FIRST COLLECTIONS
That morning Mr. Britt did not dawdle in the hotel office with his
cigar. He knew perfectly well that he merely had been making a pretense
of enjoying that sybaritism, putting on his new clubman airs along with
his dye and his toupee.
Among other curios in the office was a dusty, stuffed alligator, hanging
from the ceiling over the desk. The jaws were widely agape and Mr.
Britt always felt an inclination to yawn when he looked alligatorward.
Therefore, the alligator offended Mr. Britt by suggesting drowsiness
in the morning; Mr. Britt, up early, and strictly after any worm that
showed itself along the financial path, resented the feeling of daytime
sleepiness as heresy. Furthermore, that morning the gaping alligator
also suggested the countenance of the open-mouthed Files whom Britt
had just left in the dining room, and Files had been irritating. Britt
scowled at the alligator, lighted a cigar, and hustled outdoors; he had
the feeling that the day was to be an important one in his affairs.
Egypt's Pharaoh was able to view considerable of the town from the
tavern porch. The tavern was an old stage-coach house and was boosted
high on a hill, according to the pioneer plan of location. The houses of
the little village straggled down the hill.
The aspect was not uninviting, seen under the charitable cloak of
February's snow, sun-touched by the freshly risen luminary, the white
expanses glinting; all the rocks and ledges and the barren shapes were
covered. But under summer's frank sunlight Egypt was as disheartening a
spectacle as a racked old horse, ribs and hip bones outthrust, waiting
for the knacker's offices.
There were men in Egypt--men whose reverses had put them in a
particularly ugly mood--who said out loud in places where Britt could
not hear them that the money-grabber could not get much more than
twelve-per-cent blood out of the nag he had ridden for so long, and
might as well set knife to neck and put the town out of its misery.
Right behind Britt, as he stood on the porch, was a sheaf of yellowed
papers nailed to the side of the tavern. Nobody in Egypt bothered to
look at the papers; all the taxpayers knew what they were; the papers
were signed by the high sheriff of the county and represented that all
the real estate of Egypt had been sold over and over for taxes and had
been bid in by the town as a municipality--and there the matter rested.
Egypt, in other words, had been trying to lift itself by the bootstraps
and was not merely still standing on the ground, but was considerably
sunk in the hole that had been dug by the boot heels while Egypt was
jumping up and down. Mr. Britt was not troubled by the sight of the
yellowed papers; he owned mortgages and pulled in profit by the legal
curiosities known as “Holmes notes”--leeches of particular drawing
power. Mr. Britt did not own real estate. Egypt, in its financial stress
and snarl of litigation, was a wonderful operating field for a man with
loose money and a tight nature.
From far swamps the whack of axes sounded. Mr. Britt knew that men were
cutting hoop poles and timber for shooks; Egypt earned ready money
with which to pay interest, getting out shooks and hoop poles. That
occupation had been the resource of the pioneers, and the descendants
stuck to the work, knowing how to do it better than anything else. There
was not enough soil for farming on a real money-making scale. The old
sheep, so cynics said, were trained to hold the lambs by their tails and
lower them head downward among the rocks to graze. Poor men usually
own dogs. But dogs would not live long in Egypt, the cynics went on to
assert; the dogs ran themselves to death hustling over the town line to
find dirt enough to bury a bone.
Mr. Britt could see his statue in the cemetery.
Down the street was a one-story brick building, the only brick structure
in the town. Set into the front of this building was a replica of the
statue in the cemetery. Britt had secured special rates by ordering two
statues from the stonecutter. Britt possessed vanity. He had hidden it,
begrudging the cost of gratifying it. The crust of his nature, hardening
through the years, had pressed upon that vanity. The statues, his
refurbished beard, and his rehaired head had relieved the pressure
somewhat, but the vanity was still sore. In his new mood he was dreading
a blow on that sore spot. He realized what kind of a grudge he was
carrying around. A vague sense of an unjust deal in life is more
dangerous to the possessor than an acute and concrete knowledge of
specific injury. The vagueness causes it to be correlated to insanity.
Britt, putting his belated aspirations to the test, hoped that nobody
would presume to hit on that sore spot. He knew that such an adventure
might be dangerous for the person or persons who went up against him.
He buttoned his overcoat, settled the cigar rigidly into one corner of
his mouth, stared with approval at the stone image of himself in the
facade of Britt Block, and walked to the edge of the porch.
Across the street sat a little building above the door of which was a
sign inscribed, “Usial Britt, Shoemaker.” That it was a dwelling as well
as a shop was indicated when a bare and hairy arm was thrust from a side
window and the refuse in a smoking iron spider was dumped upon the
snow. Simultaneously it was shown that more than one person tenanted the
building: a man, bareheaded, but with a shaggy mat of roached hair that
served in lieu of a hat, issued from the door. The wanton luxuriance of
the hair would have stirred envy in any baldheaded man; but Tasper Britt
exhibited a passion that was more virulent than envy.
