I
Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to develop the
Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence School
Week, Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.
A Week is not merely a week.
If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or chamber
of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which means to get
more money, it calls in those few energetic spirits who run any city,
and proclaims a Week. This consists of one month of committee meetings,
a hundred columns of praise for the organization in the public prints,
and finally a day or two on which athletic persons flatter
inappreciative audiences in churches or cinema theaters, and the
prettiest girls in town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk to
male strangers on the street corners, apropos of giving them extremely
undecorative tags in exchange for the smallest sums which those
strangers think they must pay if they are to be considered gentlemen.
The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to acquire
money immediately by the sale of tags but by general advertising to get
more of it later.
Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly talking
men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency Engineers, went
about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to get money away from one
another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh addressed a
prayer-meeting on “The Pep of St. Paul, the First Booster.” It had held
a Gladhand Week, when everybody was supposed to speak to at least three
strangers daily, to the end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen
were backslapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons.
There had also been an Old Home Week, a Write to Mother Week, a We Want
Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church
Week, a Salvation Army Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.
Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thousand
dollars for a new Y. M. C. A. building.
On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, announcing “You
Must Come Across,” “Young Man Come Along” and “Your Money Creates
’Appiness.” Dr. Pickerbaugh made nineteen addresses in three days,
comparing the Y. M. C. A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles, and the
expeditions of Dr. Cook--who, he believed, really had discovered the
North Pole. Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of
them to the same man, who afterward made improper remarks to her. She
was rescued by a Y. M. C. A. secretary, who for a considerable time held
her hand to calm her.
No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of Weeks.
He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good Week it
was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week,
and Stop the Spitter Week that people who lacked his vigor were heard
groaning, “My health is being ruined by all this fretting over health.”
During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his own
composition:
Germs come by stealth
And ruin health,
So listen, pard,
Just drop a card
To some man who’ll clean up your yard
And that will hit the old germs hard.
Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to the
children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration for two
verses. Posters admonished:
Sell your hammer and buy a horn,
But hang onto the old fly-swatter.
If you don’t want disease sneaking into the Home
Then to kill the fly you gotter!
It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state
convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to them:
Just mention fly-prevention
At the good old Eagles’ convention.
This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska, and
waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, “Now you see the
way a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it right.”
Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer, was
not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious humorist on a
local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected
all babes in arms to smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly
because the cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health
with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thorough
satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.
With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the Program
Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and Agencies.
It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:
Brother Males and Shemales:
Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it
that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be
Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and
get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2)
home wid us.
Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to
put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser,
M.A., M.D., nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and
look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla
key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time
to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive,
hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch
with Wild Wittles.
Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s
have those cards saying you’re coming.
This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote
to Pickerbaugh:
I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we
pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say
it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to
laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that
your letter was “undignified”! Can you beat it! I think people as
hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with
the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!
II
Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed
babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the
baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then
he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control.
Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own
eight beauties.
Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his
windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on
sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and
possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus
statistics.
Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that
the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of
immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air,
Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such
crusades. He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he
believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always
be correct. To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote
Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact,
extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has
declined”--this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the
pavements.
Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably vicious
joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly
had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s administration in Nautilus, it had
decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no
speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.
It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take
much share in his publicity campaigns but rather to be his substitute in
the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and
complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.
Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What if my
statistics aren’t always exact? What if my advertising, my jollying of
the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it’s all
on the right side. No matter what methods we use, if we can get people
to have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re
justified.”
To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really
matter? Does truth matter--clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s
truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and
everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with
it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and
being flattered?
“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the desire for
scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man’s excitement
about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick by Pickerbaugh.”
To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of
Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because
they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their
earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.
He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad teeth,
careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone,
every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent chance of
dying before the age of sixteen, and he could not startle with much
alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do you realize that the number of
people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year
alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been saved, yes,
sir, _saved_, by a daily cold shower?”
For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter,
though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of
seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in
Milwaukee alone.
To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which Martin now
used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,” was without
significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity,
profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save
health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to
him inconceivable.
