So it was that in 1912 the second thrilling event happened.
Young Daniel Birge, proprietor of Birge’s General Dry Goods Store,
successor to Submit Curler, left his office, a built-up perch back of the
shoe counter, to meet Thurley Precore at four o’clock.
The four clerks knew he was going to meet Thurley, that he had been
meeting her and would continue to do so every pleasant afternoon, and
they might as well ask any questions they wished before this hour,
because business did not enter their handsome young proprietor’s head
again until he was forced to re-enter the store the next morning.
The clerks, three of whom were under twenty and in love with Dan and
one of whom was nearing fifty and longed to put him “dead to rights,”
exchanged knowing glances as they watched Dan stalk out of the store
humming a popular air and nodding a jaunty good night.
Birge’s Corners naturally had expected something of Dan Birge—who
wouldn’t of the only son of a saloon keeper and man of money, according
to the Corners’ estimate, who had been brought up at the Hotel Button
and permitted to do as he liked? Having so far escaped the gallows, Dan
had proceeded to shock the natives as much as was possible. He began at
sixteen, when, “like a streak of grease lightnin’,” according to Prince
Hawkins, he started in to educate himself by mail order courses, having
skipped school and defied teachers years without end. With the Birge
determination, once started in any direction, Dan no longer haunted the
barroom or the blacksmith’s shop; he went to Betsey Pilrig’s house, where
her adopted daughter, Thurley Precore, welcomed and studied with him.
Lorraine McDowell, the minister’s daughter, would have been only too glad
to teach Dan Birge, the gossips had it, but Dan had never known Lorraine
existed from the day Thurley had first “sung for her supper.”
Too proud to admit such was the case, Lorraine had sensibly set to work
to be as useful as any minister’s daughter ought to be in a small town,
and if she had her own particular form of heartache when she saw Dan and
Thurley walking or riding together or taking supper at the Hotel Button,
she kept it well concealed and smiled upon them and every one else alike.
After Dan had been “learning” for two years, while his father bragged
that his son would outrival college professors—and all by mail, too—the
older Birge died from an apoplectic stroke, leaving Dan his heir with the
flourishing tavern, blacksmith’s shop and real estate office to take in
hand.
This was the only time that Dan had been known to consult any one—and
every one knew Thurley had put him up to doing it, to say nothing of his
being under age—but he went to the minister and they had a long talk,
after which a sign “Closed” was across the saloon doorway, and carpenters
came from out of town to make the place over into such a store as the
Corners had never dreamed of possessing.
“My father was an honest saloon keeper, I guess,” Dan had told Thurley,
“but that business don’t suit me—nor you,” he added tenderly. “I’m going
to keep a dry goods store that will curdle all the milk in the South
Wales emporium. I’m eighteen, Thurley, and when I’m twenty-one and rid of
trustees, I’ll ask you to marry me, and, when I’m twenty-two, we’ll be
married.”
At which Thurley, admiring his audacity, had waived the question and
began to suggest what lines of goods had best be carried.
It was only natural that the older generation could not understand a
modern youth who would pay ten hard-earned dollars for a bull puppy, and
then name her Zaza and pay two dollars more for a brass-studded collar
and be willing to settle all claims for partially chewed up rubbers or
boots for which the said Zaza seemed to have a penchant!
Neither did they see the necessity of Dan’s trips to New York to buy
goods. Submit Curler had never done it, and, if one could “learn by
mail,” why not buy as well? Nor did they see the reason for Dan’s red
and white canoe, the “Water Demon,” fitted with an awning and striped
cushions and a thirty-five dollar talking machine in the center of it,
and why, when every one ought to be at work, Dan and Thurley would drift
along the lake to the tune of “Dearie” or “Are You Coming Out To-night,
Mary Ann?” while Zaza, unasked guest, would swim out and try to upset
the cargo. And when Dan engaged two rooms and had a _private bathroom_
installed at the Hotel Button and built a small balcony opening out
of his sitting room, the younger generation fell down and worshipped
blindly, while the older generation said a Birge never “built a cupola no
place without wanting to get out on it and look down on every one,” and,
“there was as much sense in all his notions as there would be in putting
a deaf mute at a telephone switchboard.”
