"I can't find anything like it," she confessed.
Then he said: "I've just remembered. Theocritus calls the hyacinth black—melan—and so does Vergil. These cannot be hyacinths at all."
He was bitterly disappointed. It would have been delightful to meet the flower in the flesh that he knew so well in literature. Doctor Martha answered with quiet strength:
"These are hyacinths."
"But the Greeks—"
"Didn't know everything," she said; "or perhaps they referred to another flower. But then we have dark-purple hyacinths."
"Ah!" he said. "Sappho speaks of the hyacinth as purple—porphuron."
Thus the modern world was reconciled with the Greek and he felt easier; but there was a gentle forcefulness about her that surprised him. He wondered whether she would not be interested in hearing about his edition of Nonnus. He assumed that she would be, being evidently intelligent. So he told her. He told her and told her, and she listened with almost devout interest. He was still telling her when the students in other classes stampeded to lunch with a many-hoofed clatter. When they straggled back from lunch he was still telling her.
It was not until he was interrupted by an afternoon class of his own that he realized how long he had talked. He apologized to Professor Binley; but she said she was honored beyond words. She had come to ask him a technical question in prosody, as from one professor to another; but she had forgotten it altogether—at least she put it off to another visit. She hastened away in a flutter, feeling slightly as if she had been to a tryst.
Litton went without his lunch that day, but he was browsing on memories of his visitor. He had not talked so long to a woman since he could remember. This was the only woman who had let him talk uninterruptedly about himself—a very superior woman, everybody said.
When he went to his room that night he was still thinking of hyacinths and of her who had brought them to his eyes.
He knocked from his desk a book. It fell open at a page. As he picked it up he noted that it was a copy of the anonymous old spring rhapsody, the Pervigilium Veneris, with its ceaselessly reiterated refrain, "To-morrow he shall love who never loved before." As he fell asleep it was running through his head like a popular tune: Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet.
It struck him as an omen; but it did not terrify him.
V
Professor Martha called again to ask her question in verse technic. The answer led to further talk and the consultation of books. She was a trifle nearsighted and too proud to wear glasses, so she had to bend close to the page; and her hair tickled his nose again foolishly.
Conference bred conference, and one day she asked him whether she would dare ask him to call. He rewarded her bravery by calling. She lived in a dormitory, with a parlor for the reception of guests. Male students were allowed to call on only two evenings a week. Litton did not call on those evenings; yet the fact that he called at all swept through the town like a silent thunderbolt. The students were mysteriously apprised of the fact that old Professor Litton and Prof. Martha Binley were sitting up and taking notice. To the youngsters it looked like a flirtation in an old folks' home.
Litton's very digestion was affected; his brain was in a whirl. He was the prey of the most childish alarms; gusts of petulant emotion swept through him if Martha were late when he called; he was mad with jealousy if she mentioned another professor.
She was growing more careful of her appearance. A new youth had come to her. She took fifteen years off her looks by simply fluffing her hair out of its professorial constriction. Professor Mackail noticed it and mentioned to Professor Litton that Professor Binley was looking ever so much better.
"She's not half homely for such an old maid!" he said.
Professor Litton felt murder in his heart. He wanted to slay the reprobate twice—once for daring to observe Martha's beauty and once for his parsimony of praise.
That evening when he called on Martha he was tortured with a sullen mood. She finally coaxed from him the astounding admission that he suspected her of flirting with Mackail. She was too new in love to recognize the ultimate compliment of his distress. She was horrified by his distrust, and so hurt that she broke forth in a storm of tears and denunciation. Their precious evening ended in a priceless quarrel of amazing violence. He stamped down the outer steps as she stamped up the inner.
For three days they did not meet and the university wore almost visible mourning for its pets. Poor Litton had not known that the human heart could suffer such agony. He was fairly burned alive with loneliness and resentment—like another Hercules blistering in the shirt of Nessus. And Martha was suffering likewise as Jason's second wife was consumed in the terrible poisoned robe that Medea sent her.
One evening a hollow-eyed Litton crept up the dormitory steps and asked the overjoyed maid for Professor Binley. When she appeared he caught her in his arms as if she were a spar and he a drowning sailor. They made up like young lovers and swore oaths that they would never quarrel again—oaths which, fortunately for the variety of their future existence, they found capable of infinite breaking and mending.
