In the small town ten miles from Caxton there wasn’t any park to
which a man could go to sit. If one stayed about the hotel, some one
from Caxton might come in. “Hello, what are you doing here?” It would
be inconvenient to explain: “I didn’t want to go to Caxton in the
daylight. I want the kindliness of evening light for myself and the
people I may see there.”
John Holden’s boy--he was but twelve--one might say his character had
not begun to form yet. One felt in him sometimes a sort of unconscious
and casual selfishness, an unawareness of others, a rather unhealthy
sharpness about getting the best of others. It was a thing that should
be corrected in him and at once. John Holden had got himself into a
small panic. “I must write him a letter at once. Such a habit gets
fixed in a boy and then in the man, and it cannot later be shaken
off. There are such a lot of people living in the world! Every
man and woman has his own point of view. To be civilized, really,
is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their
disillusionments in life.”
John Holden was now walking along a residence street of a small Ohio
town composing in fancy a letter to his son in the boys’ camp up in
Vermont. He was a man who wrote to his son every day. “I think a man
should,” he told himself. “One should remember that now the boy has no
mother.”
He had come to an outlying railroad station. It was neat, with grass
and flowers growing in a round bed in the very center of a lawn. Some
man, the station agent and telegraph operator perhaps, passed him and
went inside the station. John followed him in. On the wall of the
waiting room there was a framed copy of the timetable, and he stood
studying it. A train went to Caxton at five. Another train came from
Caxton and passed through the town he was now in at seven-forty-three,
the seven-nineteen out of Caxton. The man in the small business section
of the station opened a sliding panel and looked at him. The two men
just stared at each other without speaking, and then the panel was slid
shut again.
John looked at his watch. Two-twenty-eight. At about six he could drive
over to Caxton and dine at the hotel there. After he had dined, it
would be evening, and people would be coming into the main street.
The seven-nineteen would come in. When John was a lad, sometimes, he,
Joe, Herman, and often several other lads climbed on the front of the
baggage- or mail-car and stole a ride to the very town he was now in.
What a thrill, crouched down in the gathering darkness on the platform
as the train ran the ten miles, the car rocking from side to side! When
it got a little dark, in the fall or spring, the fields beside the
track were lighted up when the fireman opened his fire-box to throw in
coal. Once John saw a rabbit running along in the glare of light beside
the track. He could have reached down and caught it with his hand. In
the neighboring town the boys went into saloons and played pool and
drank beer. They could depend upon catching a ride back home on the
local freight that got to Caxton at about ten-thirty. On one of the
adventures John and Herman got drunk, and Joe had to help them into an
empty coal car and later get them out at Caxton. Herman got sick, and
when they were getting off the freight at Caxton, he stumbled and came
very near falling under the wheels of the moving train. John wasn’t as
drunk as Herman. When the others weren’t looking, he had poured several
of the glasses of beer into a spittoon. In Caxton he and Joe had to
walk about with Herman for several hours, and when John finally got
home, his mother was still awake and was worried. He had to lie to her.
“I drove out into the country with Herman, and a wheel broke. We had to
walk home.” The reason Joe could carry his beer so well was because he
was German. His father owned the town meat market, and the family had
beer on the table at home. No wonder it did not knock him out as it did
Herman and John.
There was a bench at the side of the railroad station, in the shade,
and John sat there for a long time--two hours, three hours. Why hadn’t
he brought a book? In fancy he composed a letter to his son and in
it he spoke of the fields lying beside the road outside the town of
Caxton, of his greeting old friends there, of things that had happened
when he was a boy. He even spoke of his former sweetheart, of Lillian.
If he now thought out just what he was going to say in the letter,
he could write it in his room at the hotel over in Caxton in a few
minutes without having to stop and think what he was going to say. You
can’t always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really,
sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life,
make him a part of your life.
It was six-twenty when John drove into Caxton and went to the hotel,
where he registered, and was shown to a room. On the street as he
drove into town he saw Billy Baker, who, when he was a young man, had
a paralyzed leg that dragged along the sidewalk when he walked. Now
he was getting old; his face seemed wrinkled and faded, like a dried
lemon, and his clothes had spots down the front. People, even sick
people, live a long time in small Ohio towns. It is surprising how
they hang on.
John had put his car, of a rather expensive make, into a garage beside
the hotel. Formerly, in his day, the building had been used as a
livery-barn. There used to be pictures of famous trotting and pacing
horses on the walls of the little office at the front. Old Dave Grey,
who owned racehorses of his own, ran the livery-barn then, and John
occasionally hired a rig there. He hired a rig and took Lillian for a
ride into the country, along moonlit roads. By a lonely farmhouse a dog
barked. Sometimes they drove along a little dirt road lined with elders
and stopped the horse. How still everything was! What a queer feeling
they had! They couldn’t talk. Sometimes they sat in silence thus, very
near each other, for a long, long time. Once they got out of the buggy,
having tied the horse to the fence, and walked in a newly cut hayfield.
