dog--and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid
down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much
happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used
the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is
good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no
question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest
and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and
meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been
more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe
the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so
misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men,
and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli
Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel
neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any
other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used
on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to
applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories
pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the
paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court
escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during
the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under
twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the
Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole
town knew what he was.
Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical
wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have
been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead
they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin,
whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office,
was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many
years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but
merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.
Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by
girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high
school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country
towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better
than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls
have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the
girls--which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have
worked in the shop--that they were girls we were proud of--all but
Ethelwylde Swaney.
She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two
years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say
like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor
compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others
for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red
Martin--which was her own mistake--this habit of blaming others for her
faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the
match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the
girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the
Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the
Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her;
also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily.
Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type
in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space
for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head
on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise
before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the
broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and
make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was
only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced
little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in
her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other
girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands--she was eternally
drying her hands--and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a
half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help
herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from
his work to help her--and then there would be more conversation.
But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John
Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the
Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her
royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a
comma and a period--though she never really learned; and we were still
patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after
being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due
allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to
arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in
her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had
worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop
would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out
that night in a gust of musk--in her picture hat and sweeping cloak,
with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing--and the office knew her no
more forever.
About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social
standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel
neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you
ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli
and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the
other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and
masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with
his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him
in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the
clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her
social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call
a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed
black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie
which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood
would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his
team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine
linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage
smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the
refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he
joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a
more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark
stairway on South Main Street.
When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back
to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the
sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for
a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he
was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was
at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his
own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat
with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding
diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted
lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed
extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign
tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering
through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he
had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red
wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the
girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at
home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and
forever talking about their "latest."
It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess
should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard
that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the
red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another
we had kept track of the girl--sometimes through her father, who, being
a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a
window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes
through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers
made him a storage battery of social information.
It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she
grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a
mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother
was a Rutherford--a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who
bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney,
who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store
where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the
horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling
with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family
reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into
kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It
was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched
around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The
girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the
Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast
table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have
a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while
they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they
tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the
dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it
was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper
begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and
there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run
errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing
cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the
neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and
that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We
are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's
discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!
But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so
grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came
back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon,
wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work,
looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of
chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel
Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with
chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than
a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama
at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward
our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely
quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her,
and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the
office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she
was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town
that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks
after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small
profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel
Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered
Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes
and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to
the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the
suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But,"
added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with
wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the
princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every
kitten becomes a cat."
[Illustration: The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to
watch her out of sight]
From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty
dollars--the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the
town's history--he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of
the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first
pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather,
and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning,
still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the
Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her
wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin
as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being
ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main
Street.
The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use
of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the
neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children.
Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing
events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the
first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and
ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the
White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that
the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old
toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other
dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls,
and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and
fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she
used to devote to her clothes.
Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the
babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much
with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he
neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his
clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit
powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She
grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to
over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by
bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he
abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for
the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way
respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious
quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the
neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them
what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with
Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become
angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her
husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had
refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else
who seemed to make her story possible.
By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister
and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow
purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was
operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled
the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were
frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess
used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under
her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the
neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that
they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend
that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys
around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker
were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to
hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes
many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible
examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others;
but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery
more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the
Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we
were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone;
her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out--pitiful and wretched
and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George
Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought
for her.
To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but
the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went
among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying
his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea,
yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral
of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned.
He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos
and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to
funerals in our town--funerals being their only diversion; how they sat
in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and
in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother
Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at
funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town
knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit
of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during
the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the
other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen
ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.
George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to
bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a
kind of gentility--perhaps for the children--was the best thing he ever
knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to
the funeral for the geraniums in the crepe paper covered tomato cans,
the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance
from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might
have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.
When the funeral left the house the neighbour women came and put it in
order, and there was a better supper waiting for the father and the
children than they had eaten for many years. And then, after the dishes
were put away, the neighbours left; and for what he tried to do and be
for the motherless brood just that one night, God will put down a good
mark for Eli Martin--even though the man failed most sadly.
When he went back to the gambling-room the next night, where he was
porter; men tried not to swear while he was in earshot, and the next day
they swore only mild oaths around him, out of respect for his grief, but
the day after they forgot their compunctions, and, within a week, Red
Martin seemed to have forgotten, too. In time, the family was scattered
over the earth--divided among kin, and adopted out, and as the town grew
older its conscience quickened and the gambling-room was closed,
whereupon Red Martin went to Huddleston's livery stable, where he worked
for enough to keep him in whisky and laudanum, and ate only when someone
gave him food.
He grew dirty, unkempt, and dull-witted. Disease bent and twisted him
hideously. When he was too sick to work, he went to the poor-house, and
came back weak and pale to sit much in the sun on the south side of the
building like a sick dog. When he is lying about the street drunk,
little boys poke sticks at him and flee with terror before him when he
wakes to blind rage and stumbles after them. It is hard to realise that
this disgusting, inhuman-looking creature is the Red Martin of twenty
years ago, who, in his long grey frock coat, patent leather shoes, white
hat and black tie, walked serenely up the steps of the bank the day it
failed, tapped on the door-pane with his revolver barrel, and, when a
man came to answer, made him open, and backed out with his revolver in
one hand and his diamonds and money in the other. He does not recall in
any vague way the Red Martin who gave the town a month's smile when he
said, after losing all his money on election, that he had learned never
to bet on anything that could talk, or had less than four legs. That Red
Martin has been dead these many years; perhaps he was no more worthy
than this one who hangs on to life, and bears the name and the disgrace
that his dead youth made inevitable.
How strange it is that a man should wreck himself, and blight those of
his own blood as this man has done! He knew what we all know about life
and its rules. He had been told, as we all are told in a thousand ways,
that bad conduct brings sorrow to the world, and that pain and
wretchedness are the only rewards of that behaviour which men call sin.
And yet there he is, sitting on his hunkers near the stable, with God's
stamp of failure all over his broken, battered body--put there by Red
Martin's own hands. But George Kirwin, who often thinks with a kindlier
spirit than others, says we are Red Martin's partners in iniquity, for
we all lived here with him, maintaining a town that tolerated gambling
and debauchery, and that, in some way, we shall each of us suffer as Red
has suffered, insomuch as each has had his share in a neighbour's shame.
We tell George that he is getting old, though he is still on the bright
side of forty, because he likes to come down town of evenings and hold a
parliament with Henry Larmy and Dan Gregg and Colonel Morrison.
Sometimes they hold it in the office and settle important affairs. A
month ago they settled the immortality of the soul, and the other night,
returning to their former subject, the question came up: "What will
become of Red Martin when he goes to Heaven?" Dan contended that the
poor fellow is carrying around his own little blowpipe hell as he goes
through life. George Kirwin maintained that Red Martin will enter the
next world with the soul that died when his body began to live in
wickedness; that there must have been some imperishable good in him as a
boy, and that Heaven, or whatever we decide to call the next world, must
be full of men and women like Red Martin--some more respectable than
he--whose hell will be the unmasking of their real selves in the world
where we "shall know as we are known." While we were sitting in judgment
on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town
from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he
expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has
been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did
not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed
and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel
Morrison's arm and said:
"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken
whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it
over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught
Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the
judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he
can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."
And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road
looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting
for the Samaritan.
XIX
"Thirty"
In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from
the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of
the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That
tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should
be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It
is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and
in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end
that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel
called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre.
It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country
town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic
word. But how to close? That is the question.