted her to be happy. As she sat in the darkness
on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of the two men became
indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her body and like a
living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she had seen and
had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at Columbus and
boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances when
she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures
distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her
contact with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the
southern end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with
a woman. During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had
been undecided as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a
little black-eyed town girl who was in their classes. Several times he
walked down the college hill and along the street with Clara. The two
stood at a street crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car.
Several cars went by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a
high stone wall. They talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had
been organized in the school, the chances of victory for the football
team. The young man was one of the actors in a play to be given by
the comedy club and told Clara of his experiences at rehearsals. As he
talked his eyes began to shine and he seemed to be looking, not at
her face or body, but at something within her. For a time, perhaps for
fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the two people would love
each other. Then the young man went away and later she saw him walking
under the trees on the college campus with the little black-eyed town
girl.
As she sat on the porch in the darkness in the summer evenings, Clara
thought of the incident and of dozens of other swift-passing contacts
she had made with men. The voices of the two men talking of money-making
went on and on. Whenever she came back out of her introspective world of
thought, Alfred Buckley's long jaw was wagging. He was always at work,
steadily, persistently urging something on her father. It was difficult
for Clara to think of her father as a rabbit, but the notion that Alfred
Buckley was like a hound stayed with her. “The wolf and the wolfhound,”
she thought absent-mindedly.
Clara was twenty-three and seemed to herself mature. She did not
intend wasting any more time going to school and did not want to be a
professional woman, like Kate Chanceller. There was something she did
want and in a way some man, she did not know what man it would be, was
concerned in the matter. She was very hungry for love, but might have
got that from another woman. Kate Chanceller would have loved her. She
was not unconscious of the fact that their friendship had been something
more than friendship. Kate loved to hold Clara's hand and wanted to kiss
and caress her. The inclination had been put down by Kate herself, a
struggle had gone on in her, and Clara had been dimly conscious of it
and had respected Kate for making it.
Why? Clara asked herself that question a dozen times during the early
weeks of that summer. Kate Chanceller had taught her to think. When
they were together Kate did both the thinking and the talking, but now
Clara's mind had a chance. There was something back of her desire for
a man. She wanted something more than caresses. There was a creative
impulse in her that could not function until she had been made love to
by a man. The man she wanted was but an instrument she sought in order
that she might fulfill herself. Several times during those evenings in
the presence of the two men, who talked only of making money out of the
products of another man's mind, she almost forced her mind out into a
concrete thought concerning women, and then it became again befogged.
Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of
Hugh McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain.
It became fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social
system under which she lived that and that only made him a possibility
for her purposes. She began to think of the inventor, and her mind,
weary of playing about her own figure, played about the figure of the
tall, serious-looking man she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred
Buckley had driven away to town for the night, she went upstairs to her
own room but did not get into bed. Instead, she put out her light and
sat by an open window that looked out upon the orchard and from which
she could see a little stretch of the road that ran past the farm house
toward town. Every evening before Alfred Buckley went away, there was
a little scene on the front porch. When the visitor got up to go, her
father made some excuse for going indoors or around the corner of the
house into the barnyard. “I will have Jim Priest hitch up your horse,”
he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the company of the man who
had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she was convinced,
wanted nothing of the kind. She was not embarrassed, but could feel his
embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches.
“Well, the night is fine,” he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was
uncomfortable. “He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed
with him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes,” she
thought. Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she
did not say a word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands
with him and then turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. “We
have bored you, I'm afraid,” he said. He took her hand and leaning over,
kissed the back of it ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went
upstairs and sat by the window. She could hear the two men continuing
their talk in the road before the house. After a time the front door
banged, her father came into the house and the visitor drove away.
Everything became quiet and for a long time she could hear the hoofs of
Alfred Buckley's horse beating a rapid tattoo on the road that led down
into town.
Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a
backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion
that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered
if both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as
they were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the
horse's hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about
the house, she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory
was very busy and had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or
when there was a slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there
was a low rumbling sound coming from many machines working in wood and
steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam
engine.
The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the
towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the
romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought,
had by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so
that they had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting
machines and in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay
out of a field and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were
still dreams and capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams
in the mind of the woman. The figures of other men that had been playing
through her mind slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind
made up stories concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had
been printed in the Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like
every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and
magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty
by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the
virtues. The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds
of men had created the figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a
half dozen other men were something more than human in the minds of
the generation that came immediately after the days of their stirring
performance. Already industry was creating a new set of semi-mythical
figures. The factory at work in the night-time in the town of Bidwell
became, to the mind of the woman sitting by the window in the farm
house, not a factory but a powerful animal, a powerful beast-like thing
that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his fellows. Her mind ran
forward and took the taming of the beast for granted. The hunger of her
generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she wanted heroes,
and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she knew nothing,
became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and the rest
were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even schemed
to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality his
schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him.
There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what
she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate
things became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself
but perhaps a son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed,
startled Clara, and she arose from the chair by the window and prepared
to go to bed. Something within her body ached, but she did not allow
herself to pursue further the thoughts she had been having.
On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit
Hugh's shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see
there. The thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly
planted in fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to
the factory and had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the
two men went to look at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the
shop.
She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little
grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley
went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she
continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She
asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying
to make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half
turned away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His
eyes, she decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was
something gray and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her
confidence in the person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust
him. There was something in his eyes that was like the things most
grateful to her own nature, the sky seen across an open stretch of
country or over a river that ran straight away into the distance. Hugh's
hair was coarse like the mane of a horse, and his nose was like the nose
of a horse. He was, she decided, very like a horse; an honest, powerful
horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing
that expressed itself through his eyes. “If I have to live with an
animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women have to decide what
other animal we are to live with before we can begin being humans,
I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf or a
wolfhound,” she found herself thinking.