THE CATER-CORNERED SEX
They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest
administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it.
Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts
through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which
often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who
venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and
worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise,
generally speaking, it appeared to give satisfaction. Nobody ever beat
the judge in any of his races for reelection, and after a while they
just naturally quit trying.
Nor did it seem to distress him deeply when the grave and learned lords
of the highest tribunal of the commonwealth saw fit, as they sometimes
did, to quarrel with a decision of his which, according to their lights,
ran counter to the authorities and the traditions revered by these
august gentlemen.
"Ah-hah!" he would say in his high penny-flute voice when such a thing
happened. "I see where the honorable court of appeals has disagreed with
me agin. Well, they've still got quite a piece to go yit before they
ketch up with the number of times I've disagreed with them."
But he never said such a thing in open court. Such utterances he
reserved for his cronies and confidants. Once he was under the dented
tin dome where he sat for so many years he became so firm a stickler for
the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was
imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church
in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not
practice the law in their shirt sleeves. They might do this when
appearing on certain neighbor circuits, but not here. They did not smoke
while court was in session, or sit reared back in their chairs with
their feet up on the counsel tables and on the bar railings. Of course
when not actually engaged in addressing the court one might chew tobacco
in moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to
lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves
besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried
on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of
cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors
which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern
admonishment for the first offense and a fine for the second.
Off the bench our judge was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the
bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe.
And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his
private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding,
his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully
accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much
use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq.,
citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's
English as though he had but small personal regard for the king or his
English either.
Similarly he always showed respect, outwardly at least, for the written
letter of the statute as written and cited. But when it seemed to him
that justice tempered with mercy stood in danger of being choked in a
lawyer's loop of red tape he sheared through the entanglements with a
promptitude which appealed more strongly, perhaps, to the lay mind than
to the professional. And if, from the bench, he might not succor the
deserving litigant or the penitent offender without violation to the
given principles of the law, which, aiming ever for the greater good to
the greater number, threatened present disaster for one deserving, he
very often privily would busy himself in the matter. This, then, was why
they had that saying about him.
It largely was in a private capacity that Judge Priest figured in the
various phases relating to the Millsap case, with which now we are about
to deal. The beginning of this was the ending of Felix Millsap, but from
its start to its finish he alone held the secrets of all its aspects.
The best people in town, those who made up the old families, knew the
daughter of this Felix Millsap; the people whose families were not so
old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones,
the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people
commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly
taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of
his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles
from the one in which her parents moved. Their lines did not touch. But
Judge Priest had the advantage on his side of moving at will in both
circles. Indeed he moved in all circles without serious impairment to
his social position in the community at large.
Briefly, the case of her who had been Eleanor Millsap was the case of a
child who, diligently climbing out of the environment of her childhood,
has attained to heights where her parents may never hope to come, a
common enough case here in flux and fluid America, and one which some
will applaud and some will deplore, depending on how they view such
matters; a daughter proclaiming by her attitude that she is ashamed of
the sources of her origin; a father and a mother visibly proud of their
offspring's successful rise, yet uncomplainingly accepting the roles to
which she has assigned them--there you have this small family tragedy in
forty words or less.
When the Millsaps moved to our town their baby was in her second summer.
With the passage of years the father and the mother came, as suitably
mated couples often do, to look rather like each other. But then,
probably there never had been a time when they, either in temperament or
port, had appeared greatly unlike, seeing that both the pair were
colorless, prosaic folk. So for Nature to mold them into a common
pattern was merely a detail of time and patience. But their little
Eleanor betrayed no resemblance to either in figure or face or
personality. It was in this instance as though hereditary traits had
been thwarted; as though two sober barnyard fowl had mated to bear a
golden pheasant. They were secluded, shy, unimaginative; she was vivid
and sprightly, with dash to her, and audacity.
They lived in one of those small gloomy houses whose shutters always are
closed and whose fronts always are blank; a house where the business of
living seems to be carried on surreptitiously, almost by stealth. She,
from the time she could walk alone, was actively abroad, a bright splash
of color in the small oblong of shabby front yard. The father, Felix
Millsap, was an odd-jobs woodworker. He made his living by undertakings
too trivial for a contracting carpenter and joiner to bid on and too
complicated for an amateur to attempt. The mother, Martha by name, took
in plain sewing to help out. She had about her the air of the needle
drudge, with shoulders bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a
seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from
holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily
grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so
very often fail to fashion.
