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In Our Town
BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
The Court of Boyville, The Real Issue, Stratagems and Spoils
Illustrations by F. R. Gruger and W. Glackens
NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMVI
Copyright 1906 by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published April, 1906
Copyright 1904 by The Century Co.
Copyright 1905-1906 by The Curtis Publishing Co.
[Illustration: He wore his collars so high that he had to order them
from a drummer]
Contents
I. SCRIBES AND PHARISEES
II. THE YOUNG PRINCE
III. THE SOCIETY EDITOR
IV. "AS A BREATH INTO THE WIND"
V. THE COMING OF THE LEISURE CLASS
VI. THE BOLTON GIRL'S "POSITION"
VII. "BY THE ROD OF HIS WRATH"
VIII. "A BUNDLE OF MYRRH"
IX. OUR LOATHED BUT ESTEEMED CONTEMPORARY
X. A QUESTION OF CLIMATE
XI. THE CASTING OUT OF JIMMY MYERS
XII. "'A BABBLED OF GREEN FIELDS"
XIII. A PILGRIM IN THE WILDERNESS
XIV. THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
XV. "AND YET A FOOL"
XVI. A KANSAS "CHILDE ROLAND"
XVII. THE TREMOLO STOP
XVIII. SOWN IN OUR WEAKNESS
XIX. "THIRTY"
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
He Wore his Collars so High that He Had to Order Them from a Drummer
Suppressing Nothing "On Account of the Respectability of the Parties
Concerned"
As an Office Joke the Boys Used to Leave a Step-Ladder by Her Desk so
that She Could Climb Up and See How Her Top-Knot Really Looked
And Brought with Him a Large Leisure and a Taste for Society
Sometimes He Thought It was a Report of a Fire and at Other Times It
Seemed Like a Dress-Goods Catalogue
As the Dinner Hour Grew Near She Raged--So the Servants said--Whenever
the Telephone Rang
"Jim Purdy, Taken the Day He Left for the Army"
He Advertised the Fact that He was a Good Hater by Showing Callers at
His Office His Barrel
He Likes to Sit in the Old Swayback Swivel-Chair and Tell Us His Theory
of the Increase in the Rainfall
And Camped in the Office for Two Days, Looking for Jimmy
Reverend Milligan Came in with a Church Notice
A Desert Scorpion, Outcast by Society and Proud of it
"He Made a Lot of Money and Blew it in"
Went About Town with His Cigar Pointing Toward his Hat-Brim
The Traveling Men on the Veranda Craned Their Necks to Watch Her Out of
Sight
Counting the Liars and Scoundrels and Double-Dealers and Villains Who
Pass
IN OUR TOWN
I
Scribes and Pharisees
Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by
those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as
"back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town
where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and
the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.
When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years,
he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness,
their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity--or if
he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this
knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his
reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their
town.
In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many
intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for
instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's
notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get
rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for
thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread
death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this
tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same
trouble with their soprano, who "flats"--and has flatted for ten years,
and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we
remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their
tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the grist that
keeps the mill going.
As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that
the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of
regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service,
and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know
the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy
just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and,
when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar
and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to
one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town,
and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than
all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day
for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the
man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a
blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is
not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is
part of the business.
Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the _Statesman_, speaks of
our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are
none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little
daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed
from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and
knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the
afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads
and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of
the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other
pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by
their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling
the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time,
and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard
for the feelings of the supercilious.
Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental
pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and
although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does
not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams--the town
pharisees--we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which
the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of
everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the
respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers
from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do
not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our
little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to
the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along,
and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.
[Illustration: Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of
the parties concerned"]
Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are
on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work
on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are
natives. We have no dialect worth recording--save that some of us
Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But
you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the
magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking
home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same
popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San
Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those
pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer
resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter
these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of
the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last
winter at the Grand Canyons and who told you of the funny performance of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side
in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and
then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip
about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago,
who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston,
where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap--those people are our
leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the
flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition
loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not
heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is
painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model
whose face is familiar in the weekly magazines is no better than she
should be--a club woman in our town who does not know of these things
is out of caste in clubdom, and women say of her that she is giving too
much time to her church.
