The possession of property of any kind gives a curious consciousness of
dignity to the human being who is its owner, due very likely to the
traditional estimate of the importance of all possessions, and to the
mystical but generally erroneous belief that property is in some way an
outward and visible proof of the worth or the ability of its
possessor--or his forbears. Even the possession of a possibility such as
Clark's Field--which was of no positive value to the Clarks, and indeed
an increasing source of expense and anxiety to the impoverished family,
as taxes rose in company with the rise of all values--conferred upon the
Clarks some small consideration in Alton and made them feel the dignity
and the tragedy of property ownership. John, who was nothing but a
seedy, middle-aged clerk, none too careful of his appearance and
uneasily aware of his failure, had ample excuse to himself for his
shortcomings and willingness to live on a kind Government, because he
had been hardly used by fate in the matter of his inheritance. As the
property that might have been his was just beyond his reach, he had a
small swagger of superiority in the gas office, and the tradition was
well established there that he belonged to a family "land poor,"--the
most genteel form of poverty if any form of poverty can be genteel. Even
old farmer Samuel had tottered about the Square on his malacca stick and
exchanged the time of day with the small merchants there, with a sense
of his own importance as the owner of "a valuable piece of property"
temporarily under legal disability.
As for the women of the family this sense of unrealized importance grew
tenfold in their consciousness, because they had few opportunities of
encountering reality in their narrow lives and because as women they
were apt to dream of wealth, even of visionary wealth. It cannot be said
that Clark's Field had much to do with John's marriage which had taken
place in 'sixty-seven, because at that early date it was not considered
a large expectation even by the Clarks. But John had a younger sister,
Ada or "Addie" Clark as she was always known, and over Addie's destiny
Clark's Field had a large and sinister influence as I shall presently
show. At the time when her father finally abandoned his farm in favor of
town life, Addie was a mere child, so young that she could forget the
wholesome pictures of domestic farm industry that she must have shared.
Or, if there lingered in the background of her memory a consciousness of
her mother's butter-making, feeding the pigs, cooking for the occasional
farm hands, washing and mending, and all the other common tasks of this
laborious condition, she conveniently ignored it as women easily
contrive to do. Her life was centered in the Church Street house where
the Clarks had at first indulged in certain pretensions. Addie had gone
to the Alton schools and there associated with the better class of
children,--a doctor's daughter and a retired bank clerk's family being
the more intimate of these. As a young girl she had a transparent
complexion and a thin sort of American prettiness that unfortunately
quickly faded, under the influences of the Church Street house, into a
sallow commonplaceness. But Addie unlike the men of the family never
wholly abandoned her aspirations and ambitions. She was very careful
about the young men whom she "encouraged," and the families into whose
houses she would enter. Thus she sacrificed her slim chances of
matrimony on the altar of a visionary family pride. One of her
high-school mates, the son of the prosperous liveryman in Alton, might
have married her had he been more warmly met, and taken her with him to
Detroit, where in time he became the well-to-do head of a large
automobile manufactory. This was not the single instance of her family
pride.
It is a fascinating subject to speculate what would have happened to Ada
if she had had the moral vigor to shake herself loose from the hampering
family traditions of riches to be, and struck out for an independent,
wholesome life as women have been known to do under similar
circumstances. But Alton, like most old towns, had strong class
traditions that exercised an iron influence upon feminine destinies. It
was, of course, hopeless for Ada, the daughter of a retired farmer who
could not sell his farm, to come into close social contact with the
local aristocracy, which consisted at this time of the Stearns and Frost
relationship together with a few well-to-do merchants from B---- who had
always lived in Alton and owned those large semi-suburban estates in its
environs. But at least she could jealously guard herself from falling
into the mire of the commoner sort of small shopkeepers who were
pressing into the Square. The end was that Addie fast became what was
then called, without any circumlocution, an "old maid," and an
uninteresting one, whose days were occupied by church and gossip, and
who went over and over the threadbare family tradition. Old Mrs. Clark,
her mother, was a realist and never forgot the farm days. She was enough
of a woman to regret sincerely the fatal mistake that the family had
made in trying to become something other than their destiny had fitted
them to be. She was a thorn in the sentimental flesh of Addie, whose
thoughts preferred to play with the dignities and ease that would be
hers when the Field had been sold. Addie dressed herself as finely as
she could on Sundays and in the afternoons would walk down the South
Road past the abandoned Field and remark to a friend upon the family
property and the misfortune that kept them all down in the depths of
poverty. As the years went on and the price of real estate advanced, her
tale sounded less ridiculous than it might. But it was a bloodless sort
of consolation even for Addie, and all her friends knew the story by
heart and listened to it merely with kind indulgence. "A bird in the
hand," etc., is a proverb peculiarly to the liking of Yankees. They do
not take much interest in Peruvian mines or other forms of
non-negotiable wealth unless they see a chance to work them off on a
more credulous public. As for old Mrs. Clark, when she became tied to
her chair, she was bitter on the topic. "That dratted old Field!" she
would say with the brutal directness of the realist; "your father would
have sold the whole of it for five thousand dollars and been
thankful!"--a fact that seemed to her children of no importance.