When Dan was quoted as saying he did not “feel right unless his suits
were made by a New York tailor,” and, without consulting any one, bought
a scarlet roadster and talked of building two-family houses as an
investment, to say nothing of the twenty thousand dollar house with an
iron deer in the front yard and steam heat that he would build when he
married Thurley Precore—the older generation tilted their chairs back
and recalled the story of the negro about to be hung, who said upon
approaching the gallows, “Dis am gwine to be a powerful lesson to dis
nigger!”
Yet the town had to admit that Dan built up the Corners more than any
of his ancestors or contemporaries. He ventured money in a moving
picture show and made it pay, mollifying the churches by turning over
the proceeds of the Passion Play for a new carpet for a Sunday-school
room and new front steps for the rival denomination. He installed an ice
cream soda fountain in Oyster Jim’s store, lending the old man the money,
and started the vogue for modern sidewalks and a town clock—and even a
manicure! There was no telling to what lengths he might have gone, if
he had not been so in love with Thurley that she occupied his thoughts
twenty-three and a half hours out of the twenty-four, but he managed to
do wonders with the remaining half hour. The town often said he no doubt
would have borrowed their farm teams to make polo ponies, and it was
suspected that he was striving frantically to “get up a board of health.”
Certain it was that Dan was not afraid to spend his money—some declared
it was a hundred thousand and some a hundred and ten thousand. And, most
glorious achievement of all, he liberally pensioned Submit Curler, whose
eyes were too dim to tell basting thread from sewing silk.
When Dan would try to convince Ali Baba of some needed modern enterprise,
Ali Baba would retort angrily, “Who made you so wise and your elders
fools? Be careful or you’ll catch brain fever and be as bald as a badger!”
To which Dan would answer good-naturedly, “No doubt of it—didn’t you know
that grass never grows on a busy street?”
Which would leave Ali Baba chuckling, “Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, if that
boy hasn’t a little Irish in him—dead dog eat a hatchet!”
No one could say Dan underpaid or cheated any person with whom he had
dealings. His store had an up-to-date, live air and one could find
bargains and articles which had never been seen in former days. Also,
when travelling men came to sell him and he entertained them at his
attempted bachelor apartments, they would suggest a game of penny-ante
and something to drink, and the boy would inform them with no shrinking
indecision, “I was raised watching men make fools of themselves,” and bid
them good night.
When he married Thurley Precore, the town gossiped, Dan would meet his
match, and, in concluding their jeremiad, said they doubted whether
Thurley would marry him after all, but if, for spite, he married
Lorraine, who, goodness knows, would jump sky high if she ever had the
chance, Dan Birge would be the same bully his father had been to his
wife—there never was a Birge who didn’t have to boss the job or quit!
None of this bothered Dan, not even the vituperation of himself when he
encouraged a family of Sicilian bootmakers to rent one of his cottages
and began to _pay to have his shoes shined_. Nothing bothered Dan except
the fear lest Thurley should not marry him; that only bothered him at
stray moments when a wilful impulse led her to break an engagement with
him and run off to sing at some entertainment at South Wales.
As he strode along the main street, Zaza heeling him, he whistled “Bonnie
Sweet Bessie” and shouted out a hullo to every one he passed, regardless
of age or rank. There was something delightfully irrepressible about Dan.
Perhaps the fact that every girl in town was or had been or was planning
to be in love with him might have aided his buoyancy, as well as the
knowledge that the older generation still looked at him with horrified
disapproval and yet were powerless to control so much as a single one of
Zaza’s barks.
He made his way up the winding path leading to the burial ground, one of
those picturesque spots with weeping willows, wild roses and a tottering
old fence, and scraggly berry bushes growing insolently without.
“Oh, Thurley,” he began, calling before he reached the summit.
“Ship ahoy!” sang back a strong, sweet voice. Presently he came upon a
tall, blue-eyed girl with thick braids of dark hair. She was sitting
under a willow tree, a book thrown carelessly at one side.
“Thurley, dearest,” he began, sitting down and kissing her, “I thought
four o’clock would never come.”
