1
The basement of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Brailsford
Junction rang with the shouts of children playing tag despite the
scolding of their busy mothers. Flushed matrons buzzed in laden
down with loaves of homemade bread, pans of biscuits ready for the
oven, mason jars full of sweet, sour, and mixed pickles, bags of
ground coffee, and huge pots of dressed and dismembered chickens
so tender and plump that their flesh would have warranted the term
"voluptuous" if stewed by a less austere generation.
Joe Whalen, town drunk, general roustabout, and janitor of the
church was starting a paper fire in the furnace.
"Put in more paper," shouted Old Mrs. Crandall, mother of
Temperance, who had left her room for the first time in months for
this occasion. "Terrible weather for rheumatism, ain't it?"
"Terrible," shouted Joe.
"You don't need to holler at me," said Old Mrs. Crandall. "I ain't
as hard of hearing as all that."
She pulled her shawl a little tighter about her rheumatic
shoulders, and cocked a sly old ear for the salty gossip Sister
Atwell was passing on to Sister Bailey.
Girls of high school age, whispering and giggling, twisted long
streamers of red, white, and blue crêpe paper in dizzy crescents
from pillar to pillar of the festive room, while over each blazing
chromo the same laughing girls hung shooting stars, bluebells,
anemones, and other spring flowers.
The chromos were of the unforgettable period in religious art which
offered holy scenes in dazzling triads, stirring masterpieces which
could not help but move saints and sinners alike, pictures which
carried a message and a warning. "Rock of Ages Cleft for Me" with
a courageous lady in a white nightgown hanging perilously to a
granite cross amid seas which would have sunk the _Titanic_; an
amazingly tinted "Last Supper"; Christ driving the money changers
from the temple with a ferocious rawhide blacksnake which Stud
Brailsford privately admitted a man would not use on a team of
balky mules.
Flowers were also heaped upon the golden oak upright piano, lacking
three ivories, sadly out of tune, and showing unmistakable battle
scars from the militant hammering it received during every Sunday
School session, no less than from the attempts of Epworth League
members to "rag" such sacred selections as "Holy, Holy, Holy."
The kitchen was a mad-house. Along ten feet of glowing griddles
perspiring sisters of the Ladies' Aid were stewing chickens,
thickening gravy, starting great pots of coffee (two hours before
suppertime with the result that church supper coffee had a wallop
like 100 proof Bourbon) cutting slices of home-baked bread,
quartering apple, pumpkin, and gooseberry pies, whipping half
gallons of Jersey cream in wooden bowls two feet in diameter,
pouring into boat-shaped cut-glass dishes jars of pickles, glass
after glass of jams, jellies and preserves.
Crocks of golden butter and creamy cottage cheese made a formidable
bulwark of richly laden earthenware in one corner, while a phalanx
of ice cream freezers stood guard beside the kitchen door. And
never except in time of war were seen such tubs of potatoes and
kettles of peas.
Thirty tables for which thirty women had each brought her largest
tablecloth were being set with six hundred ironware plates and
as many indestructible cups and saucers, while what was smilingly
known as the church silverware was lined up, knife, fork and spoon
at the right of every plate.
It was the scandal of the Ladies' Aid that some of these pieces
of husky serviceware were not stamped as they should have been
with "Property of the Methodist Episcopal Church" but were labeled
instead "Property of the First Congregational Church" or, breath of
popery, heresy and damnation, "Property of the St. James Catholic
Church."
A venturesome member of the Ladies' Aid who had once attended a
Congregational supper came back with the juicy information that
the Congregational church had hundreds of knives, forks, and
spoons marked with the bold Methodist insignia. This served as an
excellent palliative to Methodist consciences.
No one, of course, had ever worried about what might have been
stolen from the papists.
Into this wild and frantic scene shortly before supper time came
Sarah Brailsford, Early Ann, and Gus. The hired man shuffled
sheepishly behind the protecting women folks loaded to the gunwales
with apple pies.
"Oh, Sister Brailsford, how _do_ you do!" chorused the sisterhood.
"My, what lovely apple pies!"
They greeted Early Ann with reserved enthusiasm, insisting she must
join the Epworth League, and Standard Bearers.
"So important that a girl gets the right atmosphere during her
formative years," said Sister Dickenson.