Each denied that the other could possibly love each. He decried himself as a stupid, ugly old fogy; and she cried him up as the wisest and most beautiful and best of men. Since best sounded rather weak, she called him the bestest; and he did not charge the impossible word against her as he had against Teed. He did not remember that Teed had ever used such language. Nobody could ever have used such language, because nobody was ever like her!
And when she said that he could not possibly love a homely, scrawny old maid like her, he delivered a eulogy that would have struck Aphrodite, rising milkily from the sea, as a slight exaggeration. And as for old maid, he cried in a curious blending of puerility and scholasticism:
"Old maid, do you say? And has my little Margy-wargles forgotten what Sappho said of an old maid? We'd have lost it if some old scholiast on the stupid old sophist Hermogenes hadn't happened to quote it to explain the word glukumalon—an apple grafted on a quince. Sappho said this old maid was like—let me see!—'like the sweet apple that blushes on the top of the bough—on the tip of the topmost; and the apple-gatherers forgot it—no, they did not forget it; they just could not get it!' And that's you, Moggles mine! You're an old maid because you've been out of reach of everybody. I can't climb to you; so you're going to drop into my arms—aren't you?"
She said she supposed she was. And she did.
Triumphantly he said, "Hadn't we better announce our engagement?"
This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid to let the students all know it. A little later—on Commencement Day will be time enough."
He bowed to her decision—not for the last time.
For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names—Meæ Deliciæ, or Glukutate, or Melema. A poem that he had always thought the last word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions—the poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not know—nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows—how many kisses there are."
His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch to after dinner.
She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to Stookie-tookie.
Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart, so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.
During those black days when Litton had quarreled with Martha he had fiercely reminded Teed that only a month remained before his final examinations, and warned him that he would hold him strictly to account. No classics, no diploma!
Teed had sulked and moped while Litton sulked and moped; but when Litton was reconciled to Martha the sun seemed to come out on Teed's clouded world, too. He took a sudden extra interest in his electrical studies and obtained permission to work in the laboratory overtime. He obtained permission even to visit the big city for certain apparatus. And he wrote the despondent, distant Fannie Newman that there would "shortly be something doing in the classics."
VI
One afternoon Professor Litton, having dismissed his class—in which he was obliged to rebuke Teed more severely than usual—fell to remembering his last communion with Martha, the things he had said—and heard! He wondered, as a philologist, at the strange prevalence of the "oo" sound in his love-making. It was plainly an onomatopœic word representing the soul's delight. Oo! was what Ah! is to the soul in exaltation and Oh! to the soul in surprise. If the hyacinths babbled Ai, Ai! the roses must murmur Oo! Oo!
The more he thought it over, the more nonsense it became, as all words turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of his own for his everlastingly mysterious love affairs?
Eager for the comfort of fellowship in disgrace he hurried to the library and sought out the works of the Dean of St. Patrick's. And in the "Journal to Stella" he found what he sought—and more. Expressions of the most appalling coarseness alternated with the most insipid tendernesses.
The old dean had a code of abbreviations: M.D. for "My dear," Ppt. for "Poppet," Pdfr. for "Poor dear foolish rogue," Oo or zoo or loo stood for "you," Deelest for "Dearest," and Rettle for "Letter," and Dallars for "Girl," Vely for "Very," and Hele and Lele for "Here and there." Litton copied out for his own comfort and Martha's this passage.
Do you know what? When I am writing in my own language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it: "Zoo must cly Lele and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr., pay? Iss, and so la shall! And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood mollow."
And Dean Swift had written this while he was in London two hundred years before, a great man among great men. With such authority back of him Litton returned to his empty class-room feeling as proud as Gulliver in Lilliput. A little later he was Gulliver in Brobdingnag.
Alone at his desk, with none of his students in the seats before him, he took from his pocket—his left pocket—a photograph of Prof. Martha Binley. It had been taken one day on a picnic far from the spying eyes of pupils. Her hair was all wind-blown, her eyes frowned gleamingly into the sun, and her mouth was curled with laughter.
He sat there alone—the learned professor—and talked to this snapshot in a dialogue he would have recently accepted as a perfect examination paper for matriculation in an insane-asylum.