“Did you make mistakes in change?” She put her hand on his shoulder. “If
the clerks could see their lord and master now,” and she rumpled up his
hair.
“Bother the clerks and the whole darned town—I’ve made you promise to
marry me, Thurley, and you’re not going to make me keep it a secret.
Why don’t we tell every one right away? What’s the use of keeping it to
ourselves, when we are both sure of ourselves and the happiest things
alive?”
Thurley laughed indulgently. “It’s just me, Dan. I want to be terribly
sure of myself.”
He took her hands in his. “You are! You love me. You’ve always cared for
me, as I have for you—’way back ten years ago when you joined the gang! I
have all the money we need and you may have it all. Say we won’t keep it
a secret! I’m dead tired of the Hotel Button; it gets on my nerves these
days. Mrs. Hawkins has been mighty white to me—when I know what a spoiled
nuisance I must have been—but she’s a perfect litany of woe. I can hear
her now, ‘Wal, there wuz two funerals down to South Wales to-day—an’ I
meant to make a lemon pie but there wuz no lemons!’ Or else she gets on
another tactic—of borrowers—and she greets a chap with, ‘Don’t never talk
about borrowers, Dan Birge; my curtain frames has been as far as the next
township, and sometimes I ain’t set eyes on my ice cream freezer from May
to November!’ And if I’m trying extra hard to think about business—and
I’m really thinking about you—she starts in about somebody’s second
cousin’s divorce and soliloquizes, ‘We’re all members of one human family
and God never meant for man and wife to live together like cat and dog.’
And I’ve never known it to fail that I was hurrying to get away to meet
some one—and it was ’most always you—that she didn’t drag me into her
sitting room to see some of her damned—excuse me, Thurley—embroidery
that she’s going stone blind by doing and listen to her explain, ‘These
two doilies is just alike, only one is blue with flowers and the other
is pink with stars and anchors—they’re a weddin’ present for Mrs. P. L.
Flanigan—her second wedding, too; she’s been on the stage since she could
lisp, supported Madame Modjeska all through the West and then married a
no good Irish comedian.... Oh, Dan, don’t be in a hurry! Look at this
one—ain’t it a work of art, if I do say so—clover is like sweet peas,
awful hard to embroider natural.’”
Dan paused, out of breath.
“Yes,” Thurley said soberly, “but she has her meals on time, and you eat
them.”
“My Swedish appetite is always with me, no joke; but what of that? Do you
think I expect you to drudge like Prince Hawkins’ wife? Not much. We are
going to have a _maid_, no hired girl, but a trained maid, and we’ll pay
her five and maybe six dollars a week, and a wash-woman besides that.”
“The town will say I’m lazy. Lorraine McDowell does all the work at the
parsonage and visits the poor families besides.”
“That’s very fine in Lorraine, but she isn’t my Thurley. You just
couldn’t pin yourself down to routine, could you?” He looked at her
admiringly. “The best you can do is to pin the other chap down to it—like
you did me. It is you who made me study and make good; I was a spoiled
kid with more money than was good for me and no one with a grain of faith
as to my future. They were holding their breath until I’d get into a
scrape and they could go at me without gloves. Well, I didn’t, unless
they call loving Thurley Precore and being engaged to her a scrape! Of
course they’ve patted me on the shoulder now and said decent things, but
I’m twenty-two and a man, and they can’t do otherwise. I guess you said
about all there was to say when you told me, ‘The best vault in which to
keep your fortune is a good education.’”
Thurley leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. “You’re a wonder,” she
whispered, “but, really, wouldn’t Lorraine make you happier?”
His face clouded with an injured expression. “Why drag in Lorraine? She’d
like to drag herself in,” he admitted candidly, “and I guess every one
knows it, but you don’t fall in love to suit the other fellow—and I don’t
love Lorraine.”
“She’s so pretty and frail, and you’re such a big, strong gypsy lad,”
mused Thurley, pulling sprays of feathery grass idly, “and I’m such a
big, strong gypsy lass that we’re not contrasts. We’re too much alike,
Dan; too selfish in the same way. Every one is bound to be selfish in
some way or other, but when you both hit the same trail, it usually ends
in a crash ... please, wait until I finish. Then we’re too fond of having
our own ways. I’d like it if you became Daniel Precore instead of my
becoming Thurley Birge; yes, I truly would. I don’t want to promise to
love, honor and obey any one—not a bit of it. I want to do what I dreamed
of as a child—those dreams kept me alive, Dan. I want to sing, not in the
town, but in New York, London, Paris. I’ve read of girls from the country
who made good, and I can sing, Dan! It is not silly for me to say it.
