All that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The
escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however,
for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of
the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a
clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion
its hunger after life.
When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for
consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied
above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason
to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing
that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”
But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She
kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived
me.”
At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie.
She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that
you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose
the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after
all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She
took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one
and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only
natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the
wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different.
We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does
with us as She pleases.”
But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in
her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.
“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t
suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to
me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily _did_ help Ellen it was
only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children
are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are
likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were
young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles
after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way
off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They
envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”
For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece
silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve
been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life
is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us.
Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins,
only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children
of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and
their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither.
They are lost somewhere between.”
But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades
of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother
and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg
St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised
heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been
called upon to endure so much.
As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next
election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his
campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too
strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about
helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as
clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a
cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children,
goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So
he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was
honest, he was sacrificed to the Mills. He settled himself, a man of
forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s
Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because
it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.
In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There
was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of
violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town
enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once
affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the
top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were
removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the
way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western
Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron
over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in
passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while
they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town
among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the
Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with
fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element
in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the
square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at
last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians
who had to do with the contract.
In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the
Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the
shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For
all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one
proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom
to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a
rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of
trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into
tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening
penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the
prosperity to which he had contributed so much. He went his way, petty,
dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because
he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the
piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in
the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side,
because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new
furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds
of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in
the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and
obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming
prosperity.