We take all the beautiful garden magazines, and our terra-cotta works
are turning out creditable vases--which we pronounce "vahzes," you may
be sure--for formal gardens. And though we men for the most part run our
own lawnmowers, and personally look after the work of the college boy
who takes care of the horse and the cow for his room, still there are a
few of us proud and haughty creatures who have automobiles, and go
snorting around the country scaring horses and tooting terror into the
herds by the roadside. But the bright young reporters on our papers do
not let an automobile come to town without printing an item stating its
make and its cost, and whether or not it is a new one or a second-hand
one, and what speed it can make. At the flower parade in our own little
town last October there were ten automobiles in line, decked with paper
flowers and laden with pretty girls in lawns and dimities and
linens--though as a matter of fact most of the linens were only "Indian
head." And our particular little country paper printed an item to the
effect that the real social line of cleavage in the town lies not
between the cut-glass set and the devotees of hand-painted china, but
between the real nobility who wear genuine linen and the base imitations
who wear Indian head.
In some towns an item like that would make people mad, but we have our
people trained to stand a good deal. They know that it costs them five
cents a line for cards of thanks and resolutions of respect, so they
never bring them in. They know that our paper never permits "one who was
there" to report social functions, so that dear old correspondent has
resigned; and because we have insisted for years on making an item about
the first tomatoes that are served in spring at any dinner or reception,
together with the cost per pound of the tomatoes, the town has become
used to our attitude and does not buzz with indignation when we poke a
risible finger at the homemade costumes of the Plymouth Daughters when
they present "The Mikado" to pay for the new pipe-organ. Indeed, so used
is the town to our ways that when there was great talk last winter about
Mrs. Frelingheysen for serving fresh strawberries over the ice cream at
her luncheon in February, just after her husband had gone through
bankruptcy, she called up Miss Larrabee, our society editor, on the
telephone and asked her to make a little item saying that the
strawberries served by Mrs. Frelingheysen at her luncheon were not
fresh, but merely sun dried. This we did gladly and printed her recipe.
So used is this town to our school teachers resigning to get married
that when one resigns for any other reason we make it a point to
announce in the paper that it is not for the usual reason, and tell our
readers exactly what the young woman is going to do.
So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family
vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but
which--like all other family vernaculars--is Greek to those outside the
circle. Thus we say:
"Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day
for a boy."
City papers would print it:
"Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."
Again we print this item:
"Mrs. Merriman is getting ready to lend her fern to the Nortons, June
15."
That doesn't mean anything, unless you happen to know that Mrs. Merriman
has the prettiest Boston fern in town, and that no bow-window is
properly decorated at any wedding without that fern. In larger towns the
same news item would appear thus:
"Cards are out announcing the wedding of Miss Cecil Norton and Mr.
Collis R. Hatcher at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. J.
Norton, 1022 High street, June 15."
A plain drunk is generally referred to in our columns as a "guest of
Marshal Furgeson's informal house-party," and when a group of
drunk-and-disorderlies is brought in we feel free to say of their
evening diversion that they "spent the happy hours, after refreshments,
playing progressive hell." And this brings us to the consideration of
the most important personage with whom we have to deal. In what we call
"social circles," the most important personages are Mrs. Julia Neal
Worthington and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin, who keep two hired
girls and can pay five dollars a week for them when the prevailing
price is three. In financial circles the most important personage is
John Markley, who buys real-estate mortgages; in political circles the
most important personage is Charlie Hedrick who knows the railroad
attorneys at the capital and always can get passes for the county
delegation to the State convention; in the railroad-yards the most
important personage is the division superintendent, who smokes ten-cent
cigars and has the only "room with a bath" at the Hotel Metropole. But
with us, in the publication of our newspaper, the most important
personage in town is Marshal Furgeson.