The man who came forth was “Prophet Elias.” It was the newcomer, the
religious fanatic, the exhorter against oppression of the people by
usury, the fearless declaimer who named Tasper Britt in diatribe and was
setting the folks by the ears.
The Prophet's morning greeting did not make for amity. He stood straight
and pointed in turn to the visible statues and then to Tasper Britt, in
person. “Baal, and the images of Baal!” he shouted. “Stone, all three!”
Then he stepped from the door and spread a prodigiously big umbrella--an
umbrella striped in dingy colors and of the size of the canopies seen
over the drivers of delivery wagons. The employment of such a shield
from the sun in midwinter indicated that the Prophet was rather more
than eccentric; his garb conveyed the same suggestion. He wore a frayed
purple robe that hung on his heels when he came striding across the
street. On a broad band of cloth that once had been white, reaching from
shoulder to waist, diagonally across his breast, were the words, “The
Light of the World.”
Tasper Britt surveyed him with venomous gaze as he advanced. But Britt
shifted his stare and put additional venom into the look he gave a
man who came to the door and stood there, leaning against the jamb and
surveying the scene with a satisfied grin. There was no need of the name
“Britt” above his head to proclaim his kinship with the man who stood on
the tavern porch. The beard of the Britt in the door was gray, and his
head was bald. But he was Tasper Britt, in looks, as Britt unadorned
ought to have been. There was something like subtle reproach in his
sticking to nature as nature had ordained. And the folks of Egypt had
been having much to say about Usial Britt putting this new touch of
malice into the long-enduring feud between twin brothers--even though
he merely went on as he had been going, bald and gray. But because Usial
had taken to going about in public places wherever Tasper appeared, and
unobtrusively got as near his brother as possible on those occasions,
and winked and pointed to himself and suggested “Before using!” the
malice was apparent.
Usial, in the door, stroked his smooth poll complacently and grinned.
Tasper, on the porch, shook his fist.
Prophet Elias marched close to the porch and struck an attitude. “Hear
ye! Hath not Job said, 'The triumphing of the wicked is short, and the
joy of the hypocrite but for a moment'?”
A man who was humped over a sawbuck in a nearby yard straightened up
and began to pay strict attention. A driver halted a sled loaded with
unshaved hoop poles, and listened. The commercial drummer came out on
the porch.
“Look here, you crazy coot, haven't I given you fair warning about
tongue-whaling me in public?” demanded the man who was pilloried.
“'Behold, all they that are incensed against thee shall be ashamed and
confounded,'” quoted the Prophet, pounding his fist against the lettered
breast. “'They shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall
perish.'”
Mr. Britt leaped off the porch, thrust the Prophet from his path, and
strode across the street toward the man in the door. The brother did
not lose his smile. He maintained his placid demeanor even when an angry
finger slashed through the air close under his nose.
“I never intended to pass speech with you again, you renegade,” stormed
Tasper. “But I'm talking to-day for a town that I propose to represent
in the legislature, and I won't have it shamed any longer by a lunatic
that you're harboring.”
Usial Britt lifted his eyebrows. “The legislature?” He puckered his lips
and whistled a few bars of “Hail to the Chief.”
Candidate Britt waggled the monitory finger more energetically. “You are
sheltering and ste'boying on a crazy man who is making the rest of the
people in this town crazy. If they hadn't grown loony they'd ride him
out over the line on a rail.”
The Prophet had arrived at Britt's shoulder. “'But God has chose the
foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the
weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.'”
“I don't guarantee my guest's brains,” said the Britt in the door, “but
I do vouch for the correctness of his memory when it comes to the matter
of Gospel quotations. And a cracked record doesn't always spoil a good
tune.”
“I'll have him in the lockup as a tramp, or on the poor farm as a
lunatic.”
“You mean, that's where you would have him if the shelter of my roof
didn't give him legal protection,” returned Usial, calm in the face of
wrath.
“'I was a stranger, and ye took me in,'” declaimed the Prophet.
“And I'm keeping you on,” stated the cynical Usial, speaking for his
brother's benefit, “because you're a self-operating, red-hot gad that
is helping me torment yon pirate with texts after I had run out of cuss
words. Go ahead, Prophet! Shoot anything. It's a poor text that will not
hit him some place.”
Obediently, the fanatic began to mouth Holy Writ in orotund. Tasper
Britt raised his fist. But the devil himself shrinks before The Word.
Britt did not strike. His face revealed his emotions; he could not bring
himself to assault this fountain of sacred aphorisms.
He turned and marched away down the middle of the road, stamping hard
into the snow.
One of the listeners was a man who came bearing a pair of shoes. Usial
Britt took them from the man's hand. “You can have 'em to-morrow night.”
“But there's only a little patch needed--”
“To-morrow night, I said. I've got other business for to-day.” He went
into the house and slammed the door.
The Prophet set his umbrella over his head and went away on the trail of
Egypt's Pharaoh.