THE COUNTY FAIR
Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened,
and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came
in with a solemn air upon him, and a new dignity that made impressive
the seriousness with which he set to work at the pile of papers on his
desk, as if he were beginning a new week with new resolutions. He was
freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it was shorter at the sides
and, against his rough sunburnt neck, showed an edge of clean white
skin. His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk appearance; his
black clothes were brushed, his linen fresh.
He spoke to Marley but a few times and then from the distant altitude of
his new dignity. Once he sent Marley on an errand to Snider's drug store
to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to keep an office docket
after that. He worked on his new docket half the morning, then he
carried the docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley's table,
flung them down and asked Marley if he would not continue the work for
him. He explained the system he had devised for keeping a record of his
cases; it was intricate and complete, but in many of his cases the
numbers and in some instances the names of opposing parties were
missing; Powell told Marley to go over to the Court House and get the
missing data from the clerk.
"I've got to go out for a while," Powell explained. Then he hurried
away; he seemed to be glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of
the task he had set for himself.
Powell's absence weighed on Marley; he was lonesome in the deserted
office, and found himself wondering just where Powell was at each
moment; he pictured him with his companions, Colonel Devlin, Marshall
Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had
been rumored that George Halliday had been admitted to the merry group,
and that they played poker nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then
Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell's wife; he had never seen
her, but he had an idea of her appearance, formed from no description of
her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured her as a graceful
little woman, with a certain droop to her figure; but try as he would,
he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet it gave somehow a
certain expression of sweetness and patience; sometimes, by an effort,
he could see her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark, and
parted in the middle with some gray in its rather heavy mass.
Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with any kind of satisfaction
with Lavinia. When he spoke of him, she would smile and affect an
interest, but he could detect the affectation, and he could detect,
also, a certain distance in her attitude toward Wade Powell or the
thought of him, which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair's
dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept Wade Powell, and he
had ceased to mention him except in a casual manner. For some like
reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at home; he found that he
had many views which he could not share with those nearest him, and his
inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and aloof.
He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell's offer of assistance, nor had he
spoken of it at home. In those four days he had thought much of it and
built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of all the possibilities,
and taken a fine delight in examining each one, working it out to its
logical end in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their fortunes.
He was disappointed when Wade Powell failed to refer to the subject
again; he would have liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia;
usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in the life of which she
was so innocent, she could reassure him; but of late he had had so many
disappointments and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia's resources of
comfort and hope that he had grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of
making any further drafts.
When Monday came and Powell did not renew the subject, nor even say what
his scheme had been, Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all
about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a sigh, and tried to
forget it himself. He took up his studies once more; but he made poor
headway; he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten pages of law in as
many days, and what he had read he could not remember. When he tried to
review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor could he wrest any from
them, even though he ground his elbows in the table with the book
between them and dug his fists into his hair.
That was the week of the Gordon County fair. For a month every fence
along the white pikes in the country had borne the bills, flaming from
afar in red ink the date, "Oct. 15-31." There were, too, lithographs
everywhere--on boards at the monument, at the Court House, on the town
hall, on the covered bridge over Mad River--lithographs picturing the
exciting finish of a trotting race, and a sedate concourse of fat
cattle. The fair opened Monday, but it was understood that that day
would be devoted to preparing and arranging the exhibits; the fair would
not begin in earnest until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.
Marley was glad that fair week had come, for the chance of novelty which
it offered, and, too, for the excuse it gave him; he would not study
that week, but in the general festivity try to forget the problem that
so oppressed him. He would have liked to go to the fair every day, but
he could not, for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to every
one else in the county, was not insignificant to him. He went, however,
on Wednesday with his father, who, with the love of horses he had
inherited from the saddle-bag days of Methodism, recklessly attended the
races. Marley thought that this visit would be his last, but on Thursday
morning he met Lawrence in the Square.
"Just the man I'm looking for!" said Lawrence.
He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official air which was
explained when Marley observed, on the lapel of his coat, the badge of
blue ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.
"I have charge of the tickets this year," he said. "Want to go? I'll
pass you in."
