On a certain morning in early September Wilbur Cowan idled on River
Street, awaiting a summons. The day was sunny and spacious, yet hardly,
he thought, could it contain his new freedom. Despairing groups of
half-grown humans, still in slavery, hastened by him to their hateful
tasks. He watched them pityingly, and when the dread bell rang, causing
stragglers to bound forward in a saving burst of speed, he halted
leisurely in sheer exultation. The ecstasy endured a full five minutes,
until a last tap of the bell tolled the knell of the tardy. It had been
worth waiting for. This much of his future he had found worth planning.
He pictured the unfortunates back in the old room, breathing chalk dust,
vexed with foolish problems, tormented by discipline. He was never again
to pass a public school save with a sensation of shuddering relief. He
had escaped into his future, and felt no concern about what it should
offer him. It was enough to have escaped.
Having savoured freedom another ten minutes, he sauntered over to the
_Advance_ office as a favour to Sam Pickering. A wastrel printer had the
night before been stricken with the wanderlust, deciding at five-thirty
to take the six-fifty-eight for other fields of endeavour, and Wilbur
Cowan had graciously consented to bridge a possible gap.
He strolled into the dusty, disordered office and eased the worry from
Sam Pickering's furrowed brow by attacking the linotype in spirited
fashion. That week he ran off the two editions of the paper. A spotted
small boy sat across the press bed from him to ink the forms. He
confided impressively to this boy that when the last paper was printed
the bronze eagle would flap its wings three times and scream as a
signal for beer to be brought from Vielhaber's. The boy widened eyes of
utter belief upon him, and Wilbur Cowan once more felt all his years.
But he was still lamentably indecisive about his future, and when a new
printer looked in upon the _Advance_ he stepped aside. Whatever he was
going to make of himself it wouldn't be someone who had to sit down
indoors. He would be slave to no linotype until they were kept in the
open. He told Sam Pickering this in so many words.
The former Mansion's stable at length engaged his wandering fancy. The
stable's old swinging sign--a carefully painted fop with flowing side
whiskers and yellow topcoat swiftly driving a spirited horse to a neat
red-wheeled run-about--had been replaced by First-Class Garage. Of its
former activities remained only three or four sedate horses to be driven
by conservatives; and Starling Tucker, who lived, but lived in the past,
dazed and unbelieving--becoming vivacious only in speech, beginning, "I
remember when--"
These memories dealt with a remote time, when a hawse was a hawse, and
you couldn't have it put all over you by a lot of slick young smarties
that could do a few things with a monkey wrench. Starling, when he thus
discoursed, sat chiefly in the little office before the rusty stove,
idly flicking his memory with a buggy whip from the rack above his head,
where reposed a dozen choice whips soon to become mere museum pieces.
Wilbur's connection with this thriving establishment was both profitable
and entertaining. Judge Penniman divined the truth of it.
"He don't work--he just plays!"
He played with disordered motors and unerringly put them right. But he
seemed to lack steadiness of purpose. He would leave an ailing car to
help out Sam Pickering, or he would leave for a round of golf with
Sharon Whipple, Sharon complaining that other people were nothing but
doggoned golf lawyers; and he would insist upon time off at three
o'clock each afternoon to give Spike Brennon his work-out. Spike had
laboured to develop other talent in Newbern, but with ill success. When
you got 'em learned a little about the game they acted like a lot of
sissies over a broken nose or a couple of front teeth out or something.
What he wanted was lads that would get the beak straightened, pretty
near as good as new, or proper gold ones put in, and come back looking
for more trouble. Wilbur Cowan alone he had found dependable.
Even so, the monotony of mere car repairing began to irk him. It was
then he formed a pleasant alliance with old Porter Howgill, whose repair
shop was across the street from the First-Class Garage. Porter's
swinging sign, weathered and ancient like that of the Mansion's stable,
said in bold challenge, "Ask me! I do everything!" And once Porter had
done everything. Now there were a number of things he couldn't do, even
when asked. He was aging and knotted with rheumatism, and his failing
eyes did not now suffice for many of the nicer jobs.