When she graduated as the valedictorian of her class in the high school
she cut a far better figure in the frock her mother had made for her
than did any there on the stage at St. Clair Hall; she had a trick of
wearing simple garments which gave them distinction. Already she had
half a dozen sweethearts. Boys were drawn to her; girls she repelled
rather. Girls found her too self-centered, too intent on attaining her
own aims to give much heed to companionships. They called her selfish.
Well, if selfishness is another name for a constant, bounding ambition
to get on and up in the world Eleanor Millsap was selfish. But for the
boys she had a tremendous attraction. They admired her quick, cruel wit,
her energy, her good looks. She met her sweethearts on the street, at
the soda fountain, in that trysting place for juvenile sweetheartings,
the far corner of the post-office corridor.
She never invited any of these youthful squires of hers to her house;
they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from
her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many
words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike,
they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many
girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof
from any touch of scandal; the very openness of her gaddings protected
her from that. Besides, she seemed instinctively to know that if she
meant to make the best possible bargain for herself in life she must
keep herself unblemished--must give of her charms but not give too
freely. Town gossips might call her a forward piece, as they did;
jealousy among girls of her own age might have it that she was flip and
fresh; but no one, with truth, might brand her as fast.
Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography--learned it
thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook--and
presently found a place as secretary to Dallam Wybrant, the leading
merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish
and newly widowed--bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a
wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people--persons
who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe
farther--smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A
good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with
an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in
the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man--well,
there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody
was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with
marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
there were married.
As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
assured social position and wealth--as our town measured wealth--in his
own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose--and
she did not choose.
One evening--it might have been about a year and a half after the
marriage of his daughter--Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a
middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who
wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends
of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight.
It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed
which required reshingling the sun had blazed down upon him until it
sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked
with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about
him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of
Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the
turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested
witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It
was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried
out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a
belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they
got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have
died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.
In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is
shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting
away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own
walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence.
But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at
the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the
burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those
who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was
not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of
flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a
tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service
and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the
grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of
what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And
she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point
plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He
had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing
it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter
had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading
firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests--her
mother's and her own--in an action for damages against the street-car
company.
However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit.
The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one
of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the
costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in
settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a
special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late
Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law. So far as
the special administrator was concerned, this would end his duties in
the premises, seeing that other than this sum there was no property to
be divided.
The little house at the foot of Yazoo Street belonged to the widow. It
had been deeded to her at the time of its purchase years and years
before, and she had been a copartner in the undertaking of paying off
the mortgage upon it by dribs and bitlets which represented hard work
and the strictest economy. Naturally her husband had made no will.
Probably it had never occurred to him that he would have any property to
bequeath to anyone. But by virtue of his having died under a street car
rather than in his bed he was worth more dead than ever, living, he had
dreamed of being worth. He was worth eight thousand dollars in cash. So,
as it turned out, he had left something other than a name for sober
reliability and a reputation for paying his debts. And no doubt, in that
bourn to which his spirit had been translated out of a battered body,
his spirit rejoiced that the manner of his taking off had been as it
was.
But if the special administrator rested content in the thought that his
share in the transaction practically would end with but few added
details, his superior, the chief judicial officer of the district, felt
called upon to take certain steps on his own initiative solely, and
without consulting any person regarding the advisability of his action.
It was characteristic of Judge Priest that he should move promptly in
the matter. To a greater degree it also was characteristic of him that,
setting out for a visit to one of no social account whatsoever, he
should garb himself with more care than he might have shown had he been
going to see one of those mighty ones who sit in the high places. In a
suit of rumply but spotless white linen, and carrying in one hand his
best tape-edged palm-leaf fan, he rather suggested a plump old mandarin
as, on that same evening of the day when the street-railway company
effected settlement, he knocked at the front door of the cottage of the
Widow Millsap.
She was in and she was alone. She was one of those women who always are
in and nearly always are alone. Immediately, then, they sat in her front
room, which was her best room. Her sewing machine was there, and her
biggest oil lamp and her few small sticks of company furniture, her few
scraps of parlor ornamentation; a bad picture or two, gaudily framed;
china vases on a mantel-shelf; two golden-oak rockers, wearing on their
slick and shiny frontlets the brand of an installment-house Cain who
murdered beauty and yet failed in his designings to achieve comfort. It
was as hot as a Dutch oven, that little box of a room inclosed within
its thin-planked walls. It was not a place where one would care to
linger longer than one had to. Judge Priest came swiftly to the heart of
the business which had sent him thither.
