Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's
house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book would
fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her
violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up
the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it.
With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful
day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes,
it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was
rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. At
other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over the
blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards
France to say farewell to it.
Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed
to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was
kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her
humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was
getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least
suggestion of anything of the sort.
Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side,
tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the
Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and
to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in
the watches of the night. He was asking her for a sign, any kind of
sign,--ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign,--and Zena was
plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear her
father's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of Tecumseh
Township, and start reading it like mad.
She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and being
parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and
saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of
Hohenbranntwein.
And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic,
because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algerian
corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the
asking, and as for a wounded English officer,--well, perhaps it's better
not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular
military hospital.
Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You've only to look
at them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress
of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely
better than anything you ever see in the city,--especially if you can
wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple trees and the
green grass of a tennis court. And if you remember, too, that these are
cultivated girls who have all been to the Mariposa high school and can
do decimal fractions, you will understand that an Algerian corsair would
sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them.
Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because they
are not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a buccaneer
or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary
people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is that each one
of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one
of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town.
I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house
in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most completely
enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes, they find
them in the strangest places, where you never expected to see them,
working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and printing
offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to find them
you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the
Errant Quest and that sort of thing.
Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed
of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on
foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank
teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard to
imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida
Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely to
pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was aware of his
existence.
That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he was
the new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the
Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and that
he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa, and
that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and that his salary
was eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn't know a thing about
him. She presumed, however, that the reason why he went past so fast was
because he didn't dare to go slow.
This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr.
Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on his
bicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty times a
day but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he used to pedal
faster and faster,--he never meant to, but he couldn't help it,--till he
went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his
little yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a second he had disappeared
in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the momentum of it carried him clear
out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause
or look back.
Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country, trying
to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his bicycle
would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida Street, and
would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the pedals whirled
round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again, like a
bullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and
even then it took all the nerve that he had.
The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but Zena
Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sort
of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of
Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.
I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh
first came to know one another. Like everything else about them, it was
a sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable unless you understand
that these things are fore-ordained.
That, of course, is the way with fore-ordained affairs and that's where
they differ from ordinary love.
I won't even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spoke
with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the "endless chain"
letter asking for ten cents. They wrote out, as I said, no less than
eight of the letters between them, and they found out that their
handwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart, except
that Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were pointed and
Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant. Beyond that
the writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in the
world. Of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkin
explained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a seven
so that it doesn't look like a nine.
So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was over
they walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly. When they got
near the house, Zena asked Pupkin to come in to tea, with such an easy
off-hand way that you couldn't have told that she was half an hour late
and was taking awful chances on the judge. Pupkin hadn't had time to say
yes before the judge appeared at the door, just as they were stepping up
on to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamite
sparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out:
"Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can't you get in to tea
at a Christian hour?"
Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and Pupkin looked one glance of
comprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street. And if the scene
wasn't quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the Troubadour,
it at least had something of the same elements in it.
Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and that
evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie, the
dining-room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showed
before. It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tire-women of Queen
Guinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands.
After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together.
They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr. Gallagher's
house,--the Mariposa Tennis Club rent it, you remember, for fifty
cents a month,--and Pupkin used to perform perfect prodigies of valour,
leaping in the air to serve with his little body hooked like a letter
S. Sometimes, too, they went out on Lake Wissanotti in the evening in
Pupkin's canoe, with Zena sitting in the bow and Pupkin paddling in the
stern and they went out ever so far and it was after dark and the stars
were shining before they came home. Zena would look at the stars and
say how infinitely far away they seemed, and Pupkin would realize that a
girl with a mind like that couldn't have any use for a fool such as
him. Zena used to ask him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursa
minor, and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were. That impressed
them both tremendously, because Pupkin didn't know that Zena remembered
the names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zena
didn't know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were.
And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mighty
near telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and about his
father and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn't the manliness
to speak straight out about it and take the consequences.
Please don't imagine from any of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin's
love ran smooth. On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it was
absolutely hopeless from the start.
There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to indicate
progress.
In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had taken
Zena out in his canoe thirty-one times. Allowing an average of two miles
for each evening, Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty-two miles, or more than
a hundred thousand yards. That surely was something.
He had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons. Three times he had
left his tennis racket up at the judge's house in Zena's charge, and
once he had, with her full consent, left his bicycle there all night.
This must count for something. No girl could trifle with a man to the
extent of having his bicycle leaning against the verandah post all night
and mean nothing by it.
More than that--he had been to tea at the judge's house fourteen times,
and seven times he had been asked by Lilian Drone to the rectory when
Zena was coming, and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea at the doctor's
house because Zena was there.
Altogether he had eaten so many meals where Zena was that his meal
ticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time, and
the face of Sadie, the dining-room girl, had grown to wear a look of
melancholy resignation; sadder than romance.
Still more than that, Pupkin had bought for Zena, reckoning it
altogether, about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel of
chocolate. Not that Pupkin grudged the expense of it. On the contrary,
over and above the ice cream and the chocolate he had bought her a white
waistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top, a lot of new neckties and
a pair of patent leather boots--that is, they were all bought on account
of her, which is the same thing.
Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of England
Church nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one evening they
had even gone to the Presbyterian Church "for fun," which, if you know
Mariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought to
speak volumes.
Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which
only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of
hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort.
Yes, it was hopeless.
Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that she
was too good for him. Every time that he came to call for her and found
her reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too clever
for him. And every time that he saw her at all he realized that she was
too beautiful for him.
