THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN
BY ELLEN GLASGOW
AUTHOR OF "THE DELIVERANCE," "THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1909. Reprinted
May, July, August, September, twice, October, 1909.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
I. IN WHICH I APPEAR WITH FEW PRETENSIONS
II. THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
III. A PAIR OF RED SHOES
IV. IN WHICH I PLAY IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
V. IN WHICH I START IN LIFE
VI. CONCERNING CARROTS
VII. IN WHICH I MOUNT THE FIRST RUNG OF THE LADDER
VIII. IN WHICH MY EDUCATION BEGINS
IX. I LEARN A LITTLE LATIN AND A GREAT DEAL OF LIFE
X. IN WHICH I GROW UP
XI. IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL
XII. I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE
XIII. IN WHICH I RUN AGAINST TRADITIONS
XIV. IN WHICH I TEST MY STRENGTH
XV. A MEETING IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
XVI. IN WHICH SALLY SPEAKS HER MIND
XVII. IN WHICH MY FORTUNES RISE
XVIII. THE PRINCIPLES OF MISS MATOACA
XIX. SHOWS THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
XX. IN WHICH SOCIETY RECEIVES US
XXI. I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR
XXII. THE MAN AND THE CLASS
XXIII. IN WHICH I WALK ON THIN ICE
XXIV. IN WHICH I GO DOWN
XXV. WE FACE THE FACTS AND EACH OTHER
XXVI. THE RED FLAG AT THE GATE
XXVII. WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US
XXVIII. IN WHICH SALLY STOOPS
XXIX. IN WHICH WE RECEIVE VISITORS
XXX. IN WHICH SALLY PLANS
XXXI. THE DEEPEST SHADOW
XXXII. I COME TO THE SURFACE
XXXIII. THE GROWING DISTANCE
XXXIV. THE BLOW THAT CLEARS
XXXV. THE ULTIMATE CHOICE
THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH I APPEAR WITH FEW PRETENSIONS
As the storm broke and a shower of hail rattled like a handful of
pebbles against our little window, I choked back a sob and edged my
small green-painted stool a trifle nearer the hearth. On the opposite
side of the wire fender, my father kicked off his wet boots, stretched
his feet, in grey yarn stockings, out on the rag carpet in front of the
fire, and reached for his pipe which he had laid, still smoking, on the
floor under his chair.
"It's as true as the Bible, Benjy," he said, "that on the day you were
born yo' brother President traded off my huntin' breeches for a yaller
pup."
My knuckles went to my eyes, while the smart of my mother's slap faded
from the cheek I had turned to the fire.
"What's become o' th' p-p-up-p?" I demanded, as I stared up at him with
my mouth held half open in readiness to break out again.
"Dead," responded my father solemnly, and I wept aloud.
It was an October evening in my childhood, and so vivid has my later
memory of it become that I can still see the sheets of water that rolled
from the lead pipe on our roof, and can still hear the splash! splash!
with which they fell into the gutter below. For three days the clouds
had hung in a grey curtain over the city, and at dawn a high wind,
blowing up from the river, had driven the dead leaves from the
churchyard like flocks of startled swallows into our little street.
Since morning I had watched them across my mother's "prize" red geranium
upon our window-sill--now whipped into deep swirls and eddies over the
sunken brick pavement, now rising in sighing swarms against the closed
doors of the houses, now soaring aloft until they flew almost as high as
the living swallows in the belfry of old Saint John's. Then as the dusk
fell, and the street lamps glimmered like blurred stars through the
rain, I drew back into our little sitting-room, which glowed bright as
an ember against the fierce weather outside.
Half an hour earlier my father had come up from the marble yard, where
he spent his days cutting lambs and doves and elaborate ivy wreaths in
stone, and the smell from his great rubber coat, which hung drying
before the kitchen stove, floated with the aroma of coffee through the
half-open door. When I closed an eye and peeped through the crack, I
could see my mother's tall shadow, shifting, not flitting, on the
whitewashed wall of the kitchen, as she passed back and forth from the
stove to the wooden cradle in which my little sister Jessy lay asleep,
with the head of her rag doll in her mouth.