"Well, Margy-wargy, zoo and Stookie-tookie is dust like old Dean Swiffikins, isn't we?"
There was a rap on the door and the knob turned as he shot the photograph into his pocket and pretended to be reading a volume of Bacchylides—upside down. The intruder was Teed. Litton was too much startled and too throbbing with guilt to express his indignation. He stammered:
"We-well, Teed?" He almost called him teed-leums, his tongue had so caught the rhythm of love.
Teed came forward with an ominous self-confidence bordering on insolence. There was a glow in his eye that made his former tyrant quail.
"Professor, I'd like a word with you about those conditions. I wish you'd let me off on 'em."
"Let you off, T-Teed?"
"Yes, sir. I can't get ready for the exams. I've boned until my skull's cracked and it lets the blamed stuff run out faster than I can cram it in. The minute I leave college I expect to forget everything I've learned here, anyway; so I'd be ever so much obliged if you'd just pass me along."
"I don't think I quite comprehend," said Litton, who was beginning to regain his pedagogical dignity.
"All you've gotta do," said Teed, "is to put a high enough mark on my papers. You gimme a special examination and I'll make the best stab I can at answering the questions; then you just shut one eye and mark it just over the failure line. That'll save you a lot o' time and fix me hunky-dory."
Litton was glaring at him, hearing the uncouth "gimme" and "gotta," and wondering that a man could spend four years in college and scrape off so little paint. Then he began to realize the meaning of Teed's proposal. His own honor was in traffic. He groaned in suffocation:
"Do you dare to ask me to put false marks on examination-papers, sir?"
"Aw, Professor, what's the dif? You couldn't grind Latin and Greek into me with a steel-rolling machine. Gimme a chance! There's a little girl waiting for me outside and a big job. I can't get one without the other—and I don't get either unless you folks slip me the sheepskin."
"Impossible, sir! Astounding! Insulting! Impossible!"
"Have a heart, can't you?"
"Leave the room, sir, at once!"
"All right!" Teed sighed, and turned away. At the door he paused to murmur, "All right for you, Stookie-tookie!"
Litton's spectacles almost exploded from his nose.
"What's that?" he shrieked.
Teed turned and came back, with an intolerable smirk, straight to the desk. He leaned on it with odious familiarity and grinned.
"Say, Prof, did you ever hear of the dictagraph?"
"No! And I don't care to now."
"You ought to read some of the modern languages, Prof! Dictagraph comes from two perfectly good Latin words: dictum and graft—well, you'll know 'em. But the Greeks weren't wise to this little device. I got part of it here."
He took from his pocket the earpiece of the familiar engine of latter-day detective romance. He explained it to the horribly fascinated Litton, whose hair stood on end and whose voice stuck in his throat in the best Vergilian manner. Before he quite understood its black magic Litton suspected the infernal purpose it had been put to. His wrath had melted to a sickening fear when Teed reached the conclusion of his uninterrupted discourse:
"The other night I was calling on a pair of girls at the dormitory where your—where Professor Binley lives. They pointed out the sofa near the fireplace where you and the professoress sit and hold hands and make googoo eyes."
There was that awful "oo" sound again! Litton was in an icy perspiration; but he was even more afraid for his beloved, precious sweetheart than for himself—and that was being about as much afraid as there is. Teed went on relentlessly, gloating like a satyric mask:
"Well, I had an idea, and the girls fell for it with a yip of joy. The next evening I called I carried a wire from my room across to that dormitory and nobody paid any attention while I brought it through a window and under the carpet to the back of the sofa. And there it waited, laying for you. And over at my digs I had it attached to a phonograph by a little invention of my own.
"Gosh! It was wonderful! It even repeated the creak of those old, rusty springs while you waited for her. And when she came—well, anyway, I got every word you said, engraved in wax, like one of those old poets of yours used to write on."
Litton was afraid to ask evidence in verification. Teed supplied the unspoken demand:
"For instance, the first thing she says to you is: 'Oh, there you are, my little lover! I thought you'd never come!' And you says, 'Did it miss its stupid old Stookie?' And she says: 'Hideously! Sit down, honey heart.' And splung went the spring—and splung again! Then she says: 'Did it have a mis'ble day in hateful old class-room? Put its boo'ful head on Margy-wargy's shojer.' Then you says—"
"Stop!" Litton cried, raising the only missile he could find, an inkstand. "Who knows of this infamy besides you?"