Across the kitchen, however, the comments were less cordial:
"Did you hear? And think of bringing her to a church supper! You
mustn't breathe a word but Temperance Crandall told me in strictest
confidence...."
Meanwhile Gus, red of face and almost tongue-tied with
embarrassment had been put to work mashing the potatoes. Women
came with milk, butter, salt, and advice while Gus mashed on. Gus
thought that perhaps he would not have been embittered about women
so early in life had it not been for twenty-five years of church
suppers.
2
Above the First National Bank of Brailsford Junction with its
wooden Doric columns and gilt-lettered windows was the office
of Timothy Halleck, attorney at law, justice of the peace,
dealer in real estate and farm mortgages, notary, and Protestant
father-confessor for half the town.
To him came ranting suffragettes; militant members of the W.C.T.U.
bent on destruction of the town's twenty-six easy-going saloon
proprietors; the saloon proprietors; fathers of wayward girls;
mothers of incorrigible boys; wives who were beaten, and husbands
who had been cuckolded. Into Timothy's great hairy ears were poured
the despairs and heartbreaks which have been the lot of man these
many centuries.
His office was nothing less than amazing. Buffalo skulls and
polished buffalo horns from his brother's ranch in Montana elbowed
stuffed fish, antlers of deer, and the head of a wild cat upon the
walls; five hundred dusty law tomes filled the sagging shelves; in
a glass case stood a shock of prize Wisconsin wheat, seed corn,
and dirty mason jars filled with every variety of grain known to
horticulture. Enormous leaves of Wisconsin tobacco framed and
labeled, Indian quivers, and year-old calendars vied for space on
the wainscoting.
Half a dozen swivel chairs and as many spittoons gave the spot
an air of luxurious informality to visiting farmers, whose well
informed nostrils might have quivered distrustfully at the dusty
stench of rotting law books had it not been synthesized with the
comfortable aroma from the livery stable next door.
Timothy Halleck himself, six feet two, large-boned, gaunt,
hawk-nosed, with great brown eyes deep-socketed and thatched above
with bristling brows, white-haired and gruff, ruled like a kindly
tyrant in his chaotic kingdom. He was the town's one-man organized
charity, a poverty-stricken philanthropist who denied himself so
that he might help others; a widower, lonesome and fond of children.
He had a few old friends, among them Stanley Brailsford now
entering his office.
"Well, Timothy," said Stud, uncomfortable in his serge suit and
well-blacked bulldog shoes, "still making a living robbing the
widows and orphans?"
"Sit down, you lazy, hog-breeding son-of-a-gun and have a cigar,"
said the lawyer. "How are those emaciated razor-backs doing on that
run-down farm of yours?"
"Getting fatter and sassier every week," said Stud, biting off
the tip of the cigar and scratching a match on the seat of his
trousers. "What you been up to?"
"Just the usual day. Forging checks and foreclosing on
octogenarians. Where've you been keeping yourself?"
"Anywhere the fish are biting. There ain't much work to be done on
a farm in the spring time."
"Need a good hand?"
"Maybe you could do my whittling," Stud said. "Anyhow it's a
standing invitation."
"Might teach you how to raise hogs instead of razor-backs. Might
breed you some beeves you could tell from bags of bones."
"Who'd you find to defraud your clients meanwhile?" Stud asked.
"Where would you find a man to run your shell game while you was
gone?"
The two old cronies glowered at each other joyfully and let fly at
the nearest gobboon simultaneously and accurately, a symphony in
expectoration which had taken nearly thirty years to perfect.
Their talk ran on: the spring floods in Ohio and Indiana, the price
of hogs, milk, and eggs, the new trailer factory which was to
occupy the old wagon-works on the creek bottom, President Wilson
and his professorial theories, the German Kaiser and his fight to
remove one of his tenant farmers, the ridiculous little Balkan
squabbles.
And getting back to their own affairs Stud asked, "Are you going
to the church supper this evening?"
"No ..." said Halleck slowly. "Something about church suppers makes
me feel ... Martha was always the center of everything, you know."
"I know," Stud said.
"You don't appreciate a woman until you've lost her," Halleck said
quietly.
"No," said Stud, "I don't suppose you do."
"You're apt to take her for granted."