Outside the splash! splash! of the rain still sounded on the brick
pavement, and as I glanced through the window, I saw an old blind negro
beggar groping under the street lamp at the corner. The muffled beat of
his stick in the drenched leaves passed our doorstep, and I heard it
grow gradually fainter as he turned in the direction of the negro hovels
that bordered our end of the town. Across the street, and on either side
of us, there were rows of small boxlike frame houses built with narrow
doorways, which opened from the sidewalk into funny little kitchens,
where women, in soiled calico dresses, appeared to iron all day long. It
was the poorer quarter of what is known in Richmond as "Church Hill," a
portion of the city which had been left behind in the earlier
fashionable progress westward. Between us and modern Richmond there were
several high hills, up which the poor dripping horses panted on summer
days, a railroad station, and a broad slum-like bottom vaguely described
as the "Old Market." Our prosperity, with our traditions, had crumbled
around us, yet there were still left the ancient church, with its shady
graveyard, and an imposing mansion or two inherited from the forgotten
splendour of former days. The other Richmond--that "up-town" I heard
sometimes mentioned--I had never seen, for my early horizon was bounded
by the green hill, by the crawling salmon-coloured James River at its
foot, and by the quaint white belfry of the parish of old St. John's.
Beneath that belfry I had made miniature graves on summer afternoons,
and as I sat now opposite to my father, with the bright fire between us,
the memory of those crumbling vaults made me hug myself in the warmth,
while I edged nearer the great black kettle singing before the flames.
"Pa," I asked presently, with an effort to resume the conversation along
cheerful lines, "was it a he or a she pup?"
My father turned his bright blue eyes from the fire, while his hand
wandered, with an habitual gesture, to his coarse straw-coloured hair
which stood, like mine, straight up from the forehead.
"Wall, I'll be blessed if I can recollect, Benjy," he replied, and added
after a moment, in which I knew that his slow wits were working over a
fresh attempt at distraction, "but speaking of dawgs, it wouldn't
surprise me if yo' ma was to let you have a b'iled egg for yo' supper."
Again the storm was averted. He was so handsome, so soft, so eager to
make everybody happy, that although he did not deceive even my infant
mind for a minute, I felt obliged by sheer force of sympathy to step
into the amiable snare he laid.
"Hard or soft?" I demanded.
"Now that's a matter of ch'ice, ain't it?" he rejoined, wrinkling his
forehead as if awed by the gravity of the decision; "but bein' a plain
man with a taste for solids, I'd say 'hard' every time."
"Hard, ma," I repeated gravely through the crack of the door to the
shifting shape on the kitchen wall. Then, while he stooped over in the
firelight to prod fresh tobacco into his pipe, I began again my
insatiable quest for knowledge which had brought me punishment at the
hand of my mother an hour before.
"Pa, who named me?"
"Yo' ma."
"Did ma name you, too?"
He shook his head, doubtfully, not negatively. Above his short growth of
beard his cheeks had warmed to a clear pink, and his foolish blue eyes
were as soft as the eyes of a baby.
"Wall, I can't say she did that--exactly."
"Then who did name you?"
"I don't recollect. My ma, I reckon."
"Did ma name me Ben Starr, or just Ben?"
"Just Ben. You were born Starr."
"Was she born Starr, too?"
"Good Lord, no, she was born Savage."
"Then why warn't I born Savage?"
"Because she married me an' I was born Starr."
I gave it up with a sigh. "Who had the most to do with my comin' here,
God or ma?" I asked after a minute.
My father hesitated as if afraid of committing himself to an heretical
utterance. "I ain't so sure," he replied at last, and added immediately
in a louder tone, "Yo' ma, I s'pose."
"Then why don't I say my prayers to ma instead of to God?"
"I wouldn't begin to worry over that at my age, if I were you," replied
my father, with angelic patience, "seein' as it's near supper time an'
the kettle's a-bilin'."
"But I want to know, pa, why it was that I came to be named just Ben?"
