LOVE AND A LIVING
Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He
made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley
had said to him, even if he could not remember exactly what it was that
Dudley had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling of dislike
he had for the old banker; he told himself that such a feeling was
unworthy of him, if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the matter
over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion of envy or jealousy of
Dudley's success. The whole town considered Dudley its leading man, and
Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to consider him in this
light because he was a good man and not because he was a rich man, just
as the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about Dudley with some
one, but he did not want to talk about him with Lavinia, because he felt
a shame in his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia might share.
He did talk with his father about him, but his father did not seem to be
interested; he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment. And when
Marley pressed him for an opinion of Dudley his father said:
"They make broad their phylacteries."
And that was all.
However, Marley found Wade Powell willing to talk of Selah Dudley, as he
was willing to talk of almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that
he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he merely let it be
understood that he had met the old man in the course of the day and
talked with him casually.
"By the way," he asked, as if the thought had just come to him, "how did
Selah Dudley make his money?"
"He didn't make it," Powell answered.
"He didn't? Did he inherit it?"
"No."
"Then how did he get it?"
"He gathered it."
"Gathered it? I don't know what you mean."
Powell laughed.
"You don't? Well, there's a difference."
"He wasn't in the army, was he?"
"In the army! Great God!" Powell threw into his voice the contempt he
could not find the word to express. "You think he'd risk his hide in the
army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly
safe--" Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought--"no bullet could
ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed."
Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out the damp little pieces of
tobacco viciously.
"No, I'll tell you, Glenn," he said, "he stayed at home and got his
start, as he calls it, by skinning the poor. Widows were his big game
and he gathered a little pile that has been growing ever since. To-day
he owns Gordon County."
"He seems to be a prominent man in the church," ventured Marley.
"He'll be a prominent man in hell," said Powell, angrily. And then he
added thoughtfully: "My one regret in going there myself is that I'll
have to see him every day."
The most curious effect of Marley's visit to Dudley, however, was one he
did not observe himself. Having been defeated in his plan to secure a
place in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation, that he
still had the law to fall back on, and he returned to his studies. But
he made little headway; once having decided to give up the law, the
decision remained, and his mind was constantly occupied with schemes for
securing a foothold in some other occupation. He considered, one after
another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast as he thought of
some opening, he went for it, but invariably to find it either no
opening at all, or else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his
approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether, and sat idle, his
book before him; but one day Powell said to him:
"Say, Glenn, you're not getting along very fast, are you?"
Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.
"Well, no," he admitted.
"What's the matter, in love?"
Marley blushed, from another cause this time, though the guilt remained
in his face. But Powell instantly was gentle.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was just joking, of course; I didn't
mean to be inquisitive. You mustn't mind my boorishness."
Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to whom any show of
affection was confusing, turned away self-consciously. But Marley
whirled his chair around toward Powell.
"I am in love," he said. "I've wanted to tell you, but I--you know who
she is."
"Lavinia Blair?"
"Yes. And that's what's troubling me," Marley went on. "I want to get
married, and I can't. I can't," he repeated, "the law's too slow; I've
realized it for a long while, but I tried to keep the fact away, I tried
not to see it. But now I have to face it. Why," he said, rising to his
feet, "it'll take a thousand years to get a practice in this town, and
I'm not even admitted yet."
He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together, his lower lip thrust
out, his teeth nipping his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said
nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and the fact made every one
in the county tremble at the thought of his cross-examinations;
sometimes he carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and as often
hurt as helped his cause. He never had been able to turn his knowledge
to much practical account; in a city he would have had numerous
retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor. In Macochee he
was out of place, and he chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact.
He waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth again.
"I'll have to get a job," Marley said at that moment, bitterly, "and go
to work; that's all." And then he laughed harshly. "Humph, get a
job--that's the biggest job of all. What can I get here in Macochee, I'd
like to know?"
He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost menacingly on Powell, as
if he were the cause of his predicament.
"I've told you already it's no place for you," said Powell, quietly.
"But where'll I go?" Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was
pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell's reply.
Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:
"When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young
fellow in my class--a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was
poor--God! how poor we were!" Powell paused in this retrospect of
poverty. "That was why we were such friends,--our poverty gave us a
common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall,
lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I
supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton--that was his county-seat.
When we were bidding each other good-by--I'll never forget the day, it
was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut
Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth
Street. I said, 'Well, we'll see each other once in a while; we won't be
far apart.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't know about that.' 'Why?'
I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to Chicago.' I looked at him in
surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to
get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed.
'Why, you'll starve to death there!' I said. He only smiled." Powell
paused, to whet Marley's appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.
"That jay," Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse,
"that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit
Court."
The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama
at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone
through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the
privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings,
plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind
hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in
picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town
where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from
hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in
Macochee.
"How _do_ young men get a start in places like Macochee?" he asked, and
then he added in despairing argument: "They _do_ stay, they _do_ get
along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and
does business, the population increases, it doesn't die off."
"Well," said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities
its mystery demanded, "some of them marry rich women, but that industry
is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most
of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and
that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders;
they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a
grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in
real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then
they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they're old, people
forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the
church, like Selah Dudley."
Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.
"The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never
starve, for people will get sick, or think they're sick, which is better
yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by
their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance
business."
Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.
"Sometimes," he resumed presently, "I feel as if I were tottering on the
verge of the insurance business myself."
Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into silence, his head
lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance, and there was something
pathetic in the figure, or would have been, but for the humor that saved
every situation for Powell. There was, however, something appealing, and
something to inspire affection, too. Marley's gaze recalled Powell, and
he glanced up with a smile.
"I reckon you've gathered from my remarks," said Powell, "that I
consider success chiefly from a monetary standpoint, but I don't. The
main business of life is living, and the trouble with the world is that
it is too busy getting ready to live to find the time for life; it has
tied itself up with a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had
to postpone living from time to time until most people have put the
beginning of life at the gateway of death; meanwhile they're busy
gathering things, like magpies, and those that gather the most are
considered the best; they have come to think that people are divided
into two classes, good and bad; the good are those who own, the bad
those who don't, and the good think their business is to put down the
bad. Now, here in Gordon County, we have about everything a man needs;
the spring comes and the summer, and the autumn and the winter; the rain
falls and the winds blow and the sun shines, and I've noticed that
Lighttown gets about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville about
as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems to shine pretty much alike
on the niggers loafing in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and Judge
Blair, bowing like Christians to each other in the Square. The trees are
the same color wherever they grow, and I don't see any reason why people
shouldn't be happy if they'd only let one another be happy. Now, I would
have lived, but I didn't have time. I thought when I began that I'd have
to do as the rest were doing, get hold of things, and I saw that if I
did, I'd have to get my share away from them; well, I made a failure of
that, being too soft inside someway; that was all right too, but
meanwhile I was wasting time, and putting off living--now it's too
late."
Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing how to take him.
"I know," he said presently. "But what am I going to do? I can live all
right, but I have to do better than that; I want to get married."
"Married," mused Powell, "married! Well, I got married."
Marley was interested. He had never heard Powell speak of his wife, and
he feared what he was about to say; for that instant Powell's standing
in his estimation trembled.
"And that was the only sensible thing I ever did."
Marley felt a great relief.
"But I don't know that I did right by Mary; I didn't do her any good, I
reckon; still, she's borne up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of
sunlight to pour over her."
Powell walked to his window, and looked across into the Court-House yard
where the leaves were falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped
that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but he was silent.
Presently he turned about.
"Well, Glenn," he said; "I see you're stuck on staying in Macochee, and
I don't blame you; and you want to get married, and that's all right.
Maybe I can help you do it."
"How?" said Marley, eagerly.
"I've got a scheme."
"What is it?"
"Well, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I'd better wait till I see
whether it will or not before I tell you."
He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and then said: "You wait here."
And he turned and left the office. Marley watched Powell's fine figure
as he walked across the street toward the Court House, a great love of
the man surging within him. He felt secure and safe; a new warmth spread
through him. At the door of the Court House Marley saw him stop and
shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two talked a moment, then
turned and went down toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and
disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he went home to his
dinner. He returned, but Powell did not come back to the office all the
afternoon.