"Sarah's happy," Stanley said. "We get along all right."
"It isn't just getting along all right," the lawyer said, gazing
down upon the street where small boys jubilant with spring were
fighting, roller-skating, and playing marbles; little girls
skipping rope, and chalking squares for sky-blue. "It's treating a
woman like another human being. Like an individual."
He swung his chair to face his life-long friend.
"You ain't thinking of taking up woman suffrage, are you?" Stud
asked with mild sarcasm. "Not Pankhurst and Belle La Follette and
that sort of thing?"
"They don't need our help, Stanley. It's we who need theirs.
They'll get more than the vote. They'll get rid of corsets, smoke
if they want to, go into business, live alone in a room like Early
Ann Sherman wanted to...."
"I ... I wanted to ask you about her," Stud said. "I wanted you to
tell me more than you could that night you put her in my spring
wagon."
Halleck hesitated, looked down at the glowing tip of his cigar,
then began slowly. "I don't think I know much more about her than
you do, Stanley. She came to Brailsford Junction last winter
and got a job stemming tobacco in one of the warehouses. She
took a room across the track with Mrs. Marsden,--that front room
downstairs with the outside door."
"And then ...?"
"Well, nothing really. She didn't tell anyone where she came from,
or who her folks were, or why she wanted to live alone like that.
She was pretty and proud and full of spunk, so the gossips got
their tongues wagging ... Mrs. Marsden, and old Mrs. Crandall, and
that blue jay, Temperance...."
"But what was wrong?"
"Nothing so far as I know. The Hubbards who live next door thought
they saw a man around her window one night, and on another
occasion Mrs. Marsden heard her scream, but when she reached the
girl's room Early Ann was alone...."
"The sluts."
"Temperance Crandall and a delegation came to me--they always
do--and said they wanted to swear out a warrant. I told them they
couldn't swear out a warrant for a girl just because she was living
alone and there was gossip...."
"Dirty-minded old women," Stud said.
"But they insisted it was up to me to do something. They said that
if I didn't they would make it so uncomfortable for the girl she
would have to leave town. I had to save the kid from that pack of
she-bloodhounds."
"And you knew I'd been sort of figuring on getting a hired girl to
help Sarah...."
"So I brought her down to your wagon that night. I knew you folks
would take care of her. It was a chance to get her away from
Temperance Crandall."
"Not so sure you got her away," said Stud. "Temperance turned in at
our place the other day. No telling what she dished out to Sarah."
"She went clear out there to start trouble?"
"I reckon she did."
"That bitch," said Timothy Halleck.
3
At the church supper that evening Peter had a revelation. Maxine
Larabee brushed against him in the coatroom, and he knew as though
he had seen it in the paper that he was in love.
Not that Maxine had even noticed his presence. Why should she with
every boy in Brailsford Junction running after her? She had simply
swept by in her smart tailored suit and velvet hat exhaling the
very faint odor of violets. It was not quite nice to use violet
perfume in Brailsford Junction in 1913. It gave Maxine an air of
sin and secrecy. Peter felt a trifle heady watching her disappear
into the forbidden realm marked WOMEN from whence came the
concerted giggles, shrieks, and titterings of a dozen high-school
girls.
Peter yanked viciously at his two-inch starched collar,
polished the bright yellow toes of his bulldog oxfords with his
handkerchief, kicked and stamped to straighten the legs of his peg
trousers which had an embarrassing manner of working up the calves
of his legs exposing a vast expanse of green polka-dot socks to say
nothing of the clips of his garters. He hummed through the tenor
part to "When It's Apple-Blossom Time in Normandy," corrected a
few minor errors in his harmony, then with the determination of
a martyr entering the arena left the comparative safety of the
coatroom and strode manfully into the bedlam of the church basement
where whole flocks of chickens were being devoured by the famished
Methodists.
Maxine Larabee! So that was what had been troubling him! But a fine
chance he had with any girl as swell as Maxine. Particularly now
that he had quit school. Why, even the college guys serenaded her;
so did rich Bud Spillman the football hero and bully. She had more
picture postcards and sofa pillows and fraternity pennants than any
girl in Rock County. She had about twelve different dresses and six
or seven hats, and a hat-pin which was supposed to have a real ruby
set in the head of it. A fine chance he had with Maxine!
