Part 18 (1/2)

”The same,” answered Dolan, ”the same it is, and by the same authority apples of gold in pictures of silver is a word fitly spoken to a man like Gabe Gamine.” He whittled for a few minutes while the harness maker worked, and then sticking his pocket-knife into the chair between his legs, said: ”But what I came in to tell you was about Lige Bemis; did you know he's in town? Well, he is. Johnnie Barclay wired him to leave the dump up in the City and come down here, and what for, do you think? 'Tis this. The council was going to change the name of Ellen Avenue out by the college to Garfield, and because it was named for that little girl of Mart's that died right after the war, don't you think Johnnie's out raising h.e.l.l about it, and brought Lige down here to beat the game. He'll be spending a lot of money if he has to.

Now you wouldn't think he'd do that for old Mart, would you? He's too many for me--that Johnny boy is. I can't make him out.” The Irishman played with his knife, sticking it in the chair and pulling it out for a while, and then continued: ”Oh, yes, what I was going to tell you was the little spat me and Lige had over Johnnie. Lige was in my room in the court-house waiting to see a man in the court, and was bragging to me about how smart John was, and says Lige, 'He's found some earth over in Missouri--yellow clay,' he says, 'that's just as good as oatmeal, and he s.h.i.+ps it all over the country to his oatmeal mills and mixes it with the real stuff and sells it.' I says: 'He does, does he?

Sells mud mixed with oatmeal?' and Lige says, 'Yes, sir, he's got a whole mountain of it, and he's getting ten dollars a ton net for it, which is better than a gold mine.' 'And you call that smart?' says I.

'Yes,' says he, 'yes, sir, that's commercial instinct; it's perfectly clean mud, and our chemist says it won't harm any one,' says he. 'And him president of the Golden Belt Elevator Co.?' says I. 'He is,' says Lige. 'And don't need the money at all?' says I. 'Not a penny of it,'

says he. 'Well,' says I, 'Lige Bemis,' says I, 'when Johnnie gets to h.e.l.l,--and he'll get there as sure as it doesn't freeze over,' says I, 'may the devil put him under that mountain of mud and keep his railroad running night and day dumping more mud on while he eats his way out as a penance,' says I. And you orto heard 'em laugh.” Dolan went on cutting curly-cues from the leather, and McHurdie kept on sewing at his bench. ”It is a queer world--a queer world; and that Johnnie Barclay is a queer duck. Bringing Lige Bemis clear down here to help old Mart out of a little trouble there ain't a dollar in; and then turning around and feeding the American people a mountain of mud.

Giving the town a park with his mother's name on it, and selling little tin strips for ten dollars apiece to pay for it. He's a queer duck. I'll bet it will keep the recording angel busy keeping books on Johnnie Barclay.”

”Oh, well, Jake,” replied McHurdie, after a silence, ”maybe the angels will just drop a tear and wipe much of the evil off.”

”Maybe so, Watts McHurdie, maybe so,” returned Dolan, ”but there won't be a dry eye in the house, as the papers say, if they keep up with him.” And after delivering himself of this, Dolan rose and yawned, and went out of the shop singing an old tune which recited the fact that he had ”a job to do down in the boulevard.”

Looking over the years that have pa.s.sed since John Barclay and Sycamore Ridge were coming out of raw adolescence into maturity, one sees that there was a miracle of change in them both, but where it was and just how it came, one may not say. The town had no special advantages. It might have been one of a thousand dreary brown unpainted villages that dot the wind-swept plain to-day, instead of the bright, prosperous, elm-shaded town that it is. John Barclay in those days of his early thirties might have become a penny-pinching dull-witted ”prominent citizen” of the Ridge, with no wider sphere of influence than the Sycamore Valley, or at most the Corn Belt Railroad.

But he and the town grew, and whether it was destiny that guided them, or whether they made their own destiny, one cannot say. The town seemed to be struggling and fighting its way to supremacy in the Sycamore Valley; and the colonel and the general and Watts McHurdie, sitting in the harness shop a score of years after those days of the seventies, used to try to remember some episode or event that would tell them how John fought his way up. But they could not do so. It was a fight in his soul. Every time his hand reached out to steal a mill or crush an opponent with the weapon of his secret railroad rebates, something caught his hand and held it for a moment, and he had to fight his way free. At first he had to learn to hate the man he was about to ruin, and to pretend that he thought the man was about to ruin him. Then he could justify himself in his greedy game. But at last he worked almost merrily. He came to enjoy the combat for its own sake. And sometimes he would play with a victim cat-wise, and after a victory in which the mouse fought well, John would lick his chops with some satisfaction at his business prowess. Mill after mill along the valley and through the West came under his control. And his skin grew leathery, and the bra.s.s l.u.s.tre in his eyes grew hard and metallic.

When he knew that he was the richest man in Garrison County, he saw that there were richer men in the state, and in after years when he was the richest man in the state, and in the Missouri Valley, the rich men in other states moved him by their wealth to work harder. But before he was thirty, his laugh had become a cackle, and Colonel Martin Culpepper, who would saunter along when Barclay would limp by on Main Street, would call out after him, ”Slow down, Johnnie, slow down, boy, or you'll bust a biler.” And then the colonel would pause and gaze benignly after the limping figure bobbing along in the next block, and if there was a bystander to address, the colonel would say, ”For a flat-wheel he does certainly make good time.” And then if the bystander looked worth the while, the colonel, in seven cases out of ten, would pull out a subscription paper for some new church building, or for some charitable purpose, and proceed to solicit the needed funds.

