Luella Thickins cast her spells over Eddie with all her might, but he
understood them now and escaped through their coarse meshes. She was so
resolute, however, that he did not dare trust himself alone in the same
town with her unless he had a chaperon.
He sent a note to Ellaphine, saying he was in dire trouble and needed
her help. This brought him the entree to her parlor. He told her the
exact situation and begged her to rescue him from Luella.
Ellaphine's craggy features grew as radiant as a mountain peak in the
sunrise. The light made beautiful what it illumined. She consented at
last to believe in Eddie's devotion, or at least in his need of her; and
the homely thing enjoyed the privilege of being pleaded for and of
yielding to the prayers of an ardent lover.
She assumed that the marriage could not take place for several years, if
ever. She wanted to give Eddie time to be sure of his heart; but Eddie
was stubborn and said:
"Seein' as we're agreed on gettin' married, let's have the wedding right
away and get it over with."
When Ellaphine's mother learned that Ellaphine had a chance to marry an
heir and was asking for time, Mrs. Govers delivered an oration that
would have sent Ellaphine to the altar with almost anybody, let alone
her idolized Eddie.
The wedding was a quiet affair. Everybody in Carthage was invited. Few
came. People feared that if they went they would have to send
wedding-presents, and Eddie and Ellar were too unimportant to the social
life of Carthage to make their approval valuable.
Eddie wore new shoes, which creaked and pinched. He looked twice as
uncomfortable and twice as sad as he had looked at his uncle Loren's
obsequies; and he suffered that supreme disenchantment of a too-large
collar with a necktie rampant.
In spite of the ancient and impregnable theory that all brides are
beautiful, was there ever a woman who looked her best in the uniform of
approaching servitude? In any case, Ellaphine's best was not good, and
she was at her worst in her ill-fitting white gown, with the veil askew.
Her graceless carriage was not improved by the difficulty of keeping
step with her escort and the added task of keeping step with the music.
The organist, Mr. Norman Maugans, always grew temperamental when he
played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," and always relieved its monotonous
cadence with passionate accelerations and abrupt retardations. That made
walking difficult.
When the minister had finished with the couple and they moved down the
aisle to what the paper called the "Bridle March, by Lohengrin," Mr.
Maugans always craned his neck to see and usually put his foot on the
wrong pedal, with the startling effect of firing a cannon at the
departing guests.
He did not crane his neck, however, to see Mr. and Mrs. Pouch depart.
They were too commonplace entirely. He played the march with such
doleful indifference that Eddie found the aisle as long as the distance
from Marathon to Athens. Also he was trying to walk so that his pinching
shoes would not squeak.
At the end of the last pew Eddie and Ellaphine encountered Luella
Thickins leaning out into the aisle and triumphantly beautiful in her
finest raiment. Her charms were militant and vindictive, and her smile
plainly said: "Uh-huh! Don't you wish you'd taken me instead of that
thing you've hitched up with for life?"
Eddie gave her one glance and found her hideous. Ellaphine lowered her
eyelids in defeat and slunk from the church, thinking:
"Now he's already sorry that he married me. What can he see in me to
love? Nothing! Nothing!"
When they clambered into the carriage Eddie said, "Well, Mrs. Pouch,
give your old husband a kiss!"
Ellaphine shrank away from him, however, crying again. He was hurt and
puzzled until he remembered that it is the business of brides to cry.
He held her hand and tried to console her for being his victim, and
imagined almost every reason for her tears but the true one.
The guests at the church straggled to Mrs. Govers's home, drawn by the
call of refreshments. Luella was the gayest of them all. People wondered
why Eddie had not married her instead of Ellaphine. Luella heard some
one say, "What on earth can he see in her?"
Luella answered, "What on earth can she see in him?" It was hardly
playing fair, but Luella was a poor loser. She even added, to clinch it,
"What on earth can they see in each other?"
That became the town comment on the couple when there was any comment at
all. Mainly they were ignored completely.
Eddie and Ellar were not even honored with the usual outburst of the
ignoblest of all sports--bride-baiting. Nobody tied a white ribbon to
the wheel of the hack that took them to the depot. Old shoes had not
been provided and rice had been forgotten. They were not pelted or
subjected to immemorial jokes. They were not chased to the train, and
their elaborate schemes for deceiving the neighbors as to the place of
their honeymoon were wasted. Nobody cared where they went or how long
they stayed.
They returned sheepishly, expecting to run a gantlet of humor; but
people seemed unaware that they had been away. They settled down into
the quiet pool of Carthage without a splash, like a pair of mud-turtles
slipping off a log into the water. Even the interest in Eddie's
inheritance did not last long, for Uncle Loren's fortune did not last
long--not that they were spendthrift, for they spent next to nothing;
but money must be fed or it starves to death. Money must grow or wither.
V
Eddie found that his uncle's reputation for hard dealing had been a
condition of his success. He soon learned that the feather-duster
factory could be run at a profit only by the most microscopic care.
Wages must be kept down; hours kept up; the workers driven every minute,
fined if they were late, nagged if they dawdled. Profit could be wrung
from the trade only by ugly battles with dealers and purchasers. Raw
material had to be fought down, finished product fought up; bills due
fought off, accounts fought in; the smallest percentage of a percentage
wrestled for.
Eddie was incapable of such vigilant hostility toward everybody. The
factory almost immediately ceased to pay expenses. Eddie was prompt to
meet debts, but lenient as a collector. The rest of his inheritance
fared no better. Eddie was an ideal mortgagee. The first widow wept him
out of his interest in five tears. Having obliged her, he could hardly
deny the next person, who had money but wanted more, "to carry out a big
deal."
Eddie first gained a reputation for being a kind-hearted gentleman and a
Christian, and later a notoriety for being an easy mark. Eddie overheard
such comment eventually, and it wounded him as deeply as it bewildered
him. Bitterer than the contempt for a hard man is the contempt for a
soft man who is betrayed by a vice of mercy. Eddie was hopelessly
addicted to decency.
Uncle Loren had been a miser and so close that his nickname had implied
the ability to skin a flint. People hated him and raged against him; but
it suddenly became evident that they had worked hard to meet their bills
payable to him. They had sat up nights devising schemes to gain cash for
him. He was a cause of industry and thrift and self-denial. He paid poor
wages, but he kept the factory going. He squeezed a penny until the
eagle screamed, but he made dusters out of the tail feathers, and he was
planning to branch out into whisk brooms and pillows when, in the words
of the pastor, he was "called home." The pastor liked the phrase, as it
did not commit him to any definite habitat.
Eddie, however, though he worked hard and used thrift, and, with
Ellaphine's help, practised self-denial, found that he was not so big a
man as the small man he succeeded. He increased the wages and cut down
the hours, and found that he had diminished the output of everything
except complaints. The men loafed shamelessly, cheated him of the energy
and the material that belonged to him, and whined all the time. His
debtors grew shiftless and contemptuous.
It is the irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may
prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs do
grow from thistles.
For a time the Pouch couple attracted a great deal of attention from the
people of Carthage--the sort of attention that people on shore devote to
a pair of capsized canoeists for whom nobody cares to risk his life.
Luella Thickins had forced the note of gaiety at the wedding, but she
soon grew genuinely glad that Eddie had got away. She began to believe
that she had jilted him.