the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit,
after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street,
where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one
another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its
relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems
to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity
drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the
law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find
change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride
through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and
street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy
and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his
steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."
The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the
middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men
remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their
hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names,
and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new
house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and
everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise
the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building
is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of
the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our
children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's
rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful
or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are
neither very good nor very bad--hardly worth God's while to sort us over
for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the
Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that
judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very
likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but
the prejudice of the neighbours.
When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we
have generally ended by wondering whether God--or whatever one cares to
call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in
our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world--whether
God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing
or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business
of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any
more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to
the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him,
it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.
Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began
calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and
he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year,
which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an
hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their
money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and
grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in
town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she
called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State
Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and
county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley"
it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their
children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties
came--one girl went to California and the boy to South America;--and
when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures--which is
almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours--he and his wife
were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.
They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary
Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with
the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought
everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres
on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and
with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church--being a
brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp,
Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always
as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the
Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late
fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the
church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she
got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing
and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She
had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning
than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so
that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up
tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.
Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million,
his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his
girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or
soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of
land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed
to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the
kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At
night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement,
where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine
o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma"
set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.
We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day,
a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he
came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful,
masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold,
unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to
go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen,"
and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association,
and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United
States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we
were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.
And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is
nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in
his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle
life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares
up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able
to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times:
whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman,
that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested
in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.
It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up
in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and
Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her.
From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her
into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell
her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had
married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music
teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography
by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her
book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming
for the best job in town--the position of cashier and stenographer for
the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and
another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the
work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who
saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was
on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office
picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the
window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs.
Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the
desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he,
too, saw what Morrison saw--which was nothing at all, except a man
standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same
place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for
five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison
unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his
eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised
interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man
said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get
you!"
The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw.
But there is something in every human creature--a survival of our jungle
days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in
language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have
defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The
volcano was beginning to smoke.
It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time
John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel
Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office,
and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around
her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man
always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one
misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for
nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew
how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean
town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she
went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the
poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing
her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper
out of the encyclopaedia, and making over her black silk the third time
for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time--and the
neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without
saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling
of the domestic waters--his wife kept her grief to herself, and even
when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what
she knew.
A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a
by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still
the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes
prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to
the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court
which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as
little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy
didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we
sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed.
The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been
entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face
the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the
afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman
did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.
The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off
his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and
cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to
make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his
countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed
immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the
employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion,
gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first
visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three
hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
"Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go,
told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes,
with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a
gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his
coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible
cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride,
but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods
stores, giggling with the men clerks--a picture of sin that made men wet
their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with
an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal,
without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the
town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as
the years went by.
So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by
our people. And when the big house went up--a palace for a country town,
though it only cost John Markley $25,000--he, who had been so reticent
about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of
the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that
the town would have something in the way of a house for public
gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the
big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a
curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of
the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially
impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs.
Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved,
gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka
caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the
Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us
that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three
columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began
with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the
third story.
It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with
him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual
loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours
had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he
had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house
was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June
meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill
John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his
annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his
party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been
treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named
from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley
with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the
sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon
the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley
had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the
county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every
subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to
print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the
Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would
subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had
sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the
greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel
Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising
the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford
it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner
on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use."
The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John
Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as
a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He
beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds
of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his
sunlight.
If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs.
Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.
All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be
the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied,
high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished
guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired
the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize
through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much
punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all
the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such
times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a
kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his
defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt
for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the
dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the
important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house.
The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared
not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This
familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that
they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for
Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which
did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom
died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back
room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family
affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's
face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll
ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and
stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple
as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab--what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"
Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe
that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or
perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives
had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social
comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder
toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second
year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from
the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from
the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think,
and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture
course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers,
and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's
work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a
gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room
of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel
let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the
office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never
accepted. And the town grinned.
At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a
losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants'
Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he
was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom
he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good
excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives,
who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the
street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling
the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up
the fight for his old place on the school board.
The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into
a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone
for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a
dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent
free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day,
and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his
health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat
hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his
wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend
burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it.
Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from
his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in
impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red
rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then,
and he had lashed himself into seventy.
However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch
and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have
mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted.
She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social
efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But
as the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants said--whenever
the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner
scheme.
[Illustration: As the dinner hour grew near she raged--so the servants
said--whenever the telephone rang]
So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and
the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when
they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the
reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by
the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had
refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever
Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these
interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her
stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the
Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a
tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the
hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a
freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking
slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her
in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.
One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and
fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy
of the _Mexican Herald_ containing the news of his boy's death in Vera
Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to
reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember
him--maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful
figure as he dragged himself out of the office--so stooped and weazened,
and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some
second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give
it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me,
anyway."