"Ma'am," he was saying, "this is a kind of a pussonal matter that's
brought me down here this hot night, and with your consent I'll git
right to the point of it. Ordinarily I'm a poor hand at diggin' into the
business of other people. But seein' that I knowed your late lamented
husband both ez a worthy citizen and ez an honest, hard-workin' man, and
seein' that in my official capacity it has been incumbent upon me to
issue certain orders in connection with your rights and claims arisin'
out of his ontimely death, I have felt emboldened to interest myself,
privately, in your case--and that's why I'm here now.
"To-day at the cotehouse, when the settlement wuz formally agreed to by
the legal representatives of both sides, an idea come to me. And that
idea is this: Now there's eight thousand dollars due the heirs, you
bein' one and your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bein' the other. Half
of eight thousand dollars wouldn't be so very much to help take keer of
a person, no matter how keerful they wuz; but eight thousand dollars,
put out at interest, would provide a livin' in a way fur one who lived
simply, and more especially in the case of one who owned their own home
and had it free from debt, ez I understand is the situation with
reguards to you.
"On the other hand, your daughter is well fixed. Her husband is a rich
man, ez measured by the standards of our people. It's probable that
she'll always be well and amply provided fur. Moreover, she's young, and
you, ma'am, will some day come to the time when you won't be able to go
on workin' with your hands ez you now do.
"So things bein' thus and so, it seems to me that ef the suggestion was
made to your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, that she should waive her
claim to her share of them eight thousand dollars and sign over her
rights to you, thereby inshorin' you frum the fear of actual want in
your declinin' years; and her, ez I have jest been statin', not needin'
the money--well, it seems to me that she would jest naturally jump at
the notion. So if you would go to her yourself with the suggestion, or
git somebody in whose good sense and judgment you've got due confidence
to go to her and her husband and lay the facts before them, I, fur one,
knowin' a little somethin' of human nature, feel morally sure of the
outcome. Why, I expect she'd welcome the idea; maybe she's already
thinkin' of the same thing and wonderin' how, legally, it kin be done.
And that, ma'am, is what brings me here to your residence to-night. And
I trust you will appreciate the motive which has prompted me and furgive
me if I, who's almost a stranger to you, seem to have meddled in your
affairs without warrant or justification."
He reared back in his chair, a plump hand upon either knee.
Through this the widow had not spoken, or offered to speak. Now that he
had finished, she answered him from the half shadow in which she sat on
the farther side of the sewing machine upon which the lamp burned. There
was no bitterness, he thought, in her words; merely a sense of
resignation to and acceptance of a state of things not of her own
contriving, and not, conceivably, to be of her own undoing.
"Judge," she said, "perhaps you know by hearsay at least that since my
daughter's marriage she has lived apart from us. Neither my husband nor
I ever set foot in the house where she lives. It was her wish"--she
caught herself here, and he, sensing that she was equivocating,
nevertheless inwardly approved of the deceit--"I mean to say that it was
not my wish to go among her friends, who are not my friends, or to
embarrass her in any way. I am proud that in marrying she has done so
well for herself. In thinking of her happiness I shall always try to
find happiness for myself.
"But, judge, you must know this too: She did not come to the--the
funeral. Well, there was a cause for that; she had a reason. But--but
she had not been here for months before that. She--oh, you might as well
hear it if you are to understand--she has never once been here since she
married!
"And so, Judge Priest, I cannot go to her until I am sent for--not under
any circumstances nor for any purpose. If she has her pride, I in my
poor small way have my pride, too, my self-respect. When she needs
me--if ever she does--I'll go to her wherever she may be if I have to
crawl there on my hands and knees. What has gone before will all be
forgotten. But don't you see, sir?--I can't go until she sends for me.
And so, Judge Priest, while I thank you with all my heart for your
thoughtfulness and your kindness, and while I'd be glad, too, if Ellie
saw fit or could be made to see that it would be a fine thing to give me
this money in the way you have suggested, I say to you again that I
cannot be the one to go to her. I will not even write to her on the
subject. That, with me, is final."
"But, ma'am," he said, "ef somebody else went--some friend of yours and
of hers--how about it then?"
She shook her head.