If you ever looked out of the car-window as you passed through town, you
undoubtedly saw him at the depot, walking nervously up and down the
platform, peering into the faces of strangers. He is ever on the outlook
for crooks, though nothing more violent has happened in our county for
years than an assault and battery. But Marshal Furgeson never
relinquishes his watch. In winter, clad in his blue uniform and campaign
hat, he is a familiar figure on our streets; and in summer, without coat
or vest, with his big silver star on which is stamped "Chief of
Police," pinned to his suspender, he may be seen at any point where
trouble is least likely to break out. He is the only man on the town
site whom we are afraid to tease, because he is our chief source of
news; for if we ruffle his temper he sees to it that our paper misses
the details of the next chicken-raid that comes under his notice. He can
bring us to time in short order.
When we particularly desire to please him we refer to him as "the
authorities." If the Palace Grocery has been invaded through the back
window and a box of plug tobacco stolen, Marshal Furgeson is delighted
to read in the paper that "the authorities have an important clew and
the arrest may be expected at any time." He is "the authorities." If
"the authorities have their eyes on a certain barber-shop on South Main
Street, which is supposed to be doing a back-door beer business," he
again is "the authorities," and contends that the word strikes more
terror into the hearts of evil-doers than the mere name, Marshal
Furgeson.
Next in rank to "the authorities," in the diplomatic corps of the
office, come our advertisers: the proprietors of the White Front
Dry-Goods Store, the Golden Eagle Clothing Store, and the Bee Hive.
These men can come nearer to dictating the paper's policy than the
bankers and politicians, who are supposed to control country newspapers.
Though we are charged with being the "organ" of any of half-a-dozen
politicians whom we happen to speak of kindly at various times, we have
little real use for politicians in our office, and a business man who
brings in sixty or seventy dollars' worth of advertising every month has
more influence with us than all the politicians in the county. This is
the situation in most newspaper offices that succeed, and when any other
situation prevails, when politicians control editors, the newspapers
don't pay well, and sooner or later the politicians are bankrupt.
The only person in town whom all the merchants desire us to poke fun at
is Mail-Order Petrie. Mail-Order Petrie is a miserly old codger who buys
everything out of town that he can buy a penny cheaper than the home
merchants sell it. He is a hard-working man, so far as that goes, and
so stingy that he has been accused of going barefooted in the summer
time to save shoes. When he is sick he sends out of town for patent
medicines, and for ten years he worked in his truck-garden, fighting
floods and droughts, bugs and blight, to save something like a hundred
dollars, which he put in a mail-order bank in St. Louis. When it failed
he grinned at the fellows who twitted him of his loss, and said: "Oh,
come easy, go easy!"
A few years ago he subscribed to a matrimonial paper, and one day he
appeared at the office of the probate judge with a mail-order wife, who,
when they had been married a few years, went to an orphan asylum and got
a mail-order baby. We have had considerable sport with Mail-Order
Petrie, and he has become so used to it that he likes it. Sometimes on
dull days he comes around to the office to tell us what a bargain he got
at this or that mail-order house, and last summer he came in to tell us
about a great bargain in a cemetery lot in a new cemetery being laid out
in Kansas City; he bought it on the installment plan, a dollar down and
twenty-five cents a month, to be paid until he died, and he bragged a
great deal about his shrewdness in getting the lot on those terms. He
chuckled as he said that he would be dead in five years at the most and
would have a seventy-five dollar lot for a mere song. He made us promise
that when that time does come we will write up his obsequies under the
head "A Mail-Order Funeral." He added, as he stood with his hand on the
door screen, that he had no use for the preachers and the hypocrites in
the churches in this town, and that he was taking a paper called the
"Magazine of Mysteries," that teaches some new ideas on religion and
that he expects to wind up in a mail-order Heaven.
And this is the material with which we do our day's work--Mail-Order
Petrie, Marshal Furgeson, the pretty girls in the flower parade, the
wise clubwomen, the cut-glass society crowd, the proud owner of the
automobile, the "respectable parties concerned," the proprietor of the
Golden Eagle, the clerks in the Bee Hive, the country crook who aspires
to be a professional criminal some day, "the leading citizen," who
spends much of his time seeing the sights of his country, the college
boys who wear funny clothes and ribbons on their hats, and the
politicians, greedy for free advertising. They are ordinary two-legged
men and women, and if there is one thing more than any other that marks
our town, it is its charity, and the mercy that is at the bottom of all
its real impulses.