"To be named just Ben?" he repeated slowly, as if the fact had been
brought for the first time to his attention. "Wall, I reckon 'twas
because we'd had considerable trouble over the namin' of the first,
which was yo' brother President. That bein' the turn of the man of the
family, I calculated that as a plain American citizen, I couldn't do
better than show I hadn't any ill feelin' agin the Government. I don't
recollect just what the name of the gentleman at the head of the Nation
was, seein' 'twas goin' on sixteen years ago, but I'd made up my mind to
call the infant in the cradle arter him, if he'd ever answered my
letter--which he never did. It was then yo' ma an' I had words because
she didn't want a child of hers named arter such a bad-mannered,
stuck-up, ornary sort, President or no President. She raised a terrible
squall, but I held out against her," he went on, dropping his voice,
"an' I stood up for it that as long as 'twas the office an' not the man
I was complimentin', I'd name him arter the office, which I did on the
spot. When 'twas over an' done the notion got into my head an' kind of
tickled me, an' when you came at last, arter the four others in between,
that died befo' they took breath, I was a'ready to name you 'Governor'
if yo' ma had been agreeable. But 'twas her turn, so she called you
arter her Uncle Benjamin--"
"What's become o' Uncle Benjamin?" I interrupted.
"Dead," responded my father, and for the third time I wept.
"I declar' that child's been goin' on like that for the last hour,"
remarked my mother, appearing upon the threshold. "Thar, thar, Benjy
boy, stop cryin' an' I'll let you go to old Mr. Cudlip's burial
to-morrow."
"May I go, too, ma?" enquired President, who had come in with a lighted
lamp in his hand. He was a big, heavy, overgrown boy, and his head was
already on a level with his father's.
"Not if I know it," responded my mother tartly, for her temper was
rising and she looked tired and anxious. "I'll take Benjy along because
he can crowd in an' nobody'll mind."
She moved a step nearer while her shadow loomed to gigantic proportions
on the whitewashed wall. Her thin brown hair, partially streaked with
grey, was brushed closely over her scalp, and this gave her profile an
angularity that became positively grotesque in the shape behind her.
Across her forehead there were three deep frowning wrinkles, which did
not disappear even when she smiled, and her sad, flint-coloured eyes
held a perplexed and anxious look, as if she were trying always to
remember something which was very important and which she had half
forgotten. I had never seen her, except when she went to funerals,
dressed otherwise than in a faded grey calico with a faded grey shawl
crossed tightly over her bosom and drawn to the back of her waist, where
it was secured by a safety pin of an enormous size. Beside her my father
looked so young and so amiable that I had a confused impression that he
had shrunk to my own age and importance. Then my mother retreated into
the kitchen and he resumed immediately his natural proportions. After
thirty years, when I think now of that ugly little room, with its
painted pine furniture, with its coloured glass vases, filled with dried
cat-tails, upon the mantelpiece, with its crude red and yellow print of
a miniature David attacking a colossal Goliath, with its narrow
window-panes, where beyond the "prize" red geranium the wind drove the
fallen leaves over the brick pavement, with its staring whitewashed
walls, and its hideous rag carpet--when I think of these vulgar details
it is to find that they are softened in my memory by a sense of peace,
of shelter, and of warm firelight shadows.
My mother had just laid the supper table, over which I had watched her
smooth the clean red and white cloth with her twisted fingers; President
was proudly holding aloft a savoury dish of broiled herrings, and my
father had pinned on my bib and drawn back the green-painted chair in
which I sat for my meals--when a hurried knock at the door arrested each
one of us in his separate attitude as if he had been instantly petrified
by the sound.
There was a second's pause, and then before my father could reach it,
the door opened and shut violently, and a woman, in a dripping cloak,
holding a little girl by the hand, came from the storm outside, and ran
straight to the fire, where she stood shaking the child's wet clothes
before the flames. As the light fell over them, I saw that the woman was
young and delicate and richly dressed, with a quantity of pale brown
hair which the rain and wind had beaten flat against her small
frightened face. At the time she was doubtless an unusually pretty
creature to a grown-up pair of eyes, but my gaze, burning with
curiosity, passed quickly over her to rest upon the little girl, who
possessed for me the attraction of my own age and size. She wore red
shoes, I saw at my first glance, and a white cloak, which I took to be
of fur, though it was probably made of some soft, fuzzy cloth I had
never seen. There was a white cap on her head, held by an elastic band
under her square little chin, and about her shoulders her hair lay in a
profuse, drenched mass of brown, which reminded me in the firelight of
the colour of wet November leaves. She was soaked through, and yet as
she stood there, with her teeth chattering in the warmth, I was struck
by the courage, almost the defiance, with which she returned my gaze.