"Her friends--now--are not my friends. My friends are not hers any more;
most of them never were her friends. Besides, the idea did not originate
with me. Either the proposition must come from her direct or it must be
presented to her by some third party. And I can think of no third party
of my choosing that she would care to hear. No, Judge Priest, I have
nobody to send."
"All right then," he stated, "since I set this here ball in motion I'll
keep it rollin'. Ma'am, I'll take it on myself to speak to Mrs. Dallam
Wybrant in your behalf."
"But, Judge Priest," she protested, "I couldn't ask you to do that for
me--I couldn't!"
"Ma'am, you ain't asked me and you don't need to ask me. I'm askin'
myself--I'm doin' this on my own hook, and ef you'll excuse me I'll
start at it right away. When there's a thing which needs to be done ez
bad ez this thing needs to be done, there oughtn't to be no time lost."
He stood up and looked about him for his hat. "Ma'am, I confidently
expect to be back here inside of half an hour, or an hour at most, with
some good news fur you."
To one who had traveled about more and seen the homes of wealthy
folk--to a professional decorator, say, or an expert in furnishing
values--the drawing-room into which Judge Priest presently was being
ushered might have seemed overdone, overly cluttered up with drapery and
adornment. But to Judge Priest's eye the room was all that a rich man's
best room should be. The thick stucco walls cut out the heat of the
night; an electric fan whirred upon him as he sat in a deep chair of
puffed red damask. A mulatto girl in neat uniform--this uniform itself
an astonishing innovation--had answered his ring at the door and had
ushered him into this wonderful parlor and had taken his name and had
gone up the broad stairs with the word that he desired to see the lady
of the house for a few minutes upon important business. He had asked
first for Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant; but Mr. Wybrant, it seemed, was
out of town; Mrs. Wybrant, then, would do. The maid, having delivered
the message, had returned to say her mistress would be down presently
and the caller was to wait, please. Waiting, he had had opportunity to
contrast the present settings with those he had just quitted. Perhaps
the contrast between them appeared all the greater by reason of the
freshness of his recollection of the physical surroundings at the scene
of his first visit of that evening.
She came down soon, wearing a loose, frilly, wrapperlike garment which
hid her figure. Approaching maternity had not softened her face, had not
given to it the glorified Madonna look. Rather it had drawn her features
to haggardness and put in her eyes a look of sharpened apprehension as
though dread of the nearing ordeal of suffering and danger overrode the
hope which, along with the new life, was quick within her. She greeted
Judge Priest with a matter-of-fact directness. Her expression plainly
enough told him she was at a loss to account for his coming.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said in her rather metallic fashion of speaking,
"that Dallam isn't here. But he was called to St. Louis this morning on
business. I hope you will pardon my receiving you in negligee. I'm not
seeing much company at present. The maid, though, said the business was
imperative."
"Yes, ma'am, it is," answered Judge Priest, rather ceremoniously for
him, "and I am grateful to you fur lettin' me see you and I don't aim to
detain you very long. I kin tell you in a few words whut it is that has
brought me."
He was as good as his promise--he did tell her in a few words. Outlining
his suggestion, he used much the same language which he had used once
already that night. He did not tell her, though, he had come to her
direct from her mother. He did not tell her he had been to her mother at
all. It might have been inferred that his present hearer was the first
to hear that which now he set forth.
"Well, ma'am," he concluded, "that's the condition ez I view it. And if
you likewise see your way clear to view it ez I do the whole thing kin
be accomplished with the scratch of a pen. And you'll have the
satisfaction of knowin' that through your act your mother will be well
provided fur fur the rest of her life." He added a final argument, being
moved thereto perhaps by the fact that she had heard him without change
of expression and with no glance which might be interpreted as approval
for his plan. "I take it, ma'am, that you do not need the money
involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich fur this
town--your husband is, anyway."
She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her
words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though,
might be said for her--she sought no roundabout course. She did not
quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or
apologies for her position.
"I decline to do it," she said. "I do not feel that I have the right to
do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest
yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no
intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You
say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to
say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself
practically admit there is a chance that some day I might need it.
Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He
is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain--all business
is. He might lose every cent he has to-morrow in some bad investment or
some poor speculation.
"There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing--absolutely
nothing--in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though
he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal
expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my
own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of
having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance
will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may draw at
will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I
choose."
"But ma'am," he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired
by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break
through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness--"but, ma'am, do
you stop to realize that it's your own mother who'd benefit by this
sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there's one
person in all this world who's entitled--"
"Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you," she said crisply, her tone icy
and sharp, "but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at
my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person
that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence
forces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a
mother myself. If my baby lives--and my baby is going to live--that
money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think
of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns
the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money;
she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she
has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my
mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard
the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of
everything else. That is all I have to say about it--that is, if I have
made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest."
