pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. "That is not your notion," he
would shout, "you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion of a
woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are founded on
nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing. Men only care
for them because they have not had what they want from them. No woman is
really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor."
When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
bitter.
"I would have you observe women's minds and avoid letting them influence
your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unrealities. They
like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy folk
about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she, while
loving books, love also the very smell of human life?"
In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became
Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of
study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her
better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less
and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of
illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them
in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the
books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false
and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried
reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary Underwood had lent him.
The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
letter to his sweetheart.
Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
water from running through his tent."
Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
in his stomach.
Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read it
aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's verses his
favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he would recite
these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like some Nicean bark of yore.
Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.
Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt's
pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy, are as far
superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
afternoons." And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much
seriousness on his face, he would add, "And for the same reason. You have
been, like him, under a master trainer of youth."
* * * * *
One evening Sam, now grown to man's stature and full of the awkwardness
and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel
at the back of Wildman's grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze
blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and
sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that
went on among the men.
Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane
at Sam's legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
"It is a theme that poets do well to write of," he declared. "In writing
of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a well-
turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings most
passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess of
poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the
daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written."
"Stuff and nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short,
black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang.
Admiring Telfer's flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. "The
night is too hot for eloquence," he bellowed. "If you must be eloquent
talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming
pool."
Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
"The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm," he
said, winking at Valmore.
Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out
of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
motion with her hand.
Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A
flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme
deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering
to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he
feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he
trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with
his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at
the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he
read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up
packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the
banker.
At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had
escaped her father.
"I told him I would go home with my sister," she said, tossing her head.
Taking hold of the boy's hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that
had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it
the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he
walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft
hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his
chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of
women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought
that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted
Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town;
had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with
a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard?
Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His
tongue seemed paralysed.
Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying
past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave
after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond
words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl
looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he
laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street
a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street
glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head.
Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him
again and again eagerly.
* * * * *
Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and
darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer
could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been
remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
wonder at the lighted way before him.
Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop, looked
into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
"Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."
In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
counter, smoked a cigar.
"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter."
The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned
and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing
went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his
agitation would pass unnoticed.
The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And
John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
country.
"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking at weeds along
the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs
that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over
each other in the dusty road.
"That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he
drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He
will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at
the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the
sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. 'Here! Here! Here!' he cries,
'you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing
in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a
darkened room.' Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand
it--I would go to New York, to France, to Paris--To be wooed for but a
passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art--uh--it is unthinkable."
The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time
to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.
"I am not like banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of the growing corn
in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as
something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses
half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I
catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, 'The
land is flowing with milk and honey.' I am made happy by my thoughts not
by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
"And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture.
Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring
in my voice to look at them. 'These orderly armies has mankind brought out
of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of
God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his
home against the grim attacking armies of want.'"
Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
"Freedom Smith should hear me now," he cried, rocking back and forth with
laughter and switching his cane at the boy's legs so that Sam had to hop
merrily about in the road to avoid it. "Flung by the hand of God out of
illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am wasted
here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase
rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town."
The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he
stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
town.
"They are good people," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your
ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you? You
have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the town see
nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be a big man of
dollars, it is plain." Into his voice came a touch of bitterness. "I also
was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not buy a farm and raise
steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have the touch of genius
without the energy to make it count."
Sam's mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a
young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and
Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and
lighted a cigarette.
"As I promised, I will talk to you of love," he said, making a wide sweep
with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his
face became serious.
"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a man
or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the
world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with
him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and
has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of
women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who
went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near
to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for
themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for
making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the
pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept
the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?"
The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and
waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think
again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively.
The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but
go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of
little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years.
No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of
women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing
humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and
stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them
here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious
thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has
done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old
and undone."
Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made
an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and
down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat
beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock
after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here
idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in
a paper that he had won a place among the world's great artists by a
picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of
the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like
Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did
not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the
master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I
could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember
a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about
asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to
give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled
with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success
I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
for a week."
Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the pleasant little
songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."
The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-
eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and of how
he had gone at night to stand under her window.
In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that
raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through
the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways
believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the
needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much
alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them.
When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the
presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving
them alone together. When boys' and girls' parties were given in Caxton
houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
"Now have a good time and don't tear the house down," they said, going off
upstairs.
Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and
tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled
and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without
guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed
passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, "It is the
loutish age."
If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young farmer and
shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer's speech. So
vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
the sense of Telfer's talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
was in his mind.
"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to not
have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make money--
and--and----"
Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
ground.
"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
something distasteful out of his throat.
In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang froid_ had
returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."
CHAPTER V
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy's incompetence and her
own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
not despise the thought of gain.
"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
Wildman's grocery.
Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"
And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
"Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
asleep!"
Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
them.
In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride. "I
will be richer than Ed Walker."
Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger's drug store
a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
killed with a knife.
In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper into
the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new dishes," he
urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions in dress," he
told the young girl.
Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.
And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith, stopping
him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
too much."
Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
his head as he hurried away.
"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has
seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
by the thought."
The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
Sam of the matter at length.
"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put
money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."
Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.
"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really
great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
very art for which he starves."
After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
the silent suggestive power of cash.
The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."
Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.
Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.
Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.
As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom's purchases.
There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in every
man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day, farmers did not
watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
men with whom he traded.
The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
loafers in the store.
Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's affairs,
but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
larger affairs.
One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
taking the harness off his horse.
"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's stable wishing
that he also might be gone.
Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.
Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
regrets.
By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
CHAPTER VI
Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
the gate and looking at the sky.
"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
went along a narrow path into the house.
The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of weariness
of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman's and,
sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man's life seemed to Sam
amusing and in some way sad.
"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the
letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
outside world to him.
In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
thought.
The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt his
ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother's life
had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
a dog and a thermometer.
to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.
At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. "That is not your notion," he
would shout, "you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion of a
woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are founded on
nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing. Men only care
for them because they have not had what they want from them. No woman is
really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor."
When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
bitter.
"I would have you observe women's minds and avoid letting them influence
your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unrealities. They
like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy folk
about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she, while
loving books, love also the very smell of human life?"
In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became
Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of
study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her
better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less
and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of
illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them
in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the
books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false
and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried
reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary Underwood had lent him.
The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
letter to his sweetheart.
Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
roadside he waved his arms and shouted:
"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
water from running through his tent."
Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
in his stomach.
Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read it
aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's verses his
favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he would recite
these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like some Nicean bark of yore.
Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.
Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt's
pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy, are as far
superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
afternoons." And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much
seriousness on his face, he would add, "And for the same reason. You have
been, like him, under a master trainer of youth."
* * * * *
One evening Sam, now grown to man's stature and full of the awkwardness
and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel
at the back of Wildman's grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze
blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and
sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that
went on among the men.
Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane
at Sam's legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.
"It is a theme that poets do well to write of," he declared. "In writing
of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a well-
turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings most
passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess of
poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the
daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written."
"Stuff and nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short,
black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang.
Admiring Telfer's flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. "The
night is too hot for eloquence," he bellowed. "If you must be eloquent
talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming
pool."
Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.
"The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm," he
said, winking at Valmore.
Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out
of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
motion with her hand.
Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A
flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme
deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering
to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he
feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he
trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with
his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at
the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he
read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up
packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the
banker.
At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had
escaped her father.
"I told him I would go home with my sister," she said, tossing her head.
Taking hold of the boy's hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that
had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it
the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he
walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft
hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his
chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.
Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of
women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought
that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted
Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town;
had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with
a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard?
Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His
tongue seemed paralysed.
Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying
past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave
after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond
words. Had they not together done this daring thing?
In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl
looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he
laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street
a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street
glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head.
Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him
again and again eagerly.
* * * * *
Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and
darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer
could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been
remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
wonder at the lighted way before him.
Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop, looked
into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
"Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."
