distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the
Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, eldest daughter of Thomas
Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the docks of
Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten years
principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
made the neighbours complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty year her senior. Ezra
Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stock-yards,
president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the
Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As
$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the
social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
gasoline used in heating it.
To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and
delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers
ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate
to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple
on "Heppelwhite in New England."
Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included
alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
table, not only did all the men wear frock-coats--not only did Uncle
Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odour of mothballs to
mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the
followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was
filled with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as
the Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a coloured
lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated on
for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her club
a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
things.
There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a
luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.
Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.
The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
objects in the temple.
But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
England, affecting to scorn the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshipped
under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.
The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
Goods store people double rates to put their special sale advertisements
on that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her,
was in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful a mien, that
to be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
living in a Sunday supplement.
The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and--here the
mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight
soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the
word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
they ate in peace.
When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
thousand-dollar gown, worshipped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
else in our town was so admirably qualified for "National Vice" as Mrs.
Worthington," and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin
to suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes into the town.
There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the
potsherds.
XV
"And Yet a Fool"
The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar
friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to
know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the
wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through
the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he
knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the
pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy
until he has found it.
One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of
the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the
address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been
mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"
is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The
paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising,
restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about
the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool
dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the
announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get
notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the
ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:
"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross &
Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general
merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to
provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired
the following unusual inscription: '_Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6,
1840, and died ----." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good
at anything and yet a fool._"'"
We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the
office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the
waste-basket, looking for his New York _Sun_, and, after Colonel
Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on
the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no
one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:
"And yet a fool--a motley fool! Poor old Samp--kept it up to the end! I
take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of
us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The
Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that
he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks
and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in
his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"
We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased
for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson
"like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.
"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly
willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you
please."
Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had
the Colonel's story taken down as he told it--to be rewritten into an
obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about
Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big
leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:
"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin,
and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to
college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole
senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and
fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I
think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been
admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer--a mighty good lawyer for that
time--and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a
boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or
less in the army--they all did 's far as that goes--but he kept it up in
a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main
business of life, which was being a good fellow.
"And he was a good fellow--an awful good fellow. We were all young then;
there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to
load up the whole bunch and go hunting--closing up the stores and taking
the girls along--and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always
have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet
up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of
prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would
always lead the singing--being just a mite more lubricated than the rest
of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey--as they used to
say.
[Illustration: "He made a lot of money and blew it in"]
"He made a lot of money and blew it in at Jim Thomas's saloon, buying
drinks, playing stud poker, betting on quarter horses, and lending it
out to fellows who helped him forget they'd borrowed it. And--say in
two or three years, after the chicken-hunting set had married off, and
begun in a way to settle down--Samp took up with the next set coming on;
he married and got the prettiest girl in town. We always thought that he
married only because he wanted to be a good fellow and did not wish to
be impolite to the girl he'd paired off with in the first crowd. Still
he didn't stay home nights, and once or twice a year--say, election or
Fourth of July--he and a lot of other young fellows would go out and tip
over all the board sidewalks in town, and paint funny signs on the store
buildings and stack beer bottles on the preacher's front porch, and
raise Ned generally. And the fellows of his age, who owned the stores
and were in nights, would say to Samp when they saw him coming down
about noon the next day:
"'Go it when you're young Samp, for when you're old you can't.' And he
would wink at 'em, give 'em ten dollars apiece for their damages and
jolly his way down the street to his office.
"Now, you mustn't get the idea that Samp was the town drunkard, for he
never was. He was just a good fellow. When the second set of young
fellows outgrew him and settled down, he picked up with the third, and
his wife's brown alpaca began to be noticed more or less among the
women. But Samp's practice didn't seem to fall off--it only changed. He
didn't have so much real estate lawing and got more criminal practice.
Gradually he became a criminal lawyer, and his fame for wit and
eloquence extended over all the State. When a cowpuncher got in trouble
his folks in the East always gave Samp a big fee to get the boy out, and
he did it. When he went to any other county-seat besides our own to try
a case, the fellows--and you know who the fellows are in a town--the
fellows knew that while Samp was in town there would be something going
on with 'fireworks in the evening.' For he was a great fellow for a good
time, and the dining-room girls at the hotel used to giggle in the
kitchen for a week after he was gone at the awful things he would say to
'em. He knew more girls by their first names than a drummer."
Colonel Morrison chuckled and crossed his fat legs at the ankles as he
continued, after lighting the cigar we gave him:
"Well, along in the late seventies we fellows that he started out with
got to owning our own homes and getting on in the world. That was the
time when Samp should have been grubbing at his law books, but nary a
grub for him. He was playing horse for dear life. And right there the
fellows all left him behind. Some were buying real estate for
speculation; some running for office; some starting a bank; and others
lending money at two per cent. a month, and leading in the
prayer-meeting. So Samp kind of hitched up his ambition and took the
slack out of his habits for a few months and went to the legislature.
They say that he certainly did have a good time, though, when he got
there. They remember that session yet up there, and call it the year of
the great flood, for the nights they were filled with music, as the poet
says, and from the best accounts we could get the days were devoid of
ease also, and how Mrs. Sampson stood it the women never could find out,
for, of course, she must have known all about it, though he wouldn't
let her come near Topeka. He began to get pursy and red-faced, and was
clicking it off with his fifth set of young fellows. It took a big slug
of whisky to set off his oratory, but when he got it wound up he surely
could pull the feathers out of the bird of freedom to beat scandalous.
But as a stump speaker you weren't always sure he'd fill the engagement.
He could make a jury blubber and clench its fists at the prosecuting
attorney, yet he didn't claim to know much law, and he did turn over all
the work in the Supreme Court to his partner, Charley Hedrick. Then,
when Charley was practising before the Supreme Court and wasn't here to
hold him down, Samp would get out and whoop it up with the boys, quote
Shakespeare and make stump speeches on dry-goods boxes at midnight, and
put his arms around old Marshal Furgeson's neck and tell him he was the
blooming flower of chivalry. Also women made a fool of him--more or
less.