"Madam," said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong
affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately
and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench,
"you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said
that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us.
Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night."
He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head--a thing the
old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a
woman of his race--and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if
a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be
it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that
house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen
that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a
half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light
playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about
her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or
in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But
Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.
Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was inability long to maintain a
gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before
he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile--and yet, when one came to
think it over, a span as wide as a continent--which lay between the
restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the
shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very
wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentleman who, come another
half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a
golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap's sewing machine.
"Ma'am," he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house,
she holding the door open for his passage, "I come back to you licked.
Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put
before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I'm a teetotal
failure. I return to you empty-handed--and licked."
To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then
as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them,
she asked quietly, almost listlessly, "My daughter saw you then?"
"She did, ma'am, she did. And she refused point-blank!"
"I am sorry, Judge Priest--sorry that you should have been put to so
much trouble needlessly," she said, still holding her voice at that
emotionless level. "I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more
than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I
should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I
should have known better than to send you."
He snorted.
"Ma'am, when a little while ago, settin' right here, I told you I
thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too
soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is
brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin' so, but I kin not
fathom the workin's of a mind that would--that would--" He floundered
for words in his indignation. "It is not natural, this here thing I have
just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could--"
"Judge Priest," she said steadily, "it is not my own flesh and blood
that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that
is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and
blood could never treat me so."
He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.
"I mean to say just this," she went on: "Ellie is not my own child. She
has not a drop of my blood or my husband's blood in her. Judge Priest, I
am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town
excepting me--now that my husband is gone--has ever known. We never had
any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to
us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a
young woman whose husband had deserted her--had run away with another
woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a
six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to
this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern
Shore of Maryland.
"Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was
shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She
had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was
dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn't have much--we never
have had much all through our lives--but what we had we divided with
her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the
last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying
she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for
her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I
was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and
died.
"Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came
to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as
though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother
died--that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old--we brought her
with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had
been her mother's name--Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named
Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she
became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected--she has never for one
moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed
indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to
behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be
criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us
comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her
that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else
did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have
served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it
lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.
"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother
instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I
have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these
women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women
was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that
child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can
still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all
that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose."
"Yes, ma'am," he said slowly, "I reckin you're right--that's
motherhood." He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his
puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep
compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.
"I take it that you adopted the child legally?" he said, seeking to make
his tone casual.
"We took her just as I told you," she answered. "We always treated her
as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference."
"Yes, ma'am, quite so. You've made that clear enough. But by law, before
you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through
the legal form of law of adoptin' her, didn't you?"
"No, sir, we didn't do that. It didn't seem necessary--it never occurred
to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew
where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn't care what might become
of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn't that
sufficient?"
Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put
one of his own:
"Do you reckin now, ma'am, by any chance that there are any people still
livin' back there in that town of Calais--old neighbors of yours, or
kinfolks maybe--who'd remember the circumstances in reguard to your
havin' took this baby in the manner which you have described?"
"Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half
sister. I haven't seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her
regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was
young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives
in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his
name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once.
And there may be still others if I could think of them."
"Never mind the others; the two you've named will be sufficient. Whut
did you say their names were, ma'am?"
She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them
in his memory.
"Ah-hah," he said. "Ma'am, have you got some writin' material handy? Any
blank paper will do--and a pen and ink?"
From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and
wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen
close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read
through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once
some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She
stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the
paper as though to stay him.
"Judge Priest," she said, "what have you written down here? And what do
you mean to do with what you have written?"
"Whut I have written here is a short statement--a memorandum, really, of
whut you have been tellin' me, ma'am," he explained. "I'll have it
written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then to-morrow I
want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of
witnesses."
"But is it necessary?" she demurred. "I'm ignorant of the law, and you
spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late
date I must do it, can't it be done privately, in secret, so that
neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?"
"Ellie will have to know, I reckin," he stated grimly, "and other folks
will know too. But this here paper has nothin' to do with any sech
proceedin' ez you imagine. It's too late now fur you legally to adopt
Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing,
and I, fur my part, don't see how any right-thinkin' person could or
would do so. She's a free agent, of full age, and she's a married woman.