“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every enlightened man in
the public service _knows_ enough about the causes of disease--matter
now of acting on that knowledge.”
When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about
the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic
dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger of alcohol, about the
value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things
they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry,
and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned
to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and
wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his
leaders.
He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven practical value”
of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh’s biology. He
noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a
new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was
the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had
surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an association of which
he had never heard.
But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he beheld in
Pickerbaugh’s most ardent eloquence.
When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that certain
tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt down instead
of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he hinted that these
attacks would save more lives than ten thousand sermons and ten years of
parades by little girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain,
then Pickerbaugh worried, “No, no, Martin, don’t think we could do that.
Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords. Can’t
accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from offending people.”
When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of “the
value of health in making life more joyful,” but when he addressed a
business luncheon he changed it to “the value in good round dollars and
cents of having workmen who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to
work faster at the same wages.” Parents’ associations he enlightened
upon “the saving in doctors’ bills of treating the child before
maladjustments go too far,” but to physicians he gave assurance that
public health agitation would merely make the custom of going regularly
to doctors more popular.
To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan, and
Edison as his masters, but in asking the business men of Nautilus--the
Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association of
wholesalers--for their divine approval of more funds for his department,
he made it clear that they were his masters and lords of all the land,
and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.
Gradually Martin’s contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to all
leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and he saw
that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He preached to himself, as Max
Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of
being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of
admitting the probable ignorance of one’s self and of everybody else,
and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.
III
A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory. He was
summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to angry
citizens why the garage next door to them should smell of gasoline; he
went back to his cubbyhole to dictate letters to school-principals about
dental clinics; he drove out to Swede Hollow to see what attention the
food and dairy inspector had given to the slaughter-houses; he ordered a
family in Shantytown quarantined; and escaped at last into the
laboratory.
It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had little time
for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns for the private
physicians of the city, but the work rested him, and now and then he
struggled over a precipitation test which was going to replace
Wassermanns and make him famous.
Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks;
Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present
interruptions it would require two hundred, by which time the
Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test useless.
To Martin’s duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the strange
city of Nautilus.
“Do you manage to keep busy all day?” he encouraged her, and, “Any place
you’d like to go this evening?”
She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and automatically
contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried
about her amusement.
IV
The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory.
The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper.
Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks, and the
laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While
Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in
the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous
enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have
greeted with “That’s a damn’ silly remark!”
He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light,
thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she bent over
the table, absurdly patient with her paint-brushes, curling her legs in
a fantastic knot.
Abruptly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you--suppose a kid
like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d’you think she
ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?”
“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if
she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn’t to
wrong his wife.”
“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?” He had stopped
his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark
eyes demanding.
“Well, if she didn’t know-- But it isn’t that. I believe marriages
really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some day Prince Charming
will come, the perfect lover--” She was so young, her lips were so
young, so very sweet! “--and of course I want to keep myself for him. It
would spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”
But her smile was caressing.
He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted
moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious
conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed
reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what
he could get. He began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had
eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering
fancy. And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could
tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an
afternoon with the child. Her mute examination of him made him feel
illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he
urged her, “Been home all day? Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner
and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see ’em?
Whatever you’d like.”
He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora
was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the
superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re
a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!”
He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s lips, and no
amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.
In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in
Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family.
Then she spoke:
“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I
hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been looking lately. I don’t
think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is
worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but
unless I up and die on you some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an
old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred
pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes--”
When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was
always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper’s curiosity as to what a
man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small
thrills.
Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and
he “hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.” No! He would call
on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the
school-clinic dentist.
But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.
If the elder Pickerbaughs were there-- Martin could hear himself saying,
“Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about--”
Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.
On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy
of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.
“Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but
pride himself.
“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven. Won’t you
sit down and cool off a little?”
“Well--” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful
conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley’s
opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry
interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.
“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said Martin.
“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things going at
City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox and winkulus
pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”
“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.