Baby that she was, I felt that she would scorn to cry while my glance
was upon her, though there were fresh tear marks on her flushed cheeks,
and around her solemn grey eyes that were made more luminous by her
broad, heavily arched black eyebrows, which gave her an intense and
questioning look. The memory of this look, which was strange in so young
a child, remained with me after the colour of her hair and every
charming feature in her face were forgotten. Years afterwards I think I
could have recognised her in a crowded street by the mingling of light
with darkness, of intense black with clear grey, in her sparkling
glance.
"I followed the wrong turn," said the pale little woman, breathing hard
with a pitiable, frightened sound, while my mother took her dripping
cloak from her shoulders, "and I could not keep on because of the rain
which came up so heavily. If I could only reach the foot of the hill I
might find a carriage to take me up-town."
My father had sprung forward as she entered, and was vigorously stirring
the fire, which blazed and crackled merrily in the open grate. She
accepted thankfully my mother's efforts to relieve her of her wet wraps,
but the little girl drew back haughtily when she was approached, and
refused obstinately to slip out of her cloak, from which the water ran
in streams to the floor.
"I don't like it here, mamma, it is a common place," she said, in a
clear childish voice, and though I hardly grasped the meaning of her
words, her tone brought to me for the first time a feeling of shame for
my humble surroundings.
"Hush, Sally," replied her mother, "you must dry yourself. These people
are very kind."
"But I thought we were going to grandmama's?"
"Grandmama lives up-town, and we are going as soon as the storm has
blown over. There, be a good girl and let the little boy take your wet
cap."
"I don't want him to take my cap. He is a common boy."
In spite of the fact that she seemed to me to be the most disagreeable
little girl I had ever met, the word she had used was lodged unalterably
in my memory. In that puzzled instant, I think, began my struggle to
rise out of the class in which I belonged by birth; and I remember that
I repeated the word "common" in a whisper to myself, while I resolved
that I would learn its meaning in order that I might cease to be the
unknown thing that it implied.
My mother, who had gone into the kitchen with the dripping cloak in her
arms, returned a moment later with a cup of steaming coffee in one hand
and a mug of hot milk in the other.
"It's a mercy if you haven't caught your death with an inner chill," she
observed in a brisk, kindly tone. "'Twas the way old Mr. Cudlip, whose
funeral I'm going to to-morrow, came to his end, and he was as hale,
red-faced a body as you ever laid eyes on."
The woman received the cup gratefully, and I could see her poor thin
hands tremble as she raised it to her lips.
"Drink the warm milk, dear," she said pleadingly to the disagreeable
little girl, who shook her head and drew back with a stiff childish
gesture.
"I'm not hungry, thank you," she replied to my mother in her sweet,
clear treble. To all further entreaties she returned the same answer,
standing there a haughty, though drenched and battered infant, in her
soiled white cloak and her red shoes, holding her mop of a muff tightly
in both hands.
"I'm not hungry, thank you," she repeated, adding presently in a manner
of chill politeness, "give it to the boy."
But the boy was not hungry either, and when my mother, finally taking
her at her word, turned, in exasperation, and offered the mug to me, I
declined it, also, and stood nervously shifting from one foot to the
other, while my hands caught and twisted the fringe of the table-cloth
at my back. The big grey eyes of the little girl looked straight into
mine, but there was no hint in them that she was aware of my existence.
Though her teeth were chattering, and she knew I heard them, she did not
relax for an instant from her scornful attitude.
"We were just about to take a mouthful of supper, mum, an' we'd be proud
if you an' the little gal would jine us," remarked my father, with an
eager hospitality.
"I thank you," replied the woman in her pretty, grateful manner, "but
the coffee has restored my strength, and if you will direct me to the
hill, I shall be quite able to go on again."
A step passed close to the door on the pavement outside, and I saw her
start and clutch the child to her bosom with trembling hands. As she
stood there in her shaking terror, I remembered a white kitten I had
once seen chased by boys into the area of a deserted house.
"If--if anyone should come to enquire after me, will you be so good as
to say nothing of my having been here?" she asked.
"To be sure I will, with all the pleasure in life," responded my father,
who, it was evident even to me, had become a victim to her distressed
loveliness.
Emboldened by the effusive politeness of my parent, I went up to the
little girl and shyly offered her a blossom from my mother's geranium
upon the window-sill. A scrap of a hand, as cold as ice when it touched
mine, closed over the stem of the flower, and without looking at me, she
stood, very erect, with the scarlet geranium grasped stiffly between her
fingers.