No, ma'am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin' she
has no moral claim on you neither. She's not your child, a fact which
I'm shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to
doubt your word. She ain't your legal heir. She ain't got a leg--excuse
me, ma'am--she ain't got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us
licked. Instid it would seem that we've got Ellie licked."
He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face.
Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of
paper as though she would tear it from him.
"No, no, no!" she cried. "I won't do that! I can't do that! You mustn't
ask me to do that, judge!"
"But, ma'am, don't you git my meanin' yit? Don't you realize that not a
penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant?
That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it's all yours and that
you're goin' to have it all for yourself--every last red cent of
it--jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in
court?"
"I'm not thinking of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her
happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have
told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you,
I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this.
You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you
to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do
anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest--oh, don't you
see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born.
She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she
really was born--knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother
died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has
borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity
through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a
thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I
would die to spare her suffering--die to spare her humiliation or
disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who
tells you no, not that, not that!"
He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust
it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He
took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and
a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with
long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a
stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black,
yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the
beauties of this mortal world.
"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you
say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong--foolishly, blindly
wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and
that no mother's son has got the right to question you or try to
persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to
be able to call myself your friend."
Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of
his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part,
he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for
the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her
hand--a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might
once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled
and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one,
and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had
done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really,
there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far
back in Judge Priest's ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in
the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her
hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied
him.
Let us now for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally
on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are
to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On
the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which
has been set forth in the foregoing pages, Judge Priest, in the company
of Doctor Lake and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell Hounds,
C.S.A., departs for Reelfoot Lake upon his annual fishing trip. In the
afternoon Jeff Poindexter, the judge's body servant, going through his
master's wardrobe seeking articles suitable for his own adornment in the
master's absence, is pained to discern stripings of spilled ink down the
legs of a pair of otherwise unmarred white trousers, and, having no
intention that garments which will one day come into his permanent
possession shall be thus disfigured and sullied, promptly bundles them
up and bears them to the cleansing, pressing and repairing establishment
of one Hyman Pedaloski. The coat which matches the trousers goes along
too. Upon the underside of one of its sleeves there is a big ink blob.
Include in the equation this _emigre_, Hyman Pedaloski, newly landed
from Courland and knowing as yet but little of English, whether written
or spoken, yet destined to advance by progressive stages until a day
comes when we proudly shall hail him as our most fashionable merchant
prince--Hy Clay Pedaloski, the Square Deal Clothier, Also Hats, Caps &
Leather Goods. Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him
our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link.
At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet
the happy fate which all true anglers wish for them; and the white
perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the
whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite. This brings
us to the end of the week and to the fifth day of the expedition, with
Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day's sports,
exhaling scents of the oil of penny-royal. Sitting-there under a tent
fly, all sun blistered and skeeter stung, all tired out but most
content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the _Daily Evening News_
which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post
office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local
Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a
paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake
swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a
tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon
disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this
wise, namely:
Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial
mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty
Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and
child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as
being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely
recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has
brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father
yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the
cigars were on you!
The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is
short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is
informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at
the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so
good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment.
Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she
'uz a powerful masterful-lookin' Yankee-talkin' lady, all dressed up lak
she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s'ciety lodge, which is
Jeff's way of summing up his impressions of the first professional
trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.
It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the
way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much
mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom,
bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving
him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went
out and closed the door behind her.
From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when
he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently
endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it
now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside,
the curtains were half drawn and the electrics not yet turned on, but
even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here
revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual
than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening
into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in
the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and
bare, as though offering to Judge Priest's own bald, pinkish pate the
sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small
ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a
young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and
you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man
since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent
obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the
purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.
"Judge Priest," she said, "I have been lying here all day hoping you
would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since
I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming."
"Ma'am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word," he said. "In
whut way kin I be of service to you? I'm at your command."
She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and
brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.
"Didn't you write this?" she asked.
He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great
chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.
"Yes, ma'am," he admitted, "I wrote it. But it wuzn't meant fur you to
see. It wuzn't meant fur anybody a-tall to see--ever. And I'm wonderin',
ma'am, and waitin' fur you to tell me how come it to reach you."
"I'll tell you," she answered. "But first, before we get to that, would
you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think
I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for
myself. Women can't reason much, you know; but they have intuition." She
smiled a little at this conceit. "And I want to know if my deductions
and my conclusions are correct."