He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid
giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel
a hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl, and a violent “Yeh,
that’s all right, but any time you see me dancing with her you just tell
me about it, will yuh!” At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping,
and observing, “Now you quit!” to persons unknown.
“Hell! It isn’t worth it! I’m going home,” Martin sighed, but at the
moment Charley screamed, “Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle along.”
He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.
“It’s so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn’t always try
to flirt, like Charley,” said Orchid.
He considered, “Splendid! She’s going to be just a nice good girl. And
I’ve come to my senses. We’ll just have a little chat and I’ll go home.”
She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, “I was so lonely,
especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your step on the
walk. I knew it the second I heard it.”
He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might
have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she
withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.
Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch
and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most
complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the
reputed joys of being guilty.
While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains
whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small
Midwestern denominational college. Verbena was going to college this
autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she “ought to stay home and
help Mama take care of the chickabiddies.”
“Meaning,” Martin reflected, “that she can’t even pass the Mugford
entrance exams!” But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly
enlarged as she whimpered, “Poor little me, prob’ly I’ll always stay
here in Nautilus, while you--oh, with your knowledge and your
frightfully strong will-power, I know you’re going to conquer the
world!”
“Nonsense, I’ll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few
good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much
will-power?”
The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Pickerbaugh
domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the
ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed
cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a
fountain, and over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck
love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children,
was stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive
the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible
pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.
He held Orchid’s quiet hand--and was lonely for Leora.
The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about
romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic. The Martin who,
like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in
the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to romance and was
altogether unromantic.
He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when she sighed,
“Oh, please don’t,” there was in him no ruthlessness and no conviction
with which to go on. He considered the moonlight again, but also he
considered being at the office early in the morning, and he wondered if
he could without detection slip out his watch and see what time it was.
He managed it. He stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow didn’t
quite kiss her, and found himself walking home.
As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He
had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to
find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak,
and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the
soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He
told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher
and drawer-out of her M’s and O’s, but once he was in his lonely flat he
longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of
luring her here to-night, and went to bed yearning, “Oh, Orchid--”
Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for
quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the
laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he
stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she
deserved to be kissed.
He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at
her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.
“Oh!” she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
“Martin--oh--my dear--do you think you ought to have done that?”
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in
the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor
wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional people that
would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have thought so, one time,
but-- Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal! Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear
Leora or do anything _really_ wrong for the world, but isn’t it
wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise
above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength
and-- But I’ve simply _got_ to be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There’s a
woman lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern
Woman’s Career.”
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. “I’ve won
her,” he gloated.... Probably never has gloating been so shakily and
badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving
Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city
clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”
“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once
amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless,
beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”
“Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.”
“Oh!” It was acute. “Oh, then you-- I was such a baby to call you up,
but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely
evening, and I just thought--_Do_ you think I’m an awful little silly?”
“No--no--sure not.”
“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought I was just
a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”
“No--no--course not. Look, I’ve got to--”
“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether
you thought I was a silly to--”
“No! Honest! Really!”
Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from
behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered
suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat
it--his wife only gone for a week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you
tightwad, bring her up here!” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that
little milliner on Prairie Avenue.”
Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all
night, and on profound contemplation decided that they “mustn’t ever do
that sort of thing again”--and would he meet her at the corner of
Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it
all over?
In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past
eight.
At five she called him up just to remind him--
In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was
too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly
thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed
for the sure solace of Leora.
“I can go as far as I like with her to-night.
“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.
“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.
“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this
fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?
“I will _not_ be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It’s
against my religion. I demand the right to be free--
“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad
as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so
I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I
don’t want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss
everybody I can.
“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy
sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m
not going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife!
He’s beaten from the beginning.”
He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was
equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy
cautious Martin of to-night. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed
for Orchid all the night.
A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.
He met her at the station.
“It’s all right, “he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years old. I’m a
respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d hate it, if it wasn’t for
my precipitation test and you and--_Why_ do you always lose your trunk
check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No,
no, darling, can’t you _see_; that’s the transportation check the
conductor gave you!”