The cut hay lay all about in little cocks. John wanted to lie on one of
the hay-cocks with Lillian, but did not dare suggest it.
At the hotel John ate his dinner in silence. There wasn’t even a
traveling salesman in the dining room, and presently the proprietor’s
wife came and stood by his table to talk with him. They had a good many
tourists, but this just happened to be a quiet day. Dull days came that
way in the hotel business. The woman’s husband was a traveling man and
had bought the hotel to give his wife something to keep her interested
while he was on the road. He was away from home so much! They had come
to Caxton from Pittsburgh.
After he had dined, John went up to his room, and presently the woman
followed. The door leading into the hall had been left open, and she
came and stood in the doorway. Really, she was rather handsome. She
only wanted to be sure that everything was all right, that he had
towels and soap and everything he needed.
For a time she lingered by the door talking of the town.
“It’s a good little town. General Hurst is buried here. You should
drive out to the cemetery and see the statue.” He wondered who General
Hurst was. In what war had he fought? Odd that he hadn’t remembered
about him. The town had a piano factory, and there was a watch company
from Cincinnati talking of putting up a plant. “They figure there is
less chance of labor trouble in a small town like this.”
The woman went, going reluctantly. As she was going along the hallway
she stopped once and looked back. There was something a little queer.
They were both self-conscious. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she
said. At forty a man did not come home to his own home town to
start---- A traveling man’s wife, eh? Well! well!
At seven-forty-five John went out for a walk on Main Street and almost
at once he met Tom Ballard, who at once recognized him, a fact that
pleased Tom. He bragged about it. “Once I see a face, I never forget.
Well! Well!” When John was twenty-two Tom must have been about fifteen.
His father was the leading doctor of the town. He took John in tow,
walked back with him toward the hotel. He kept exclaiming: “I knew you
at once. You haven’t changed much, really.”
Tom was in his turn a doctor, and there was about him something----
Right away John guessed what it was. They went up into John’s room,
and John, having in his bag a bottle of whiskey, poured Tom a drink,
which he took somewhat too eagerly, John thought. There was talk. After
Tom had taken the drink he sat on the edge of the bed still holding
the bottle John had passed to him. Herman was running a dray now.
He had married Kit Small and had five kids. Joe was working for the
International Harvester Company. “I don’t know whether he’s in town now
or not. He’s a trouble-shooter, a swell mechanic, a good fellow,” Tom
said. They drank again.
As for Lillian, mentioned with an air of being casual by John, he,
John, knew of course that she had been married and divorced. There
was some sort of trouble about another man. Her husband married
again later, and now she lived with her mother, her father, the
shoe merchant, having died. Tom spoke somewhat guardedly, as though
protecting a friend.
“I guess she’s all right now, going straight and all. Good thing she
never had any kids. She’s a little nervous and queer; has lost her
looks a good deal.”
The two men went downstairs and, walking along Main Street, got into a
car belonging to the doctor.
“I’ll take you for a little ride,” Tom said; but as he was about to
pull away from the curb where the car had been parked, he turned and
smiled at his passenger. “We ought to celebrate a little, account of
your coming back here,” he said. “What do you say to a quart?”
John handed him a ten-dollar bill, and he disappeared into a near-by
drug store. When he came back he laughed.
“I used your name all right. They didn’t recognize it. In the
prescription I wrote out I said you had a general breakdown, that you
needed to be built up. I recommended that you take a teaspoonful three
times a day. Lord! my prescription book is getting almost empty.” The
drug store belonged to a man named Will Bennett. “You remember him,
maybe. He’s Ed Bennett’s son; married Carrie Wyatt.” The names were but
dim things in John’s mind. “This man is going to get drunk. He is going
to try to get me drunk, too,” he thought.
When they had turned out of Main Street and into Walnut Street they
stopped midway between two street lights and had another drink, John
holding the bottle to his lips, but putting his tongue over the
opening. He remembered the evenings with Joe and Herman when he had
secretly poured his beer into a spittoon. He felt cold and lonely.
Walnut Street was one along which he used to walk, coming home late at
night from Lillian’s house. He remembered people who then lived along
the street, and a list of names began running through his head. Often
the names remained, but did not call up images of people. They were
just names. He hoped the doctor would not turn the car into the street
in which the Holdens had lived. Lillian had lived over in another part
of town, in what was called “the Red House District.” Just why it had
been called that John did not know.