Wilbur Cowan came to him and, even as had Porter in the days when the
sign was bright, did everything. It was a distinct relief to puzzle over
a sewing machine after labouring with too easily diagnosed motor
troubles, or to restore a bit of marquetry in a table, or play at a feat
of locksmithing. The First-Class Garage urged him to quit fiddling round
and become its foreman, but this glittering offer he refused. It was too
much like settling down to your future.
"Got his father's vagabond blood in his veins," declared Judge Penniman.
"Crazy, too, like his father. You can't tell me Dave Cowan was in his
right mind when the Whipples offered, in so many words, to set him up in
any business he wanted to name, and pay all expenses, and he spurned 'em
like so much dirt beneath his heel. Acted like a crazy loon is what I
say, and this Jack-of-all-trades is showing the strain. Mark my words,
they'll both end their days in a madhouse!"
No one did mark his words. Not even Winona, to whom they were uttered
with the air of owlish, head-snapping wisdom which marked so many of the
invalid's best things. She was concerned only with the failure of Wilbur
to select a seemly occupation. His working dress was again careless; he
reeked with oil, and his hands--hard, knotty hands--seemed to be
permanently grimed. Even Lyman Teaford managed his thriving flour and
feed business, with a butter and eggs and farm produce department, in
the garments of a gentleman. True, he often worked with his coat off,
but he removed his cuffs and carefully protected the sleeves of his
white shirt with calico oversleeves held in place by neat elastics. Once
away from the store he might have been anybody--even a banker.
Winona sought to enlist Lyman's help in the matter of Wilbur's future.
Lyman was flaccid in the matter. The boy had once stolen into the
Penniman parlour while Lyman and Winona were out rifling the ice box of
delicacies, and enticed by the glitter of Lyman's flute had thrillingly
taken it into his hands to see what made it go, dropping it in his
panic, from the centre table to the floor, when he heard their returning
steps. Lyman had never felt the same toward Wilbur after that. Now, even
under the blandishments of Winona, he was none too certain that he would
make a capable flour and feed merchant. Wilbur himself, to whom the
possibility was broached, proved all too certain that he would engage in
no mercantile pursuit whatever; surely none in which he might be
associated ever so remotely with Lyman Teaford, whom for no reason he
had always viewed with profound dislike. This incident closed almost
before it opened.
Winona again approached Sharon Whipple in Wilbur's behalf. But Sharon
was not enough depressed by the circumstance that Wilbur's work was hard
on clothes, or that tasks were chosen at random and irregularly toiled
at.
"Let him alone," advised Sharon. "Pretty soon he'll harden and settle.
Besides, he's getting his education. He ain't educated yet."
"Education?" demanded Winona, incredulous. "But he's left school!"
"He'll get it out of school. Only kind ever I got. He's educating
himself every day. Never mind his clothes. Right clothes are only right
when they fit your job. Give the boy a chance to find himself. He's
still young, Buck is--still in the gristle."
Winona winced at "gristle." It seemed so physiological--almost coarse.
* * * * *
A year went by in which Wilbur was perforce left to his self-education,
working for Porter Howgill or at the garage or for Sam Pickering as he
listed. "I'm making good money," was his steady rejoinder to Winona's
hectoring.
"As if money were everything," wrote Winona in her journal, where she
put the case against him.
Then when she had ceased to hope better things for him Wilbur Cowan
seemed to waken. There were signs and symptoms Winona thus construed. He
became careful in his attire, bought splendid new garments. His lean,
bold jaw was almost daily smoothed by the razor of Don Paley, and Winona
discovered a flask of perfume on his bureau in the little house. The
label was Heart of Flowers. It was perhaps a more florid essence than
Winona would have chosen, having a downright vigour of assertion that
left one in no doubt of its presence; but it was infinitely superior to
the scent of machine oil or printer's ink which had far too often
betrayed the boy's vicinity.