In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
counter, smoked a cigar.
"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter."
The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned
and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing
went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his
agitation would pass unnoticed.
The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And
John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
country.
"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking at weeds along
the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs
that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over
each other in the dusty road.
"That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he
drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He
will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at
the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the
sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. 'Here! Here! Here!' he cries,
'you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing
in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a
darkened room.' Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand
it--I would go to New York, to France, to Paris--To be wooed for but a
passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art--uh--it is unthinkable."
The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time
to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.
"I am not like banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of the growing corn
in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as
something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses
half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I
catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, 'The
land is flowing with milk and honey.' I am made happy by my thoughts not
by the dollars clinking in my pocket.
"And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture.
Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring
in my voice to look at them. 'These orderly armies has mankind brought out
of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of
God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his
home against the grim attacking armies of want.'"
Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.
"Freedom Smith should hear me now," he cried, rocking back and forth with
laughter and switching his cane at the boy's legs so that Sam had to hop
merrily about in the road to avoid it. "Flung by the hand of God out of
illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am wasted
here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase
rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town."
The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he
stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
town.
"They are good people," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your
ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you? You
have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the town see
nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be a big man of
dollars, it is plain." Into his voice came a touch of bitterness. "I also
was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not buy a farm and raise
steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have the touch of genius
without the energy to make it count."
Sam's mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.
At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a
young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and
Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and
lighted a cigarette.
"As I promised, I will talk to you of love," he said, making a wide sweep
with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.
The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his
face became serious.
"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a man
or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the
world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with
him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and
has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of
women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who
went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near
to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for
themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for
making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the
pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept
the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?"
The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and
waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think
again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively.
The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but
go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of
little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years.
No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of
women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing
humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and
stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them
here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious
thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has
done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old
and undone."
Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made
an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and
down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat
beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock
after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here
idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in
a paper that he had won a place among the world's great artists by a
picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of
the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like
Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did
not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the
master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I
could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember
a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about
asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to
give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled
with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success
I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
for a week."
Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the pleasant little
songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."
The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-
eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and of how
he had gone at night to stand under her window.
In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that
raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through
the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways
believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the
needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much
alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them.
When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the
presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving
them alone together. When boys' and girls' parties were given in Caxton
houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
"Now have a good time and don't tear the house down," they said, going off
upstairs.
Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and
tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled
and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without
guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed
passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, "It is the
loutish age."
If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young farmer and
shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer's speech. So
vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
the sense of Telfer's talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
was in his mind.
"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to not
have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make money--
and--and----"
Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
ground.
"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
something distasteful out of his throat.
In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang froid_ had
returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."
CHAPTER V
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy's incompetence and her
own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
not despise the thought of gain.
"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
Wildman's grocery.
Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"
And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
"Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
asleep!"
Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
them.
In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride. "I
will be richer than Ed Walker."
Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger's drug store
a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
killed with a knife.
In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper into
the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new dishes," he
urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions in dress," he
told the young girl.
Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.
And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.
"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith, stopping
him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
too much."
Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
his head as he hurried away.
"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has
seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
by the thought."
The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
Sam of the matter at length.
"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put
money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."
Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.
"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really
great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
very art for which he starves."
After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.
Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
the silent suggestive power of cash.
The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.
Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.
Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."
Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.
Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.
Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.
As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom's purchases.
There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in every
man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day, farmers did not
watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
men with whom he traded.
The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.
"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
loafers in the store.
Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's affairs,
but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
larger affairs.
One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
taking the harness off his horse.
"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.
When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's stable wishing
that he also might be gone.
Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
from the horse upon a peg in the wall.
"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.
Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
regrets.
By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.
CHAPTER VI
Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
the gate and looking at the sky.
"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
went along a narrow path into the house.
The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of weariness
of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman's and,
sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man's life seemed to Sam
amusing and in some way sad.
"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the
letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
outside world to him.
In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.
"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
thought.
The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt his
ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.
At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother's life
had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
a dog and a thermometer.