Our business seems to outsiders to be a cruel one, because we have to
deal as mere business with such sacred things as death and birth, the
meeting and parting of friends, and with tragedies as well as with
comedies. This is true. Every man--even a piano tuner--thinks his
business leads him a dog's life, and that it shows him only the seamy
side of the world. But our business, though it shows the seams, shows us
more of good than of bad in men. We are not cynics in our office; for we
know in a thousand ways that the world is good. We know that at the end
of the day we have set down more good deeds than bad deeds, and that the
people in our town will keep the telephone bell ringing to-morrow, more
to praise the recital of a good action than they will to talk to us
about some evil thing that we had to print.
Time and again we have been surprised at the charity of our people. They
are always willing to forgive, and be it man or woman who takes a
misstep in our town--which is the counterpart of hundreds of American
towns--if the offender shows that he wishes to walk straight, a thousand
hands are stretched out to help him and guide him. It is not true that a
man or woman who makes a mistake is eternally damned by his fellows. If
one persists in wrong after the first misdeed it is not because
sheltering love and kindness were not thrown around the wrongdoer. We
have in our town women who have done wrong and have lived down their
errors just as men do, and have been forgiven. A hundred times in our
office we have talked these things over and have been proud of our
people and of their humanity. We are all neighbours and friends, and
when sorrow comes, no one is alone. The town's greatest tragedies have
proved the town's sympathy, and have been worth their cost.
II
The Young Prince
We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper--some good
ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men;
some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they
sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance
business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses,
taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table
of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have
sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the
most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National
Hotel--bell-hop, he called himself--and he first attracted our attention
by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to
have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town--who had
gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and
who was sick or dying.
The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment--a
ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it
was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair
rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and
as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This
pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards,
all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers'
waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.
These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter
who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and
preachers is always complaining of dull days.
But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get
the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he
called up the hired girl of the festal house--we are such a small town
that only the rich bankers keep servants--and "made a date" with her,
and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the
proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her
guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send
away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty.
Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's
office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we
usually figured it out that the day after the letter denying our story
had come down from the Superintendent's office the change would be
officially announced.
One day when the Prince was at the depot "making the train" with his
notebook in his hand, jotting down the names of the people who got on or
off the cars, the general superintendent saw him, and called the youth
to his car.
"Well, kid," said the most worshipful one in his teasingest voice,
"What's the latest news at the general offices to-day?"
The Young Prince turned his head on one side like a little dog looking
up at a big dog, and replied:
"Well, if you must know it, you're going to get the can, though we
ain't printing it till you've got a chance to land somewhere else."
The longer the Prince worked the more clothes he bought. One of his most
effective creations was a blue serge coat and vest, and a pair of white
duck trousers linked by emotional red socks to patent-leather shoes.
This confection, crowned with a wide, saw-edged straw hat with a blue
band, made him the brightest bit of colour on the sombre streets of our
dull town. He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a
drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently
with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry:
"Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!"
But it didn't affect the Young Prince. If he happened to have time and
was feeling like it, he would climb down over the rear end of the 'bus
and chase his tormentor into the back of the store where he worked, but
generally the Young Prince took no heed of the jibes of the envious. He
was conscious that he was cutting a figure, and this consciousness made
him proud. But his pride did not cut down the stack of copy that he
laid on the table every morning and every noon. He couldn't spell and he
was innocent of grammar, and every line he wrote had to be edited, but
he got the news. He was every where. He rushed down the streets after an
item, dodging in and out of stores and offices like a streak of chain
lightning having a fit. But it was beneath his dignity to run to fires.
When the fire-bell rang, he waited nonchalantly on the corner near the
fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash
by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street,
put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he
would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a
comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn
slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the
girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body
with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.
Other reporters who have been on the paper--the good ones as well as the
bad--have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give
green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items.
But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was
visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had
accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin
from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth
announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none.
He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had
the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory--the liars and the
honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that
would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town
blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the
goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one
another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he
was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for
sham.