Now, too, he wore his young years with a new seriousness; was more
restrained of speech, with intervals of apparently lofty meditation.
Winona rejoiced at these evidences of an awakening soul. The boy might
after all some day become one of the better sort. She felt sure of this
when he sought her of his own free will and awkwardly invited her to
beautify his nails. He who had aforetime submitted to the ordeal under
protest; who had sworn she should never again so torture him! Surely he
was striving at last to be someone people would care to meet.
Poor Winona did not dream that a great love had come into Wilbur Cowan's
life; a deep and abiding love that bathed all his world in colourful
radiance and moved him to those surface elegances for which all her own
pleading had been in vain. Not even when he asked her one night--while
she worked with buffer and orange-wood stick--if she believed in love at
first sight did she suspect the underlying dynamics, the true
inebriating factor of this reform. He put the query with elaborate and
deceiving casualness, having cleared a road to it with remarks upon a
circumspect historical romance that Winona had read to him; and she had
merely said that she supposed it often did happen that way, though it
were far better that true love come gently into one's life, based upon a
profound mutual respect and esteem which would endure through long years
of wedded life.
Wilbur had questioned this, but so cautiously and quite impersonally
that Winona could not suspect his interest in the theme to be more than
academic. She believed she had convinced him that love at first sight,
so-called, is not the love one reads about in the better sort of
literature. She was not alarmed--not even curious. In her very presence
the boy had trifled with his great secret and she had not known!
So continuously had Winona dwelt in the loftier realms of social and
spiritual endeavour, it is doubtful if she knew that an organization
known as the Friday Night Social Club was doing a lot to make life
brighter for those of Newbern's citizens who were young and sportive and
yet not precisely people of the better sort. In the older days of the
town, when Winona was twenty, there was but one social set. Now she was
thirty, and there were two sets. She knew the town had grown; one
nowadays saw strange people that one did not know, even many one would
not care to know. If she had been told that the Friday Night Social Club
met weekly in Knights of Pythias Hall to dance those sinister new dances
that the city papers were so outspoken about she would have considered
it an affair of the underworld, about which the less said the letter.
Had it been disclosed to her that Wilbur Cowan, under the chaperonage of
Edward--Spike--Brennon, 133 lbs., ringside, had become an addict of
these affairs, a determined and efficient exponent of the weird new
steps--"a good thing for y'r footwork," Spike had said--she would have
considered he had plumbed the profoundest depths of social ignominy. Yet
so it was. Each Friday night he danced. He liked it, and while he
disported himself from the lightest of social motives love came to him;
the world was suddenly a place of fixed rainbows, and dancing--with
her--no longer a gladsome capering, but a holy rite.
On a certain Friday evening unstarred by any portent she had burst upon
his yielding eyes. Instantly he could have told Winona more than she
would ever know about love at first sight. A creature of rounded beauty,
peerlessly blonde, her mass of hair elaborately coifed and bound about
her pale brow with a fillet of sable velvet. He saw her first in the
dance, sumptuously gowned, regal, yet blithe, yielding as might a
goddess to the mortal embrace of Bill Bardin as they fox-trotted to the
viol's surge. He was stricken dumb until the dance ended. Then he
gripped an arm of Spike Brennon, who had stood by him against the wall,
"looking 'em over," as Spike had put it.
"Look!" he urged in tones hushed to the wonder of her. Spike had looked.
"Gee!" breathed the stricken one mechanically. He would not have chosen
the word, but it formed a vent for his emotion.
"Bleached blonde," said Spike after a sharper scrutiny of the fair one,
who now coquetted with a circle of gallants.
"Isn't she?" exclaimed the new lover, admiringly.
With so golden a result to dazzle him, was he to quarrel pettishly with
the way it had been wrought?
"Do you suppose I could be introduced to her?" demanded Wilbur, timidly.
This marked the depth of his passion. He was too good a dancer to talk
such nonsense ordinarily.
"Surest thing you know," said Spike. "Could you be introduced to her?
In a split second! Come on!"