"Nobody yet—on my word of honor."
"Honor!" sneered Litton, so savagely that Teed's shameless leer vanished in a glare of anger.
"Nobody yet! The girls are dying to hear and some of the fellows knew what I was up to; but I was thinking that I'd tell 'em that the blamed thing didn't work, provided—provided—"
"Provided?" Litton wailed, miserably.
"Provided you could see your way clear to being a little careless with your marks on my exam-papers."
Litton sat with his head whirling and roaring like a coffee-grinder. A multitude of considerations ran through and were crushed into powder—his honor; her honor; the standards of the university; the standards of a lover; the unimportance of Teed; the all-importance of Martha; the secret disloyalty to the faculty; the open disloyalty to his best-beloved. He heard Teed's voice as from far off:
"Of course, if you can't see your way to sparing my sweetheart's feelings I don't see why I'm expected to spare yours—or to lie to the fellows and girls who are perishing to hear how two professors talk when they're in love."
Another long pause. Then the artful Teed moved to the door and turned the knob. Litton could not speak; but he threw a look that was like a grappling-iron and Teed came back.
"How do I know," Litton moaned, "how do I know that you will keep your word?"
"How do I know that you'll keep yours?" Teed replied, with the insolence of a conqueror.
"Sir!" Litton flared, but weakly, like a sick candle.
"Well," Teed drawled, "I'll bring you the cylinders. I'll have to trust you, as one gentleman to another."
"Gentleman!" Litton snarled in hydrophobic frenzy.
"Well, as one lover to another, then," Teed laughed. "Do I get my diploma?"
Litton's head was so heavy he could not nod it.
"It's my diploma in exchange for your records. Come on, Professor—be a sport! And take it from me, it's no fun having the words you whisper in a girl's ear in the dark shouted out loud in the open court. And mine were repeated in a Dutch dialect! I got yours just as they came from your lips—and hers."
That ended it. Litton surrendered, passed himself under the yoke; pledged himself to the loathsome compact, and Teed went to fetch the price of his degree of Bachelor of Arts.
Litton hung dejected beyond feeling for a long while. His heart was whimpering Ai, Ai! He felt himself crushed under a hundred different crimes. He felt that he could never look up again. Then he heard a soft tap at the door. He could not raise his eyes or his voice. He heard the door open and supposed it was Teed bringing him the wages of his shame; but he heard another voice—an unimaginably beautiful, tragically tender voice—crooning:
"Oo-oo! Stookie-tookie!"
He looked up. How radiant she was! He could only sigh. She came across to him as gracefully and lightly as Iris running down a rainbow. She was murmuring:
"I just had to slip over and tell you something."
"Well, Martha!" he sighed.
She stopped short, as if he had struck her.
"'Martha'? What's the matter? You aren't mad at me, are you, Stookie?"
"How could I be angry with you, Marg—er—Martha?"
"Then why don't you call me Margy-wargleums?"
He stared at her. Her whimsical smile, trembling to a piteously pretty hint of terror, overwhelmed him. He hesitated, then shoved back his chair and, rising, caught her to him so tightly that she gasped out, "Oo!" There it was again! He laughed like an overgrown cub as he cried:
"Why don't I call you Margy-wargleums? Well, what a darned fool I'd be not to! Margy-wargleums!"
To such ruin does love—the blind, the lawless, the illiterate child—bring the noblest intelligences and the loftiest principles.
THE MOUTH OF THE GIFT HORSE
I
The town of Wakefield was—is—suffering from growing pains—from ingrowing pains, according to its rival, Gatesville.
Wakefield has long been guilty of trying to add a cubit to its stature by taking thought. Established, like thousands of other pools left in the prairies by that tidal wave of humanity sweeping westward in the middle of the last century, it passed its tenth thousand with a rush; then something happened.
For decades the decennial census dismally tolled the same knell of fifteen thousand in round numbers. The annual censuses but echoed the reverberations. A few more cases of measles one year, and the population lapsed a little below the mark; an easy winter, and it slipped a little above. No mandragora of bad times or bad health ever quite brought it so low as fourteen thousand. No fever of prosperity ever sent the temperature quite so high as sixteen thousand.