"I'll take you to the bottom of the hill myself," protested my father,
"but I wish you could persuade yourself to try a bite of food befo' you
set out in the rain."
"It is important that I should lose no time," answered the woman,
drawing her breath quickly through her small white teeth, "but I fear
that I am taking you away from your supper?"
"Not at all, you will not deprive me in the least," stammered my father,
blushing up to his ears, while his straight flaxen hair appeared
literally to rise with embarrassment. "I--I--the fact is I'm not an
eater, mum."
For an instant, remembering the story of Ananias I had heard in
Sunday-school, I looked round in terror, half expecting to hear the
dreadful feet of the young men on the pavement. But he passed scathless
for the hour at least, and our visitor had turned to receive her
half-dried cloak from my mother's hands, when her face changed suddenly
to a more deadly pallor, and seizing the little girl by the shoulder,
she fled, like a small frightened animal, across the threshold into the
kitchen.
My father's hand had barely reached the knob of the street door, when it
opened and a man in a rubber coat entered, and stopped short in the
centre of the room, where he stood blinking rapidly in the lamplight. I
heard the rain drip with a soft pattering sound from his coat to the
floor, and when he wheeled about, after an instant in which his glance
searched the room, I saw that his face was flushed and his eyes swimming
and bloodshot. There was in his look, as I remember it now, something of
the inflamed yet bridled cruelty of a bird of prey.
"Have you noticed a lady with a little girl go by?" he enquired.
At his question my father fell back a step or two until he stood
squarely planted before the door into the kitchen. Though he was a big
man, he was not so big as the other, who towered above the dried
cat-tails in a china vase on the mantelpiece.
"Are you sure they did not pass here?" asked the stranger, and as he
turned his head the dried pollen was loosened from the cat-tails and
drifted in an ashen dust to the hearth.
"No, I'll stake my word on that. They ain't passed here yet," replied my
father.
With an angry gesture the other shook his rubber coat over our bright
little carpet, and passed out again, slamming the door violently behind
him. Running to the window, I lifted the green shade, and watched his
big black figure splashing recklessly through the heavy puddles under
the faint yellowish glimmer of the street lamp at the comer. The light
flickered feebly on his rubber coat and appeared to go out in the
streams of water that fell from his shoulders.
When I looked round I saw that the woman had come back into the room,
still grasping the little girl by the hand.
"No, no, I must go at once. It is necessary that I should go at once,"
she repeated breathlessly, looking up in a dazed way into my mother's
face.
"If you must you must, an' what ain't my business ain't," replied my
mother a trifle sharply, while she wrapped a grey woollen comforter of
her own closely over the head and shoulders of the little girl, "but if
you'd take my advice, which you won't, you'd turn this minute an' walk
straight back home to yo' husband."
But the woman only shook her head with its drenched mass of soft brown
hair.
"We must go, Sally, mustn't we?" she said to the child.
"Yes, we must go, mamma," answered the little girl, still grasping the
stem of the red geranium between her fingers.
"That bein' the case, I'll get into my coat with all the pleasure in
life an' see you safe," remarked my father, with a manner that impressed
me as little short of the magnificent.
"But I hate to take you away from home on such a terrible night."
"Oh, don't mention the weather," responded my gallant parent, while he
struggled into his rubber shoes; and he added quite handsomely, after a
flourish which appeared to set the elements at defiance, "arter all,
weather is only weather, mum."
As nobody, not even my mother, was found to challenge the truth of this
statement, the child was warmly wrapped up in an old blanket shawl, and
my father lifted her in his arms, while the three set out under a big
cotton umbrella for the brow of the hill. President and I peered after
them from the window, screening our eyes with our hollowed palms, and
flattening our noses against the icy panes; but in spite of our efforts
we could only discern dimly the shape of the umbrella rising like a
miniature black mountain out of the white blur of the fog. The long
empty street with the wind-drifts of dead leaves, the pale glimmer of
the solitary light at the far corner, the steady splash! splash! of the
rain as it fell on the brick pavement, the bitter draught that blew in
over the shivering geranium upon the sill--all these brought a lump to
my throat, and I turned back quickly into our cheerful little room,
where my untasted supper awaited me.