BOOK II

BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL, BUT AN INTERLUDE FOR THE ORCHESTRA

And so the years slipped by--monotonous years they seem now, so far as this story goes. Because little happened worth the telling; for growth is so still and so dull and so undramatic that it escapes interest and climax; yet it is all there is in life. For the roots of events in the ground of the past are like the crowded moments of our pa.s.sing lives that are recorded only in our under-consciousnesses, to rise in other years in character formed, in traits established, in events fructified. And in the years when the evil days came not, John Barclay's tragedy was stirring in the soil of his soul.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the management, let us thank you for your kind attention, during the tedious act which has closed. We have done our best to please you with the puppets and have cracked their heads together in fine fas.h.i.+on, and they have danced and cried and crackled, while we pulled the strings as our mummers mumbled. But now they must have new clothes on. Time, the great costumer, must change their make-up. So we will fold down the curtain.

John Barclay, a Gentleman, must be painted yellow with gold. Philemon Ward, a Patriot, must be sprinkled with gray. Martin Culpepper's Large White Plumes must be towsled. Watts McHurdie, a Poet, must be bent a little at the hips and shoulders. Adrian Brownwell, a Gallant, must creak as he struts. Neal Dow Ward, an Infant, must put on long trousers. E. W. Bemis, a Lawyer, must be dignified; Jacob Dolan, an Irishman and a Soldier, must grow unkempt and frowsy. Robert Hendricks, Fellow Fine, must have his blond hair rubbed off at the temples, and his face marked with maturity. Lycurgus Mason, a Woman Tamer, must get used to wearing white s.h.i.+rts. Gabriel Carnine, a Money Changer, must feel his importance; and Oscar Fernald, a Tavern Keeper, must be hobbled by the years. All but the shades must be refurbished.

General Hendricks and Elmer, his son, must fade farther into the mists of the past, while Henry Schnitzler settles comfortably down in storied urn and animated bust.

There they hang together on the line, these ba.s.swood folk, and beside them wave their womankind. These also must be repaired and refitted throughout, as Oscar Fernald's letter-heads used to say of the Thayer House. Jane Barclay, Wife of John, must have the ”star light, star bright” wiped out of her eyes. Mary Barclay, Mother of the Same, must have her limbs trimmed gaunt, and her face chiselled strong and indomitable. Jeanette Barclay, a Toddler, must grow into dresses.

Molly Culpepper, a Dear, must have her heart taken out, and her face show the shock of the operation. Nellie Logan, a poet's Wife, must join all the lodges in the Ridge to help her husband in politics.

Trixie Lee, little Beatrix Lee, daughter of J. Lord and Lady Lee, must have her childish face scarred and her eyes glazed. Mrs. Hally Bemis, a Prodigal, must be swathed in silk. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward and all her sisters must be put in the simple garb of school-teachers.

Miss Hendricks, a Mouse, must hide in the dusky places; and Ellen Culpepper, a Memory, must come to life.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, while we have been diverting you, Time has been at work on the little people of the pa.s.sing show, and now before we draw back the curtain to let them caper across your hearts, let us again thank you one and all for your courtesy in staying, and hope that what you see and hear may make you wiser and kinder and braver; for this is a moral entertainment, good people, planned to show you that yesterday makes to-day and they both make to-morrow, and so the world spins round the sun.

CHAPTER XVII

The rumble of the wheels in the great stone mill across the Sycamore and the roar of the waters over the dam seem to have been in Jeanette Barclay's ears from the day of her birth; for she was but a baby when the stone mill rose where the little red mill had stood, and beside the stone mill there had grown up the long stone factory wherein Lycurgus Mason was a man of consequence. As the trains whirled by strangers could see the signs in mammoth letters, ”The Golden Belt Mills” on the larger building and on the smaller, ”The Barclay Economy Door Strip Factory.” Standing on the stone steps of her father's house the child could read these signs clear across the mill-pond, and from these signs she learned her letters. For her father had more pride in that one mill on the Sycamore than in the scores of other mills that he controlled. And even in after years, when he controlled mills all over the West, and owned railroads upon which to take his flour to the sea, and s.h.i.+ps in which to carry his flour all over the world, the Golden Belt Mill at Sycamore Ridge was his chief pride. The rumble of the wheels and the hoa.r.s.e voice of the dam that seemed to Jeanette like the call of the sea, were so sweet to her father's ears that when he wearied of the work of the National Provisions Company, with its two floors of busy offices in the Corn Exchange Building in the great city, he would come home to Sycamore Ridge, and go to his private office in the mill. The child remembers what seemed like endless days, but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years, when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy. At low water, she remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he sat in his office near by watching her from the window. That was when she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of the shadows on the stones. Jeanette talked with her, but no one else could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself, stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock. But Jeanette saw the snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too, and she could not make him understand who Ellen was. So he only trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.

She made songs to fit the rhythmic murmur of the wheels. And always she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the sc.r.a.ps of tin and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick and make the prettiest bright s.h.i.+ny tin curls for her dolls that a little girl ever saw in all the world. And once Ellen came from among the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason. And then he drove her up town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought ice-cream for her.

It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels.

And once when she came back a big girl,--an exceedingly big girl with braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so, and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she never did find out what ”gyves upon his wrists” meant,--once when she came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much older than Jeanette--four or five and maybe six years older--ran right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone before Jeanette could call her back. The child never saw her playmate again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who she was. As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen, and something in her hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:--

”O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones.”

So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with a long list of words under it rhyming with ”stones,” she would have forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone walls of the mills, and of the word ”Barclay” on the long low walls of the factory, might have pa.s.sed from her consciousness altogether. By such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what we are, and what we are has grown from what we were. If Jeanette Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties, was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,--so far as mere money goes,--had been brought up with a governess and a maid, and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry--But there we go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all; and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham ap.r.o.ns, sitting on a cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the ba.s.s play among the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree, has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.

But the recollection of those days, so vivid and so sweet, is one of her choicest treasures. Of course things were not as she saw them.