Besides, there is little else I can do!”
“I know it,” he said in a muffled tone, “but why not sing just for me?
I’ll always listen.”
“That’s the trouble. I want to sing for thousands of strangers; I want
to be famous, Dan, and yet, I want you for my pal. Don’t you see that
it doesn’t go together as it should? For me to stay here as your wife,
and for me to travel all over the world and be on the stage—and all that
would go with it. I wouldn’t be your wife unless I was sure to be the
right wife. Dear old boy, you shrug your shoulders every time I try to
explain it. But I’m different from Lorraine and the other girls. I’m
selfish and generous all in one, quick tempered and patient by turns.
I hate to fuss about details. Domesticity drives me mad, poor Granny
Pilrig can tell you! I’d sit up half the night to learn a song or read a
book, and then I’d want to be hideously lazy the next morning. Sometimes
I feel as if I were floating in the air, flying with absolutely divine
ease and bliss just because of something deep inside myself—I haven’t the
faintest idea what it is. I can sing on hilltops and laugh in the grayest
of drizzles. Everything can be in glorious purples and golden colors. And
when the sun is actually bright and every one is congratulating every one
on the weather, I find myself old, tired, black within. I want to cry,
scream, go away from every one and neither speak nor move. That’s what
they call temperament, I understand, and you, Dan boy,” Thurley’s lovable
mouth curved into smiles, “you could never say that is a good basis for a
happy marriage—particularly to a gentleman with a ‘Swedish appetite’ and
one who likes to be amused when he comes home tired out from a bargain
sale of kitchen oilcloth!”
“Well, what is the basis for a happy marriage? Mrs. Hawkins says ‘young
folks should set down and talk about what they each like to eat before
the engagement is announced!’ I guess we can pass that up.”
“Did you know what Mrs. Hawkins said about me, as being a good wife for
you? It’s funny! She told Granny and Granny told me. She said, ‘I bet
Thurley would dust the divil out of her cut glass and rustle into her
georgette crêpes to get to a singing bee; but cook that boy a square
meal, darn a sock, stand a bit of the Birge temper—never!’”
“She’s just a meddlesome old woman,” Dan began angrily.
“She’s truthful and she likes us both. Don’t let’s rush ahead and be
married until we are sure, and until you try once more to see if you
don’t love Lorraine; it seems so cruel when she cares so hard.”
“If she writes me any more silly notes about maple sugar socials on
her everlasting pink paper and smelling of shampoo powders, I’ll stop
speaking to her,” he declared. “Let’s settle it to-day, Thurley—announce
our engagement in the Saturday _Gazette_. Everything I have or ever will
have is yours. I love you; I’ll do what you say and be as you would have
me. Darling, you’ve no one in this world to look out for you and I’ve no
one to look out for. Let me take care of you! Please, I care so hard.”
His dark, handsome face was very close to hers and, suddenly, he laid his
head on her shoulder, smothering a sob.
Thurley’s sunrise, rose-red self went out to him in sympathy. “Does it
mean so much?”
“Just—everything,” was the incoherent answer.
“Then—I will.” Tears came into her blue eyes. “I couldn’t make you wait
any longer. Look at me.” She lifted his face between her hands and they
looked into each other’s eyes for a long, wonderful instant. “Dan, it may
be a mistake, but I think I do love you even if I’m not willing to be a
house-and-garden wife and stop my singing.... I’d perish if I stopped
singing, so promise me you’ll never ask it.”
“Not in church and parlors and like that,” he said unwillingly, “but my
wife isn’t going to sing on the stage.”
Thurley’s brows drew together in perplexity. “Well, maybe no one will
ever ask me,” she evaded. “We won’t quarrel about it until they do—only
I’d fight you pretty hard if you tried to stop my singing—it means even
more than you do!”