The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to
write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a
good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand
in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a
public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows"
scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go
and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it--what
the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of
the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and
see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them;
who can translate the tall talking into history--he is a real reporter.
And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of
everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth--as sometimes we did
not--he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved
his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of
his business.
For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He
knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased
to be a reporter--never took off his make-up, never let down from his
exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks
fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and
made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society
column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the
next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they
must tell him the truth.
The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they
feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a
long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"--and turned
his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.
And thus the Young Prince went home.
III
The Society Editor
They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts;
that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he
knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view
of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our
little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the
interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get
advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us
writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page.
The religious reporter does the racing matinee in Wildwood Park, and the
financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men
also gets any church news that comes along.
The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss
Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her
graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an
office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a
paying proposition.
At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee
devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride
was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was
so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep
it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must
use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured
about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder
by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and
began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the
Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social
is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on
the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.
[Illustration: As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by
her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really
looked]
She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the
Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the
basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the
evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness,
her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day
she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in
the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No
other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's
dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical
marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club,
she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town.
But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her
head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town
means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as
well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights
of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth
League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the
Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing
Class, the Switchmen's annual ball--if we get their job-work--and every
kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen
sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss
Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and
by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession,
she affected to loathe her department.
Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud
appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers
for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone
church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as
the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning
imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers
and uncles and aunts. By the day of the wedding she would be rolling a
steady diapason of polite, decolourised, expurgated, ladylike profanity.
While she sat at her desk writing the stereotyped account of the event,
it was like picking up a live wire to speak to her. As she wrote, we
could tell at just what stage she had arrived in her copy. Thus, if she
said to the adjacent atmosphere, "What a whopper!" we knew that she had
written, "The crowning glory of a happy fortnight of social gatherings
found its place when----" and when she hissed out, "Mortgaged clear to
the eaves and full of installment furniture!" we felt that she had
reached a point something like this: "After the ceremony the gay party
assembled at the palatial home." In a moment she would snarl: "I am dead
tired of seeing Mrs. Merriman's sprawly old fern and the Bosworth palm.
I wish they would stop lending them!" and then we realised that she had
reached the part of her write-up which said: "The chancel rail was
banked with a profusion of palms and ferns and rare tropical plants."
She always groaned when she came to the "simple and impressive ring
ceremony." When she wrote:
"The distinguished company came forward to offer congratulations to the
newly-wedded pair," she would say as she sharpened her pencil-point:
"There's nothing like a wedding to reveal what a raft of common kin
people have," and we knew that it was all over and that she was closing
the article with: "A dazzling array of costly and beautiful presents was
exhibited in the library," for then she would pick up her copy, dog-ear
the sheets, and jab them on the hook as she sighed: "Another great
American pickle-dish exhibit ended."
In the way she did two things Miss Larrabee excited the wonder and
admiration of the office. One was the way that she kept tab on brides.
We heard through her of the brides who could cook, and of those who were
beginning life by accumulating a bright little pile of tin cans in the
alley. She knew the brides who could do their own sewing and those who
could not. She had the single girl's sniff at the bride who wore her
trousseau season after season, made over and fixed up, and she gave the
office the benefit of her opinion of the husband in the case who had a
new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married
troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were
edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young
married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his
wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office
window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee
regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a
"fresh bottle of emotions."
The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was
in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there
are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns.
Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the
second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a
twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three
years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it
made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even
with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss
Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen
times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her
relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was
wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss
Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from
fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a
homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old
lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were
always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked
the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might
be.
She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams.
She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend
their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or
whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur,
Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her
whist party--one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another
to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a
fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off
clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew,
though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any
harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was
not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically
with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be
interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where
we ever saw Miss Larrabee's claw in print was in the insistent
misspelling of the name of a woman who made it a point to ridicule the
paper.