Marley was glad enough to accept.
"I'll have to go around to the office and tell Powell," he said. "I was
away all day yesterday."
"Oh, nonsense," replied Lawrence, "that won't make any difference; he's
been full for two days. This is his big time."
Marley had a pang as he saw with what small seriousness Lawrence
regarded his relation to the law; it reflected, doubtless, the common
attitude of the community toward him and his efforts.
"I've got to hurry," Lawrence went on; "I've got a rig waiting here; you
can ride out with me."
It was one of the incomparable afternoons that autumn brings to Ohio;
the retreating sun was flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh
and Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence drove rapidly
through the throng of hurrying vehicles that crowded the road to the
fair-grounds, stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything with
its white powder.
Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of business to engage in
the weary search for pleasure, and Marley set out alone across the
scorched and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with people for
the races. He could hear the nervous clamor of the bell in the judges'
stand, the notes of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round, the
incessant thumping of the bass drum that made its barbaric music for the
side-show, and the cries of venders, dominating all the voices of the
thousands bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once, calling him back to
the real, to the peace of the commonplace, he heard the distant tones of
the town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away, above the autumnal
trees.
He pressed into the space between the grand stand and the whitewashed
fence that surrounded the track; through the palings he could see the
stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily breathing trotters they
jogged to and fro; above him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish
cries and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences, sometimes
voices he knew. All around him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made
clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some insignia of office,
solemnly watched the races and talked of horses.
The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley
left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the
sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here
and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the
din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he
laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going
about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively,
calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell.
The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its
center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was
trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of
his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain
of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should
not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group,
not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade
Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county's best criminal lawyer.
When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he
introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man
at his elbow. Powell's face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant.
The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.
"This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn," he said,
bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a
husky whisper: "He's our candidate for county clerk, you know."
Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman's face, but he could
not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with
a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed
and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though,
it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his
neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the
poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with
Carman's face. But Powell was drawing them aside.
"Come over here," he was saying, "where we can be alone."
He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one was near; they were
quite out of the crowd which was pressing to the whitewashed picket
fence, attracted by the excitement of the race for which the horses were
just then scoring.
"Now, Jake," Powell began, speaking to Carman, "this is the young man I
was talking to you about."
Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile, turned his face half
away.
"I reckon," Powell went on, "that I might be able to do you some good,
if I took off my coat." Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence;
Marley had never known him to come so near to boasting before.
Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own eyes narrowed, was watching
him closely. Once he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified; he did
not know what play was going on here; he looked from Carman to Powell,
and back to Carman again. There was some strange fascination about
Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he discovered that there was
something peculiar about Carman's eyes.
"I haven't said anything to Marley about the matter, Jake," Powell said.
"Maybe I'd better tell him. Hell! He might not want it--I don't know."
Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in the shadow; now it came
into the sunlight, and Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman's right
eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye remained fixed; it
was larger than the pupil of the right eye, which had shrunk to a
pin-point in the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely, the left
eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it almost hurt Marley's eyes to
look at it.
"I've been telling Carman, Glenn," Powell was explaining, "that if he is
elected--and gets into the Court House--"
Marley looked at Powell expectantly.
"I want him," Powell went on, "to make you his deputy."
Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what Powell had meant that day a
fortnight ago; he felt his great affection for Powell glow and warm;
Lavinia would appreciate Powell after this. It meant salary, position, a
place in which he might complete his law studies at his leisure; it
meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia! He looked all his gratitude
at Powell, who smiled appreciatively.
Carman had turned his face away again, he was still smiling, and
plucking now at his chin; Marley waited, and Powell finally grew
impatient.
"Well, Jake, what do you say?"
Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly turned about. Marley watched
him narrowly, he saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil of
the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for the first time, Carman
looked steadily at Marley and for the first time he spoke.
"Well," he said, and he stopped to spit out his tobacco, "you know I'm
always ready to do a friend a good turn."
Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment, and then he said,
"All right, Jake."
Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of excitement, and they
heard a loud yell:
"Go!"
And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed palings.