"Well, ma'am," he said, "ez I wuz sayin', no human eye wuz to have read
this here. But since you have read it, I feel it's my bounden duty, in
common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though
in doin' so I'm breakin' a solemn pledge."
So he told her--the how and the why and the where and the when of it;
details of which the reader is aware.
"I thought I wasn't very far wrong, and I wasn't," she said when he had
finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on
the farther wall. Then: "Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have
been the god of the machine. I wonder if you'd be willing to continue
to serve?"
"Ef it lies within my powers to do so--yessum, and gladly."
"It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers
drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of
that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will
send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please--as
soon as possible."
"Ma'am," he said, "it shall be as you desire; but ef it's all the same
to you I'd like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin
think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which
would give me more honest pleasure. I'll do so before I leave this
house." He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be
giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to
spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a
question: "It would appear that you have changed your mind about this
here matter since I seen you last?"
"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for
me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most
of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my
baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been
altered. I've been lying here to-day with her beside me, thinking
things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father
should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of
the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I
did--although until I read that paper I didn't know it--beholden to the
goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real
mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have
owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think
so--no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it
is so."
"Lady," he answered, "to a mere man woman always will be an everlastin'
puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint
way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break
in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you
ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of
note paper."
"Oh, that's right! I had forgotten," she answered. "Try to think now,
judge--when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that
night at her house, what did you do with the paper?"
"I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much
anyway."
"Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?"
"Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!" he exclaimed. "I believe that's
purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein' a careless old
fool, I left it there instid of tearin' it up or burnin' it, and then I
went on home and plum' furgot it wuz still there--not that I now regret
havin' done so, seein' whut to-night's outcome is."
"And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn
that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about
that?"
"I suspicion that he done that very thing," he said, a light beginning
to break in upon him. "Jeff is purty particular about keepin' my clothes
in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he
decides it's time to confiscate 'em away frum me and start in wearin'
'em himself. Yessum, my Jeff's mighty funny that way. And now, come to
think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on 'em
that same night."
"Well, then, the mystery is no mystery at all," she said. "On that very
same day--the day your darky sent your clothes to the cleaner's--I had
two of Dallam's suits sent down to be pressed. That little man at the
tailor shop--Pedaloski--found this paper crumpled up in your pocket and
took it out and then later forgot where he had found it. So, as I
understand, he tried to read it, seeking for a clue to its ownership. He
can't read much English, you know, so probably he has had no idea then
or thereafter of the meaning of it; but he did know enough English to
make out the name of Wybrant. Look at it and you'll see my name occurs
twice in it, but your name does not occur at all. So don't you see what
happened--what he did? Thinking the paper must have come from one of my
husband's pockets, he smoothed it out as well as he could and folded it
up and pinned it to the sleeve of Dallam's blue serge and sent it here.
My maid found it when she was undoing the bundle before hanging up the
clothes in Dallam's closet, and she brought it to me, thinking, I
suppose, it was a bill from the cleaner's shop, and I read it. Simple
enough explanation, isn't it, when you know the facts?"
"Simple," he agreed, "and yit at the same time sort of wonderful too.
And whut did you do when you read it?"
"I was stunned at first. I tried at first not to believe it. But I
couldn't deceive myself. Something inside of me told me that it was
true--every word of it. I suppose it was the woman in me that told me.
And somehow I knew that you had written it, although really that part
was not so very hard a thing to figure out, considering everything. And
somehow--I can't tell you why though--I was morally sure that after you
had written it some other person had forbidden your making use of it in
any way, and instinctively--anyhow, I suppose you might say it was by
instinct--I knew that it had reached me, of all persons, by accident and
not by design.
"I tried to reach you--you were gone away. But I did reach that funny
little man Pedaloski by telephone, and found out from him why he had
pinned the paper on Dallam's coat. I did not tell my husband about it.
He doesn't know yet. I don't think I shall ever tell him. For two days,
judge, I wrestled with the problem of whether I should send for my
mother and tell her that now I knew the thing which all her life she had
guarded from me. Finally I decided to wait and see you first, and try to
find out from you the exact circumstances under which the paper was
written, and the reason why, after writing it, you crumpled it up and
hid it away.
"And then--and then my baby came, and since she came my scheme of life
seems all made over. And oh, Judge Priest"--she reached forth a white,
weak hand and caught at his--"I have you and my baby and--yes, that
little man to thank that my eyes have been opened and that my heart has
melted in me and that my soul has been purged from a terrible selfish
deed of cruelty and ingratitude. And one thing more I want you to know:
I'm not really sorry that I was born as I was. I'm glad, because--well,
I'm just glad, that's all. And I suppose that, too, is the woman in me."