When the old woman was laid away in Woodlawn beside her husband, Addie
could give free rein to her fancies, untroubled by the darts of the
realist. But the family fortunes soon became most desperate. Fortunately
John had no children, his one small son having died as a baby. His wife,
who had perhaps become tired of the family fortune as it never quite
realized itself, tried to prod her shiftless husband into a greater
activity. But except for the getting of the pension, which was put
through in 1885, John added little to the family purse, and before his
mother's death lost his position in the gas office, a new administration
of the company holding that a municipal utility was not an asylum for
old soldiers. The trouble was, as Mrs. John knew, and as Ada always
refused to recognize, John drank. At first it was a convivial weakness
indulged in only at the reunions of old veterans,--John was a most
ardent "Vet,"--but it became a habit that took away his little
usefulness for anything. So now the family for steady income was reduced
to the pension, which was only twenty-two dollars a month. Clearly
something had to be done. Mrs. John took in lodgers in the Church Street
house, a clerk or two from the neighboring shops. And Addie finally
brought herself to learn the manipulation of the typewriter, which was
fast becoming a woman's profession, and found a position in a large
store in the city.
It would seem that the Clark fortunes had reached their lowest ebb:
family extinction was all that now remained for them. The Church Street
house rested solely, save for the small pension, on the exertions of two
ineffective women. It could just get on as it was, and if the family
life had never been a bright and cheerful one, it was now drearier than
ever. Then Addie married. She was nearly if not quite forty years old,
and neither her brother nor sister-in-law expected such an event. She
was sallow, thin, and rather querulous in temperament. Very likely Addie
felt that marriage could not make her lot worse, and as middle-age
threatened, she accepted the defeat of her ambitions and in the spirit
of better-late-than-never struck out for herself in the race for
personal happiness, throwing over the burden of Clark's Field.
At any rate, she was married to William Scarp, a fellow-clerk in Minot
Brothers--wholesale wool. Addie represented that Mr. Scarp was of
excellent Southern blood from somewhere in North Carolina. It is
needless to enter into that nebulous question. He was earning thirty
dollars a week with Minot Brothers when they became engaged and was a
few years younger than his bride. The firm gave him a five-dollar
increase of salary on his marriage, old Savage remarking facetiously
that he believed in rewarding courage. The couple went to live in the
city, and for a year or two they moved nomadically from one
boarding-house or cheap hotel to another. It may be presumed that Addie,
without any clear idea of deceiving, had misled William Scarp in the
matter of Clark's Field--her fixed delusion. The Field made this
marriage, and it was not a happy one. The John Clarks, who still hung on
in the Church Street house with an additional roomer, soon began to
suspect that Addie was not wholly happy in her married life. William had
a quick temper and was very plain-spoken about the "job" that Addie had
"put over him" in the matter of the Clark property, though in fact she
had exercised no more mendacity than women of forty in her position are
wont to do. At one time shortly after the marriage Scarp had an
"understanding" with John Clark about the family estate. When he learned
that the Field could not be sold in the present state of its title and
that such leases as had been made of it to meet taxes and other
obligations tied it up until the opening of the next century, he
expressed himself abusively. Later he suggested that a "syndicate"
should be formed to employ lawyers to straighten out the title and
dispose of the property piecemeal as the leases fell in. It seemed a
brilliant plan, quite modern in its sound, but alas! William, no more
than John, could finance the "syndicate." So the suggestion lapsed, and
the Scarps worried along on William's salary for a time, and then moved
to Philadelphia. What Addie's experiences were there, or in Cincinnati
and Indianapolis, to which cities they also wandered, I have no means of
knowing, nor did the John Clarks hear from her, except for a rare
penciled postcard. The Clarks, as may be observed, were no great
letter-writers.
All is that one day in November of 1889, Addie arrived at the Church
Street house with a forlorn parcel of a little girl and a bedraggled bag
that contained her entire worldly possessions. She was ill and old. She
would say little about her husband, but later it came out in the
newspapers that William Scarp had been convicted of forgery and sent to
prison in Indiana (where he died soon after of consumption contracted in
prison). Addie had come back to the only human refuge she knew. She was
too ill and too beaten by life to work. She sat around in the Church
Street house dumbly for nearly a year, then died, leaving the forlorn,
pale little girl to her brother and sister-in-law as a legacy. This
child she had named Adelle, thus proving the persistence of her fancy
even in her forlornest hours. Ada or Addie was too common for the last
of the Clarks. She should at least have something poetic for name. For
who could say? She might some day become an heiress and shine in that
social firmament so much desired by her mother. In that event she should
not be handicapped by a vulgar name. As Addie had resumed her maiden
name after Scarp had been sent to prison, the little girl was destined
to grow up as Adelle Clark,--the last member of the Alton branch of the
Clarks, ultimate heiress to Clark's Field, should there be anything of
it left to inherit when the law let go.
The silent little girl, who played about the lodgers' rooms in the dingy
Church Street house, was of course unaware of the weight of expectation
hanging to her. She was almost abnormally silent, perhaps because of her
depressing prenatal experiences as well as the forlorn environment of
the rooming-house,--perhaps because of physical and spiritual anaemia.
"She's a puny mite of a child," Mrs. John Clark said complainingly,
unpromising like everything Clark; nevertheless, the last of the sturdy
yeoman stock of Clarks.