to them with sickening force. They left the front door open and raised
the windows. The reporter began using a chisel on the top of a little
box with a Government frank on it, that had been placed upon the
music-box in the corner.
"We may as well see what David sent home," he grunted, as he jerked at
the stubborn nails, "anyway, I've got a theory."
Larmy was smoking hard. "Yes," he replied after a time; "we might as
well open it now as any time. The letter said all his things would be
found there. I guess he didn't have a great deal. Poor little devil,
there was no one much to get things for but you fellows and maybe me, if
he thought of us."
By this time the box was opened, and the reporter was scooping things
out upon the floor. There was an army uniform, that had something clinky
in the pockets, and wrapped in a magenta silk handkerchief was a carved
piece of ivory. In a camera plate-box was a rose, faded and crumbly, a
chip-diamond ring, a bangle bracelet, a woman's glove and a photograph.
These Larmy looked at as he smoked. They meant nothing to him, but the
reporter dived into the clothes for the clinky things. He came up with a
bunch of keys, and on it was the long brass lever which unlocked the
music in the box.
"Here," he said as he jingled the keys, "is the last link in our chain."
And he rose and went over to the box, uncovered it, and jabbed in the
lever with a nervous hand. There was a rolling and clinking inside.
Then, slowly, a harmony rose, and the tinkling that came from the box
resolved itself into a melody that filled the room. It was strong and
clear and powerful, and seemed to have a certain passion in it that may
have been struck like flint fire from the time and the place and the
spirit of the occasion. The two men stared dumbly as they listened. The
sound rose stronger and stronger; over and over again the song repeated
itself; then very gently its strength began to fail; and finally it sank
into a ghostly tinkle that still carried the melody till it faded into
silence.
"That," said the reporter, "is the song that was in his heart--'Love's
Golden Dream.' I'm satisfied."
"The last link," shuddered Larmy. "That which seemed corporeal has
melted 'as a breath into the wind.'"
The reporter shovelled the debris into the box, pushed it under a desk,
and the two men hurried to close the office. As they stood on the
threshold a moment, while the reporter clicked the key in the lock, a
paper rustled and they heard a mouse scamper across the floor inside the
empty room.
"Let's go home," shivered Larmy. They started north, which was the short
way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No,
let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and
it's dark down there."
And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on
without words.
V
The Coming of the Leisure Class
We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is
always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of
us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of
Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler,
the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and
the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through
the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their
wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and,
excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the
men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town,
and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made
him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our
little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his
mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the
big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small
town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but
it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well
fixed."
[Illustration: And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for
society]
But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the
society column Saturday without him, for he was a continuous social
performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel
tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other
boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas,
full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and
when under that gala facade he came tripping into the office in his
white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society
editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business,
would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section
of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud."
To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so
sarcastic! I have a little item for you."
The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And
there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he
gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the
county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first
progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven
girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't
been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with
one hand--and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd assembled
for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork
against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on
one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College
who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the
life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two
kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the
sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls,
before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he
gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real
devilish.
He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls
when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured
tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery
waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training
well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social
diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of
mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family
phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of
families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to
regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he
gave a Japanese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself
in the church where he was accustomed to pass the plate on Sundays. Miss
Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young
Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never
referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once
printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League
meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we
put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent
in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of
the Ministerial Alliance.
The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough
to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious
mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coarse.
One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the
paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his
life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times
that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was
willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.
Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in
Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much
culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes,
and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along,
telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland
for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the
nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how
Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families
and its week-end house-parties.
The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned
over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to
us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them
down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's
Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what
stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss
Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let
fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food
Baby?"
But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation
remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought
that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really
didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in
their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he
had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a
young woman's waist.
"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young
man who will put his arm around a girl will go further--yes, Miss
Larabee--much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and
shook it at the awful thought.
Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:
"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"
He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever
lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told
us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to
call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.
He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join
his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young
dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who
dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and
certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on
golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the
autumn, and checkers in the winter.
That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he
had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he
went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he
wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that
everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice
people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively
shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country
Club--so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.
For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office.
Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly
said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted,
"but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family,
through reduced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very
haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with
people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old
school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as
I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious
hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar
hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I
met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the
date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an
account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of
that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an
account of the wedding.
In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves
in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing
in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself
out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners
of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction.
In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be
obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk
to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come
what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social
history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in
Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work
at four o'clock. Those were great days--"the glory that was Greece, the
grandeur that was Rome."
VI
The Bolton Girl's "Position"
When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it
was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly
improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected
as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this
much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not
let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had
limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the
office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the
friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried
our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing
committee of the town council--and she found ways to make them ask if we
couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed,
she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She
had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a
name for herself.
She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which
she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we
didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the
names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many
times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We
tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the
Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that
John Jones of Lebo--that is to say, red John, as distinguished from
black John--or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler
settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained
carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie,
"other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X;
they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of
mobs"--to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes--"others,
with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"--and
she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity--"but in our little local
paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the
most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to
borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in
town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party
last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and
why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for
sunshine cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that
interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three
columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way,
so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is
good for ten dollars of our money every Saturday night.
Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in
tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a
chance! It would be just lovely--simply grand, and she knew she could do
it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that
made her quiver with anticipation. Whereupon she went out and came back
in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an
article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic
chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through
the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and
beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from
all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty--then it is that
entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our
tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found
out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through
said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at
other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made
four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince
rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said:
"You'll never make anything out of her--she's a handholder! When a girl
begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"
[Illustration: Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at
other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue]
But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We
explained that what we wanted was short items--two or three lines
each--little references to home doings; something telling who has
company, who is sick, who is putting shingles on the barn or an "L" on
the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so passionately that it seemed as
though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like
taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.
The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her--give
her something to do--she was sure she could show us how well she could
do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the
district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening
meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and
said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir
because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then
we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no
value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and
said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if
it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would
go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting
by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table,
said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel
food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League
convention.
Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests
at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young
Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came
to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She
said that she so longed for intellectual companionship that she felt
sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that
would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be
it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and
mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last
syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a shirtwaist Madonna.
But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we
could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the
sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle
through my blood like wine. I know I could write them--such sublime
things--but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes
up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling
through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who
has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight
of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to
her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a
lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out
across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into
the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who
lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the
land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to
her highest ideal, so she set them a task--and, oh, a lot more about
what they did; I haven't thought that out--but anyway she married the
red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his
retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to
get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."
No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped
plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another
disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coarse when one looks
at it closely.
We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke
abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M.
B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an
anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting
to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady
has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their
business to assume a courtship. They should know that there are souls
on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross
materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At
the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a
subscriber."
The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and
blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen
shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young
Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen
shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began
to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors
turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that
Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon--pink and blue and
white and yellow--in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same
passionate fervour on her hemstitching and tucking that she had wasted
on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the
biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after
their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's
livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the
fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the
patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."
The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with
strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from
Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In
the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up
her own wedding--recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte
in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as
she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to
Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in
the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the
groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on
the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am
going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"
VII
"By the Rod of His Wrath"