One given to sonorous and orotund phrases would doubtless have coined a
most splendid speech here. But all the old judge, gently patting her
hand, said was:
"Well, now, ma'am, that's powerful fine--the way it's all turned out.
And I'm glad I had a blunderin' hand in it to help bring it about. I
shorely am, ma'am. I'd like to keep on havin' a hand in it. I wonder now
ef you wouldn't like fur me to be the one to go right now and fetch your
mother here to you?"
She shook her head, smiling.
"Thank you, judge, that's not necessary. She's here now. She was here
when the baby came. I sent for her. She's in her room right down the
hall; it'll be her room always from now on. I expect she's sewing on
things for the baby; we can't make her stop it. She's terribly jealous
of Miss McAlpin--that's the trained nurse Dallam brought back with him
from St. Louis--but Miss McAlpin will be going soon, and then she'll be
in sole charge. She doesn't know, Judge Priest, that what she told to
you I now know. She never shall know if I can prevent it, and I know
you'll help me guard our secret from her."
"I reckin you may safely count on me there, ma'am," he promised. "I've
frequently been told by disinterested parties that I snore purty loud
sometimes, but I don't believe anybody yit caught me talkin' in my
sleep. And now I expect you're sort of tired out. So ef you'll excuse
me I'll jest slip downstairs, and before I go do that there little piece
of writin' we spoke about a while ago."
"Wouldn't you like to see my baby before you go?" she asked. Her left
hand felt for the white folds which half swaddled the tiny sleeper.
"Judge Priest, let me introduce you to little Miss Martha Millsap
Wybrant, named for her grandmammy."
"Pleased to meet you, young lady," said he, bowing low and elaborately.
"At your early age, honey, it's easier fur a man, to understand you than
ever it will be agin after you start growin' up. Pleased indeed to meet
you."
If memory serves him aright, this chronicler of sundry small happenings
in the life and times of the Honorable William Pitman Priest has more
than once heretofore commented upon the fact that among our circuit
judge's idiosyncrasies was his trick, when deeply moved, of talking to
himself. This night as he went slowly homeward through the soft and
velvety cool of the summer darkness he freely indulged himself in this
habit. Oddly enough, he punctuated his periods, as it were, with
lamp-posts. When he reached a street light he would speak musingly to
himself, then fall silent until he had trudged along to the next light.
Something after this fashion:
Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Exall Boulevard:
"Well, sir, the older I git the more convinced I am that jest about the
time a man decides he knows a little something about human nature it's a
shore sign he don't know nothin' a-tall about it, 'specially human
nature ez it applies to the female of the species. Now, f'rinstance, you
take this here present instance: A woman turns aginst the woman she
thinks is her own mother. Then she finds out the other woman ain't her
own mother a-tall, and she swings right back round agin and--well, it's
got me stumped. Now ef in her place it had 'a' been a man. But a
woman--oh, shuckin's, whut's the use?"
Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Sycamore Avenue:
"Still, of course we've got to figger the baby as a prime factor
enterin' into the case and helpin' to straighten things out. Spry little
trick fur three days old, goin' on four, wuzn't she? Ought to be purty,
too, when she gits herself some hair and a few teeth and plumps out so's
she taken up the slack of them million wrinkles, more or less, that
she's got now. Babies, now--great institutions anyway you take 'em."
Corner of Sycamore Avenue, turning into Clay Street:
"And still, dog-gone it, you'll find folks in this world so blind that
they'll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest
goes along doin' things by haphazard without no workin' plans and no
fixed designs. But me, I'm different--me. I regard the scheme of
creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go
meddlin' along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and
jest when it looks like nothin' is goin' to result frum my interference
but fresh heartaches fur one of the noblest souls that ever lived on
this here footstool, why the firm of Providence, Pedaloski and
Poindexter steps in, and bang, there you are! It wouldn't happen agin
probably in a thousand years, but it shore happened this oncet, I'll
tell the world. Let's see, now, how does that there line in the hymn
book run?--'moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.' Ain't it
the truth?"
Last street lamp on Clay Street before you come to Judge Priest's house:
"And they call 'em the opposite sex! I claim the feller that fust coined
that there line wuz a powerful conservative pusson. Opposite? Huh!
Listen here to me: They're so dad-gum opposite they're plum'
cater-cornered!"