There was no brass band to meet him. At the hotel the clerk read his
name without emotion. When he required the best two rooms in the hotel,
and a bath at that, the clerk looked suspicious:
"Any baggage?"
"Three trunks and a grip."
"What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?"
"Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room."
He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it
seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs,
apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows.
He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked
horse dozing at the hitching-post?
Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There
stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the
trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the
porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with
the same arch of water springing from the nozzle.
He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he
started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A
raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It
was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat
dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score
of years ago.
Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor
Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy
was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened
the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and washing-powder
Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used washing-powder
then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."
As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the
grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy
leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The
delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in
Wakefield, now as then.
Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery
where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables
seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the
strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as
always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs. Spate had so
distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old
Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as
his hard-driven horses.
Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into
conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had
always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and
whiskers.
Joel Spate, never dreaming who Shelby was, was gracious to him for the
first time in history. He evidently looked upon Shelby as a new-comer
who might be pre-empted for a regular customer before Mrs. L. Bowers,
the rival grocer, got him. It somehow hurt Shelby's homesick heart to be
unrecognized, more than it pleased him to enjoy time's topsy-turvy. Here
he was, returned rich and powerful, to patronize the taskmaster who had
worked him hard and paid him harder in the old years. Yet he dared not
proclaim himself and take his revenge.
He ended the interview by buying a few of the grocer's horrible cigars,
which he gave away to the hotel porter later.
All round the town Shelby wandered, trying to be recognized. But age and
prosperity had altered him beyond recall, though he himself knew almost
every old negro whitewash man, almost every teamster, he met. He was
surer of the first names than of the last, for the first names had been
most used in his day, and it surprised him to find how clearly he
recalled these names and faces, though late acquaintances escaped his
memory with ease.
The women, too, he could generally place, though many who had been
short-skirted tomboys were now heavy-footed matrons of embonpoint with
children at their skirts, children as old as they themselves had been
when he knew them. Some of them, indeed, he recognized only by the
children that lagged alongside like early duplicates.
As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of
their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but
the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before
she reached him he identified Phoebe Carew.
Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a
meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled
about town on Saturday afternoons. And now the child, though she must be
thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful
prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by
accident or choice, not by nature's decree.
He wondered if she, at least, would pay him the compliment of
recognition. She made no sign of it as she approached. As she passed he
lifted his hat.
"Isn't this Miss Phoebe Carew?"
Wakefield women were not in danger from strangers' advances; she paused
without alarm and answered with an inquiring smile:
"Yes."
"You don't remember me?"