"But you don't know her yourself?" Wilbur hung back.
"Stop your kiddin'!"
Spike half dragged his fearful charge across the floor, not too subtly
shouldered a way between Bill Bardin and Terry Stamper, bowed gracefully
to the strange beauty, and said, "Hello, sister! Shake hands with my
friend, Kid Cowan."
"Pleased to meet you!" She smiled graciously upon Wilbur and extended a
richly jewelled hand, which he timidly pressed. Then she turned to Spike
Brennon. "I know your name, all right," she declared. "You're that
Mister Fresh we hear so much about--giving introductions to parties you
ain't met yourself."
Wilbur Cowan blushed for Spike's _faux pas_, looking to see him slink
off abashed, but there were things he had yet to learn about his friend.
"Just for that," said Spike, "I'll take this dance with you." And
brazenly he encircled her waist as the music came anew.
"It's hot to-night," said Wilbur very simply to Terry Stamper and Bill
Bardin as they moved off the floor to an open window.
His dancing eyes followed Beauty in the dance, and he was at her side
when the music ceased. Until it came again he fanned by an open window
her flushed and lovely face. Her name was Pearl.
"I wish this night would last forever," he murmured to her.
"Tut, tut!" said Pearl in humorous dismay, "and me having to be at
business at seven A.M.!"
Only then did he learn that she was not a mere social butterfly, but one
of the proletariat; that, in truth, she waited on table at the Mansion.
Instantly he constructed their future together. He would free her from
that life of toil.
"You're too beautiful for work like that," he told her.
Pearl eyed him with sudden approval.
"You're all right, kid. I often said the same thing myself, but no one's
fell for it up to date."
They danced, and again they danced.
"You're the nicest boy in the bunch," murmured Pearl.
"I never saw any one so beautiful," said Wilbur.
Pearl smiled graciously. "I love the sound of your voice," she said.
She was wrested from him by Bill Bardin. When he would have retrieved
her Terry Stamper had secured her notice. So through another dance he
stood aloof against the wall, moody now. It might be only social finesse
in Pearl but she was showing to others the same pleased vivacity she had
shown to him. Could it be she did not yet understand? Had she possibly
not divined that they two were now forever apart from the trivial world?
They danced again.
"Don't you feel as if we'd always known each other?" he demanded.
"Sure, kid!" breathed Pearl.
It was after still another dance--she had meantime floated in the arms
of a mere mill foreman. This time he led her into the dusky hallway,
where open windows brought the cool night to other low-voiced couples.
He led her to the farthest window, where the shadow was deepest, and
they looked out-above the roof of Rapp Brothers, Jewellery-to a sky of
pale stars and a blond moon.
"Ain't it great?" said Pearl.
He stood close to her, trembling from the faintest contact with her
loveliness. He wished to kiss her-he must kiss her. But he was afraid.
Pearl was sympathetic. She divined his trouble, and in the deep shadow
she adroitly did it herself. Then she rebuked his boldness.
"Say, but you're the quick little worker, seems to me!"
For a moment he was incapable of speech, standing mute, her warm hand in
his.
"It's been a dream," he managed at last. "Just like a dream! Now you
belong to me, don't you?"
"Sure, if you want to put it that way," said Pearl "Come on! there's the
music again."
At the door she was taken from him by the audacious mill foreman.
Wilbur was chilled. Pearl had instantly recovered her public, or
ballroom, manner. Could it be that she had not been rightly uplifted by
the greatness of their moment? Did she realize all it would mean to
them? But she was meltingly tender when at last they swayed in the waltz
to "Home, Sweet Home." And it was he who bore her off under the witching
moon to the side entrance of the Mansion. They lingered a moment in the
protecting shadows. Pearl was chatty--not sufficiently impressed, it
seemed to him, with the sweet gravity of this crisis.
"We're engaged now," he reminded her. Pearl laughed lightly.
"Have it your own way, kid! Wha'd you say your name was?"