We have had other girls around the office since Miss Larrabee left, but
they do not seem to get the work done with any system. She was not only
industrious but practical. Friday mornings, when her work piled up,
instead of fussing around the office and chattering at the telephone,
she would dive into her desk and bring up her regular list of
adjectives. These she would copy on three slips, carefully dividing the
list so that no one had a duplicate, and in the afternoon each of the
boys received a slip with a list of parties, and with instructions to
scatter the adjectives she had given him through the accounts of the
parties assigned to him--and the work was soon done. There was no
scratching the head for synonyms for "beautiful," "superb" or "elegant."
Miss Larrabee had doled out to each of us the adjectives necessary, and,
given the adjectives, society reporting is easy. The editing of the copy
is easy also, for one does not have to remember whether or not the
refreshments were "delicious" at the Jones party when he sees the word
in connection with the viands at the Smith party. No two parties were
ever "elegant" the same week. No two events were "charming." No two
women were "exquisitely" gowned. The person who was assigned the
adjective "delightful" by Miss Larrabee might stick it in front of a
luncheon, pin it on a hostess, or use it for an evening's entertainment.
But he could use it only once. And with a list of those present and the
adjectives thereunto appertaining, even a new boy could get up a column
in half an hour. She had an artist's pride in the finished work, however
much she might dislike the thing in making, and she used to sail down to
the press-room as soon as the paper was out, and, picking up the paper
from the folder, she would stand reading her page, line upon line,
precept upon precept, though every word and syllable was familiar to
her.
During her first year she joined the Woman's State Press Club, but she
discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never
attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore
white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories,
and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork
hosiery with suspicion and alarm.
As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen,
she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too
many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear
their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down
to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town.
Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin
bringing them up by hand.
Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all
over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics
About Town' here on the _Sun_. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl,
and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back.
My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When
Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the
grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd
do you a New York letter some time?
"They say these city papers are hog tight!"
IV
"As a Breath into the Wind"
We are proud of the machinery in our office--the two linotypes, the big
perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office
traditions with certain human attributes--having their moods and
vagaries and tantrums--so we love them as men love children. And this is
a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows
that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the
building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night,
after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably
asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are
as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis
petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they
were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night
stinks of them were rank and beastly.
David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to
wrestle with the forms--being cast in the nonpareil mould of his
race--and so we put him to carrying papers. In school season he seemed
to go to school, and in summer it is certain that he put a box on a high
stool in the back room, and learned the printer's case, and fed the job
presses at odd times, and edged on to the pay-roll without ever having
been formally hired. In the same surreptitious manner he slipped a cot
into the stockroom upstairs and slept there, and finally had it fitted
up as a bedroom, and so became an office fixture.
By the time his voice had stopped squeaking he was a good printer, and
what with using the front office for a study at night, and the New York
papers and the magazines for textbooks, he had acquired a good working
education. Whereupon he fell in love with two divinities at once--the
blonde one working in the Racket Store, on Main Street, and the other, a
new linotype that we installed the year before McKinley's first
election. His heart was sadly torn between them. He never went to bed
under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's
natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate
mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a
brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital
and jabbered strange things.
Among other things the priest who sat beside him one day heard Latin
verse; whereat the father addressed David in the language of the Church
and received reply in kind. And they talked solemnly about matters
theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the
liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there
were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without
faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed
incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to
prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's
day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin,
but insisted on reading the note under his pillow which his girl had
sent him. After that he wanted to know how New York stood in the
National League and how Hans Wagner's batting record was, and proceeded
to get well in short order.
David resumed his place in the office, and when we put in the perfecting
press he added another string to his bow. The press and the linotype and
his girl were his life's passions, and his position as short-stop in the
Maroons, and as snare-drummer in the Second Regiment band, were his
diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial
Dancing Club--chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A
boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a
dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any
social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our
town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which,
of course, is as it should be.
So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we
gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by
night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars
a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it--generally
through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was
cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more
formal dances.
Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call
on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth
Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights
in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but
David and the girl were merely going together--as the parlance of our
town has it--and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting
married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven
which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by
night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome
and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt
him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry
Larmy--known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years
gone--and the two began chumming together.
"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet,
received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and
believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a
woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat,
preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how
to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs
included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the
curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in
the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should
be in bed.