“It won’t after we are married,” he asserted jealously, “and I won’t
wait long for you either. We’ll live at the hotel until the house is
ready. I want to begin the plans to-morrow.”
“Oh, Dan, a year anyway! Whatever will Granny do?”
“Move her into the hotel,” he promised generously. “But you’ve got to
marry me in September! Let’s go over to Philena’s grave and pledge it.”
“I don’t think I deserve you, you’re so much in earnest, but I am sort of
playing a lovely, interesting part—a wonderful part, too, but I’d really
like to have strangers here to see how well I do it,” Thurley tried to
explain as they came up to a white cross newer than the surrounding
markers on which was engraved:
Philena, beloved grandchild of Betsey Pilrig,
Young, beautiful and good, God numbered her among His angels
At the early age of fifteen!
“Now promise,” Dan insisted, holding her hands.
“I promise,” Thurley answered. Leaning over the cross, they kissed each
other with tender solemnity.
“Shall we sit here and talk,” Thurley asked, “or walk back?”
“Anything you like. You’re so beautiful to-day, Thurley, I wonder if you
realize how beautiful you are! I’m going to make you wear the proper sort
of clothes and send right off for your ring.”
Thurley glanced at her pink cotton blouse and white wash skirt in
disdain. “I hate bothering over clothes and yet I’d like rich, weird
creations just dropped from the skies. I never could sit and sew like—”
“Lorraine, I suppose!” Dan laughed in spite of himself. “I want to
walk over to the _Gazette_ office and put our engagement notice in. I
wouldn’t want that to go by another week, if I had to get out an extry. I
believe I’d make them get out an extry, too!”
“Did the _Gazette_ ever get out an extry for anything?” she asked.
“The nearest they ever came to it was when Ali Baba was learning to ride
a wheel and he ran into a barrel of tar pitch within half an hour of four
o’clock! Come on, sweetheart, we can begin planning furniture.”
Thurley lingered near an old tombstone with the engraving:
Naked as from the earth we came,
And crept to life at first,
We to the earth return again,
And mingle with our dust.
“I love a graveyard,” she said pensively. “I like to sing in one.”
“Sing for me now.” Dan was anxious to comply with her slightest wish.
“This is a queer one to sing, up here,” she answered, beginning,
The ship goes sailing down the bay,
Good-by, my lover good-by—
Dan was not thinking of the song; he was thinking of Thurley as his
bespoken wife and of his and Thurley’s life together. Singing was to be
a minor thing which should take place while babies were rocked to sleep
or perhaps on Easter Sunday for the special anthem. Dan had no idea of
allowing her to remain a paid soloist—but it would do to tell her so
later!
“Bravo,” he said as she finished. “Shall we go along?” tucking her arm
under his with a masterful air.
They trudged down the pathway to the road. Some children were picking the
last berries from the dusty bushes; when they caught sight of Thurley,
they ran towards her, saying,
“Miss Clergy heard you sing. Her carriage just went on. She had Ali Baba
stop so’s she could hear. She stuck her head out the window and asked him
your name and Dan’s name and he told her, and then she stuck her head in
and he drove on.”
“There’s an old woman who ought to be ashamed to act like she has for
years and years,” Dan began.
But Thurley did not answer. Presently she said, “So—I had an audience
even in a graveyard. Dan, do you know Miss Clergy never asks questions
about any one? She must have liked my voice!”
“She’ll never get the chance to hear it again! I’ll race you to that
first oak—”
Thurley shook her head. “Wait, Dan, I feel queer inside ... as if
something might come of it, I don’t know just what.”
“Are you going to let a crazy old woman’s listening to you sing stop our
getting to the newspaper office in time to announce our engagement?”
“Dan, do you realize that we are both ‘Corners’ people and they never
do get along? A house or a store on the corner always attracts the most
attention and gets the most notice paid to it and that is why your
father’s people founded these Corners and you have to be a Corners
person—people just naturally pay you attention or you know why ... and
I’m a Corners person, too.”
“I said I was not going to listen to your nonsense. I’ll kiss you right
in sight of this farmer’s team,” he warned. “You’re going to belong to me
and that is all that matters.”