She kissed him again. Then he wandered off in the mystic night, far over
a world reeling through golden moonshine, to reach his dark but glowing
little room at an hour that would have disquieted Winona. It was the
following day that he cheered her by displaying a new attention to his
apparel, and it was before the ensuing Friday night dance that he had
submitted his hands to her for embellishment--talking casually of love
at first sight.
There followed for him a time of fearful delight, not unmarred by spells
of troubled wonder. Pearl was not exclusively enough his. She danced
with other men; she chatted with them as with her peers. She seemed even
to encourage their advances. He would have preferred that she found
these repulsive, but she continued gay, even hard, under his chiding.
"Tut, tut! I been told I got an awfully feminine nature. A girl of my
type is bound to have gentleman friends," she protested.
He aged under this strain. He saw now that he must abandon his easy view
about his future. He must, indeed, plan his life. He must choose his
vocation, follow it grimly, with one end in view. Pearl must become his
in the sight abandon his easy view about his future. He must, indeed,
plan his life. He must choose his vocation, follow it grimly, with one
end in view. Pearl must become his in the sight of God and
man--especially man--with the least delay. He delighted Sam Pickering by
continuing steadily at the linotype for five consecutive weeks, while
business piled up at the First-Class Garage and old Porter Howgill was
asked vainly to do everything.
Then on a fateful night Lyman Teaford assumed a new and disquieting
value in his life. Lyman Teaford, who for a dozen years had gone with
Winona Penniman faithfully if not spectacularly; Lyman Teaford,
dignified and genteel, who belonged to Newbern's better set, had one
night appeared at an affair of the Friday Night Social Club. Perhaps
because he had reached the perilous forties he had suddenly determined
to abandon the safe highway and seek adventure in miry bypaths. Perhaps
he felt that he had austerely played the flute too long. At any rate, he
came and danced with the lower element of Newbern, not oftener with
Pearl than with others that first night. But he came again and danced
much oftener with Pearl. There was no quick, hot alarm in the breast of
Wilbur Cowan. Lyman Teaford was an old man, chiefly notable, in Wilbur's
opinion, for the remarkable fluency of his Adam's apple while--with chin
aloft--he played high notes on his silver flute.
Yet dimly at last he felt discomfort at Lyman's crude persistence with
Pearl. He danced with others now only when Pearl was firm in refusals.
Wilbur to her jested with venomous sarcasm at the expense of Lyman.
Women were difficult to understand, he thought. What could her motive
be?
The drama, Greek in its severity, culminated with a hideous, a sickening
velocity. On a Monday morning, in but moderate torment at Pearl's
inconsistency, Wilbur Cowan sat at the linotype in the _Advance_ office,
swiftly causing type metal to become communicative about the week's
doings in Newbern. He hung a finished sheet of Sam Pickering's pencilled
copy on a hook, and casually surveyed the sheet beneath. It was a social
item, he saw--the notice of a marriage. Then names amazingly leaped from
it to sear his defenseless eyes. Lyman Teaford--Miss Pearl King! He
gasped and looked about him. The familiar routine of the office was
under way. In his little room beyond he could see Sam Pickering
scribbling other items. He constrained himself to read the monstrous
slander before him.
"Lyman N. Teaford, one of our best-known business men, was last evening
united in the bonds of holy wedlock to Miss Pearl King, for some months
employed at the Mansion House. The marriage service was performed by the
Reverend Mallett at the parsonage, and was attended by only a few chosen
friends. The happy pair left on the six-fifty-eight for a brief
honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and on their return will occupy the Latimer
mansion on North Oak Street, recently purchased by the groom in view of
his approaching nuptials. A wide circle of friends wish them all
happiness."
Wilbur Cowan again surveyed the office, and again peered sharply in at
Sam Pickering. His first wild thought was that Sam had descended to a
practical joke. If so it was a tasteless proceeding. But he must be
game. It was surely a joke, and Sam and the others in the office would
be watching him for signs of anguish. His machine steadily clicked off
the item. He struck not one wrong letter. He hung the sheet of copy on
its hook and waited for the explosion of crude humour. He felt that his
impassive demeanour had foiled the mean intention. But no one regarded
him. Sam Pickering wrote on. Terry Stamper stolidly ran off cards on the
job press. They were all indifferent. Something told him it was not a
joke.