Peter was so absorbed in this new and disastrous turn of events
that he failed to answer the greetings and friendly gibes with
which he was met as he elbowed his way to the ticket table,
purchased for thirty-five cents a frayed rectangle of cardboard,
and finding a vacant seat, set to like the good young trencherman
he was. He scarcely noticed when Mrs. Fulton whisked away his
empty plate and returned plump, red, and beaming with a second
helping, and he was half way through his pumpkin pie loaded with
whipped cream before he noticed that something cataclysmic and
world-shaking was about to occur. Maxine Larabee was taking the
chair beside him.
"Gee, you're a regular swell tonight," the blond vision of
loveliness crowned with a coronet braid murmured sotto voce to the
embarrassed boy beside her. She looked approvingly at the green
polka-dot tie which matched the socks, the black curls slicked down
on either side of the central part. "Why don't you take me down to
the ice-cream parlor and buy me a lover's delight sometime?"
"Me?" Peter asked, astonished. "Me take you right down to the
ice-cream parlor and buy you an ice-cream sundae?"
"Why not?" the girl wanted to know. "There isn't any law against
it." She had a low, husky voice and a thrilling little laugh which
made the goose-flesh stand up on Peter's arms and electric chills
run up and down his spine.
"Why don't you take me for a ride on the handlebars of your new
motorcycle sometime?"
"Aw, you'd get hurt," Peter said with a tinge of his boyhood
contempt for mere girls springing up from some remote corner of
his still adolescent mind. "You'd get your skirts caught in the
spokes and we'd both go in the ditch."
"Oh, I would!" said the girl, raising her eyebrows. "Oh, I would,
would I! Well, I didn't the night Bud Spillman took me for a spin
on his motorcycle."
"I can go faster than Bud Spillman," Peter said irrelevantly. "I
ran him ragged the day we raced home from Janesville. I can go a
mile a minute on my machine."
"Give me a ride sometime and let's see you do it."
"But gee whiz, Maxine...."
"Gee whiz, nothing!" the girl said. "Either you give me a ride on
your motorcycle or I won't let you take me down to the ice-cream
parlor."
"I'll give you a ride," Peter promised, glowering at the bit of
pie-crust he was pushing about with his fork, "I'll give you a ride
that'll blow all the hair pins out of your hair."
The girl tittered quietly. "You _are_ a dear," she murmured. "But
here comes mother. I'll see you at eight down by the post office."
Peter got up hurriedly as Mrs. Larabee, a buxom blonde of forty
with exaggerated Gibson Girl figure nosed her way like a lake
freighter through the lesser craft between her and her pampered
daughter.
"Won't you have my chair?" said the boy with a mixture of guilt
and gallantry. "No, Mrs. Larabee, I'm absolutely all through with
supper."
He disappeared like an eel into the milling crowd.
Outside it had started to rain lightly. He walked without hat
or coat through the misty spring dusk, his brain a tumult of
conflicting emotions. Oh, she was a beautiful girl. Such big, clear
blue eyes, such shining blond hair ... like, like a regular gold
crown on her head. Her skin was as soft as ... as the petal of a
flower, and she had the littlest feet.
He wasn't worthy of her. He wasn't even worthy to touch the hem of
her garments. He, a big awkward farm boy without any manners. He
wished he could give himself a good poke in the jaw for not saying
right away, "Why, of course, Maxine. I would be delighted to give
you a ride on my motorcycle."
He thought he must be going crazy to have argued with her like that
when she had just decided to notice him for the first time in their
lives.
"You big country boob," he said abusively, "I'll bet a town fellow
would have known what to say."
His eyes and throat felt so funny that he thought maybe he was
going to cry, but he choked back the tears angrily and hurried on
through the spring evening watching the nighthawks skimming low
over the houses, and the strange, soft flight of the bats. The wind
sighed in the newly feathered elms and the arc-lights sputtered
menacingly.
He felt incredibly alone, infinitely removed from the rest of the
world. No other boy in history had been so suddenly and deeply in
love, so troubled and filled with foreboding. He had never known
such a hurt as he now felt in his breast, such an unbelievable
longing, although for what he could not say.
Long before eight he was standing at the post office corner, and
there he stood in the mist until long after nine. Maxine did not
come.