You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero. When Zena would clasp her
hands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen and
heroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in. Not in it, that was
all. If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the judge's house
been invaded by the Germans, he might have had a chance, but as it
was--hopeless.
Then there was Zena's father. Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to please
the judge. He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh advanced,
and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself. They denounced
female suffrage one day and they favoured it the next. One day the judge
would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the
country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay
in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinions
like the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the only things on which he
was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the
Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of
judges.
But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn't asked
him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all the
bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's premises as their
own. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena
would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper and
flounce off the piazza to her room. After which the judge's manner would
change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and
positively beam with contentment. In all of which there was something so
mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's chances were hopeless.
Nor was that all of it. Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a year
and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.
I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the
banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so
many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one,
who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa House
and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists.
Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all
that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of
social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism,
the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George,--he understood the
whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars.
When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of the
Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with
dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.
But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena
Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh,
yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it not
been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold
reality between him and Zena.
He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that he
tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found
that something held him back, he realized more and more the kind of
thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it, with a
sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and mother
wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head
them off from it.
Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was
ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and father
turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up
to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.
No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference of
fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this
world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what
it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother. You
think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are all
that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of the
bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.
So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother
turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.
He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of their
Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door for
them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of it, a
suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.
The very thought of it turned him ill.
What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were
poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in the
sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merely
means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to
have everything he wants; but rich in the other sense,--motor cars, Ritz
hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing.
Why, Pupkin's father,--what's the use of trying to conceal it any
longer?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and
Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of the
Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to Chidabecto.
And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact that Pupkin
senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of it. Attorney
General! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better than the Senate.
No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was practically a promoter,
and he blew companies like bubbles, and when he wasn't in the Maritime
Provinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floating
loans, and when they had no money left in New York he floated it in
London: and when he had it, he floated on top of it big rafts of lumber
on the Miramichi and codfish on the Grand Banks and lesser fish in the
Fundy Bay. You've heard perhaps of the Tidal Transportation Company, and
Fundy Fisheries Corporation, and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited?
Well, all of those were Pupkin senior under other names. So just imagine
him in Mariposa! Wouldn't he be utterly foolish there? Just imagine him
meeting Jim Eliot and treating him like a druggist merely because he
ran a drug store! or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barber
simply because he shaved for money! Why, a man like that could ruin
young Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day, and Pupkin knew it.
That wouldn't matter so much, but think of the Pepperleighs and Zena!
Everything would be over with them at once. Pupkin knew just what the
judge thought of riches and luxuries. How often had he heard the
judge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan and
Mr. Rockefeller. How often had Pupkin heard him say that any man who
received more than three thousand dollars a year (that was the judicial
salary in the Missinaba district) was a mere robber, unfit to shake
the hand of an honest man. Bitter! I should think he was! He was not so
bitter, perhaps, as Mr. Muddleson, the principal of the Mariposa high
school, who said that any man who received more than fifteen hundred
dollars was a public enemy. He was certainly not so bitter as Trelawney,
the post-master, who said that any man who got from society more
than thirteen hundred dollars (apart from a legitimate increase in
recognition of a successful election) was a danger to society. Still,
he was bitter. They all were in Mariposa. Pupkin could just imagine how
they would despise his father!
And Zena! That was the worst of all. How often had, Pupkin heard her
say that she simply hated diamonds wouldn't wear them, despised them,
wouldn't give a thank you for a whole tiara of them! As for motor cars
and steam yachts,--well, it was pretty plain that that sort of thing had
no chance with Zena Pepperleigh. Why, she had told Pupkin one night in
the canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor and had his way
to make and would hew down difficulties for her sake. And when Pupkin
couldn't answer the argument she was quite cross and silent all the way
home.
What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank in
Mariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the life
of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I suppose
there are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance and
that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime Province people, and,
of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin senior.
Don't mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes; but
mark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of his
lungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not because he
preferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made it
imperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the point, not in
the least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on account of a peculiar
affection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it. His own
longing--and his wife shared it--was for the simple, simple life--an
island somewhere, with birds and trees. They had bought three or four
islands--one in the St. Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off the
coast of Maine--looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often said
that he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little
old farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often bought
little old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be so
near a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even having
had time to look at them.
But--and this is where the emphasis lay--in the matter of luxury for his
only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right to the
core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists ingrained in
him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his childhood, Pupkin senior
had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury, to "tan it out of him,"
after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces. Then he sent him to
an old-fashioned school to get it "thumped out of him," and after that
he had put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it "knocked
out of him." If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came to
Mariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out into
ribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adam
still needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces.
Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was his
father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin,
Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was kept
out of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since his
father's time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into a
bank; "sling him" was, I think, the expression. So his father decided
that if Pupkin was to be slung, he should be slung good and far--clean
into Canada (you know the way they use that word in the Maritime
Provinces). And to sling Pupkin he called in the services of an old
friend, a man after his own heart, just as violent as himself, who used
to be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior thirty years ago.
So this friend, who happened to live in Mariposa, and who was a violent
man, said at once: "Edward, by Jehoshaphat! send the boy up here."
So that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa. And if, when he got there, his
father's friend gave no sign, and treated the boy with roughness and
incivility, that may have been, for all I know, a continuation of the
"tanning" process of the Maritime people.
Did I mention that the Pepperleigh family, generations ago, had taken up
land near the Aroostook, and that it was from there the judge's father
came to Tecumseh township? Perhaps not, but it doesn't matter.
But surely after such reminiscences as these the awful things that are
impending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter.