When the car had reached the end of the line Barstow decided to walk
back to escape the garrulity of the motorman, who lived a lonely life,
though he was of a sociable disposition.
Barstow's way led him shortly to the edge of a curious demesne, or
rather the debris of an estate. A chaos of grass and weeds thrust even
through the rust of the high iron fence about the place. Shrubs that had
once been shapely grew raggedly up and swept down into the tall and
ragged grass. A few evergreen trees lifted flowering cones like funeral
candles in sconces. What had been a lake with fountains was a great,
cracked basin of concrete tarnished with scabious pools thick with the
dead leaves of many an autumn.
Barstow entered a fallen gate and walked along paths where his feet
slashed through barbaric tangles clutching at him like fingers. As he
prowled, wondering what splendor this could have been which was so
misplaced in so dull a town and drooping into so early a neglect, birds
took alarm and went crying through the branches. There were lithe
escapes through the grass, and from the rim of the lake ugly toads
plounced into the pool and set the water-spiders scurrying on their
frail catamarans.
Two bronze stags towered knee-deep in verdure; one had a single antler,
the other none. A pair of toothless lions brooded over their lost
dignity. Between their disconsolate sentry, mounted flight on flight of
marble steps to the house of the manor. It lay like an old frigate
storm-shattered and flung aground to rot. The hospitable doors were
planked shut, the windows, too; the floors of the verandas were broken
and the roof was everywhere sunken and insecure.
At the portal had stood two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One
of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her
sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept into stone.
The scene somehow reminded Barstow of one of Poe's landscapes. It was
the corpse of a home. Eventually he noticed a tall woman in black,
seated on a bench and gazing down the terraces across the dead lake.
Barstow was tempted to ask her whose place this had been and what its
history was, but her mien and her crepe daunted him.
He made his way out of the region, looking back as he went. When he
approached the most neighboring house a grocery-wagon came flying down
the road. Before it stopped the slanted driver was off the seat and
half-way across the yard. In a moment he was back again. Barstow called
out:
"Whose place is that?"
"Shelby's."
"Did he move away?"
But the horse was already in motion, and the youth had darted after,
leaping to the side of the seat and calling back something which Barstow
could not hear.
Shelby, who had given the town everything he could, had even endowed it
with a ruins.
When Barstow had reached the hotel again he went in to his supper. A
head waitress, chewing gum, took him to a table where a wildly coiffed
damsel brought him a bewildering array of most undesirable foods in a
flotilla of small dishes.
After supper Barstow, following the suit of the other guests, took a
chair on the sidewalk, for a little breeze loafed along the hot street.
Barstow's name had been seen upon the hotel register and the executive
committee of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club waited upon him in an august
body.
Mr. Pettibone introduced himself and the others. They took chairs and
hitched them close to Barstow, while they poured out in alternate
strains the advantages of Wakefield. Barstow listened politely, but the
empty factory and the dismantled home of Shelby haunted him and made a
dismal background to their advertisements.
It was of the factory that he spoke first:
"The building you wrote me about and offered me rent-free looks a little
small and out of date for our plant. I saw Shelby's factory empty. Could
I rent that at a reasonable figure, do you suppose?"
The committee leaped at the idea with enthusiasm. Spate laughed through
his beard:
"Lord, I reckon the company would rent it to you for almost the price of
the taxes."
Then he realized that this was saying just a trifle too much. They began
to crawfish their way out. But Barstow said, with unconviction:
"There's only one thing that worries me. Why did Shelby close up his
Paradise Powder factory and move away?"
Pettibone urged the reason hastily: "His brothers closed it up for him.
They wouldn't stand any more of his extravagant nonsense. They shut down
the factory and then shut down on him, too."
"So he gave up his house and moved away?" said Barstow.
"He gave up his house because he couldn't keep it up," said Amasa
Harbury. "Taxes were pretty steep and nobody would rent it, of course.
It don't belong in a town like Wakefield. Neither did Shelby."
"So he moved away?"
"Moved away, nothin'," sneered Spate. "He went to a boardin'-house and
died there. Left his wife a lot of stock in a broken-down street-car
line, and a no-good electric-light company, and an independent telephone
system that the regulars gobbled up. She's gone back to teachin' school
again. We used our influence to get her old job back. We didn't think we
ought to blame her for the faults of Shelby."
"And what had Shelby done?"
They told him in their own way--treading on one another's toes in their
anxiety; shutting one another up; hunching their chairs together in a
tangle as if their slanders were wares they were trying to sell.
But about all that Barstow could make of the matter was that Shelby had
been in much such case as his own. He had been hungry for human
gratitude, and had not realized that it is won rather by accepting than
by bestowing gifts.
Barstow sat and smoked glumly while the committee clattered. He hardly
heard what they were at such pains to emphasize. He was musing upon a
philosophy of his father's:
"There's an old saying, 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth.' But
sayings and doings are far apart. If you can manage to sell a man a
horse he'll make the best of the worst bargain; he'll nurse the nag and
feed him and drive him easy and brag about his faults. He'll overlook
everything from spavin to bots; he'll learn to think that a hamstrung
hind leg is the poetry of motion. But a gift horse--Lord love you! If
you give a man a horse he'll look him in the mouth and everywhere else.
The whole family will take turns with a microscope. They'll kick because
he isn't run by electricity, and if he's an Arabian they'll roast him
because he holds his tail so high. If you want folks to appreciate
anything don't give it to 'em; make 'em work for it and pay for
it--double if you can."
* * * * *
Shelby had mixed poetry with business, had given something for nothing;
had paid the penalty.