He finished the next sheet of copy. Then, when he was certain he had not
been jested with, he rose from the torturing machine, put on his coat,
and told Sam Pickering he had an engagement. Sam hoped it wouldn't keep
him from work that afternoon.
Wilbur said "Possibly not," though he knew he would now loathe the
linotype forever.
"By the way"--he managed it jauntily, as Sam bent again over his pad of
yellow copy paper--"I see Lyme Teaford's name is going to be in print
this week."
Sam paused in his labour and chuckled.
"Yes, the old hard-shell is landed. That blonde hasn't been bringing him
his three meals a day all this time for nothing."
"She must have married him for his money," Wilbur heard himself saying
in cold, cynical tones. The illumining thought had just come. That
explained it.
"Sure," agreed Sam. "Why wouldn't she?"
* * * * *
Late that afternoon, in the humble gymnasium at the rear of Pegleg
McCarron's, Spike Brennon emerged from a rally in which Wilbur Cowan had
displayed unaccustomed spirit. Spike tenderly caressed his nose with a
glove and tried to look down upon it. The swelling already showed to his
oblique gaze.
"Say, kid," he demanded, irritably, "what's the big idea? Is this murder
or jest a friendly bout? You better behave or I'll stop pullin' my
punches."
It could not be explained to the aggrieved Spike that his opponent had
for the moment convinced himself that he faced one of Newbern's
best-known business men.
Later he contented himself with observing Lyman Teaford at Niagara
Falls. The fatuous groom stood heedlessly at the cataract's verge. There
was a simple push, and the world was suddenly a better place to live in.
As for his bereaved mate--he meditated her destruction, also, but this
was too summary. It came to him that she had been a lovely and helpless
victim of circumstances. For he had stayed on with Spike through the
evening, and in a dearth of custom Spike, back of the bar, had sung in a
whining tenor, "For she's only a bird in a gilded cage----"
That was it. She had discarded him because he was penniless--had sold
herself to be a rich man's toy. She would pay for it in bitter anguish.
"Only a bird in a gilded cage," sang Spike again. An encore had been
urged.
At noon the following day Winona Penniman, a copy of the _Advance_
before her, sat at the Penniman luncheon table staring dully into a dish
of cold rice pudding. She had read again and again the unbelievable
item. At length she snapped her head, as Spike Brennon would when now
and again a clean blow reached his jaw, pushed the untouched dessert
from her with a gesture of repugnance, and went aloft to her own little
room. Here she sat at her neat desk of bird's eye maple, opened her
journal, and across a blank page wrote in her fine, firm hand, "What
Life Means to Me."
It had seemed to her that it meant much. She would fill many pages. The
name of Lyman Teaford would not there appear, yet his influence would be
continuously present. She was not stricken as had been another reader of
that fateful bit of news. But she was startled, feeling herself
perilously cast afloat from old moorings. She began bravely and easily,
with a choice literary flavour.
"My sensations may be more readily imagined than described."
This she found true. She could imagine them readily, but could not, in
truth, describe them. She was shocked to discern that for the first time
in her correct life there were distinctly imagined sensations which she
could not bring herself to word, even in a volume forever sacred to her
own eyes. A long time she sat imagining. At last she wrote, but the
words seemed so petty.
All apparently that life meant to her was "How did she do it?"
She stared long at this. Then followed, as if the fruit of her further
meditation: "There is a horrid bit of slang I hear from time to
time--can it be that I need more pepper?"
After this she took from the bottom drawer of her bureau that
long-forgotten gift from the facetious Dave Cowan. She held the
stockings of tan silk before her, testing their fineness, their
sheerness. She was still meditating. She snapped her dark head, perked
it as might a puzzled wren.
"Certainly, more pepper!" she murmured.