The iteration got on people's nerves till a commercial association was formed under the name of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club, with a motto of "Boom or Bust." Many individuals accomplished the latter, but the town still failed of the former. The chief activity of the club was in the line of decoying manufacturers over into Macedonia by various bribes.
Its first capture was a cutlery company in another city. Though apparently prosperous, it had fallen foul of the times, and its president adroitly allowed the Wide-a-Wakefield Club to learn that, if a building of sufficient size were offered rent free for a term of years, the cutlery company might be induced to move to Wakefield and conduct its business there, employing at least a hundred laborers, year in, year out.
There was not in all Wakefield a citizen too dull to see the individual and collective advantage of this hundred increase. It meant money in the pocket of every doctor, lawyer, merchant, clothier, boarding-house-keeper, saloon-keeper, soda-water-vender—whom not?
Every establishment in town would profit, from the sanatorium to the "pantatorium"—as the institution for the replenishment of trousers was elegantly styled.
Commercial fervor rose to such heights in Wakefield that in no time at all enough money was subscribed to build a convenient factory and to purchase as many of the shares of cutlery stock as the amiable president cared to print. In due season the manufacture of tableware and penknives began, and the pride of the town was set aglow by the trade-mark stamped on every article issued from the cutlery factory. It was an ingenious emblem—a glorious Cupid in a sash marked "Wakefield," stabbing a miserable Cupid in a sash marked "Sheffield."
It was Sheffield that survived. In fact, the stupid English city probably never heard of the Wakefield Cutlery Company. Nor did Wakefield hear of it long. For the emery dust soon ceased to glisten in the air and the steel died of a distemper.
It was a very real shock to Wakefield, and many a boy that had been meant for college went into his father's store instead, and many a girl who had planned to go East to be polished stayed at home and polished her mother's plates and pans, because the family funds had been invested in the steel-engravings of the cutlery stock certificates. They were very handsome engravings.
Hope languished in Wakefield until a company from Kenosha consented to transport its entire industry thither if it could receive a building rent free. It was proffered, and it accepted, the cutlery works. For a season the neighboring streets were acrid with the aroma of the passionate pickles that were bottled there. And then its briny deeps ceased to swim with knobby condiments. A tin-foil company abode awhile, and yet again a tamale-canning corporation, which in its turn sailed on to the Sargasso Sea of missing industries.
Other factory buildings in Wakefield fared likewise. They were but lodging-houses for transient failures. The population swung with the tide, but always at anchor. The lift which the census received from an artificial-flower company, employing seventy-five hands, was canceled by the demise of a more redolent pork-packing concern of equal pay-roll. People missed it when the wind blew from the west.
But Wakefield hoped on. One day the executive committee of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club, having nothing else to do, met in executive session. There were various propositions to consider. All of them were written on letter-heads of the highest school of commercial art, and all of them promised to endow Wakefield with some epoch-making advantage, provided merely that Wakefield furnish a building rent free, tax free, water free, and subscribe to a certain amount of stock.
The club regarded these glittering baits with that cold and clammy gaze with which an aged trout of many-scarred gills peruses some newfangled spoon.
But if these letters were tabled with suspicion because they offered too
much for too little, what hospitality could be expected for a letter
which offered still more for still less? The chairman of the committee
was Ansel K. Pettibone, whose sign-board announced him as a "practical
house-painter and paper-hanger." He read this letter, head-lines and
all:
MARK A. SHELBY JOHN R. SHELBY LUKE B. SHELBY
SHELBY PARADISE POWDER COMPANY
SPRINGFIELD, MASS., U. S. A.
Makes Washday Welcome. Sidestep Substitutes.
Wide-a-Wakefield Club, Wakefield:
Dear Sirs,—The undersigned was born in your city, and left same about twenty years ago to seek his fortune. I have finally found it after many ups and downs. Us three brothers have jointly perfected and patented the famous Paradise Powder. It is generally conceded to be the grandest thing of its kind ever put on the market, and, in the words of the motto, "Makes Washday Welcome." Ladies who have used it agree that our statement is not excessive when we say, "Once tried, you will use no other."
It is selling at such a rate in the East that I have a personal profit of two thousand dollars a week. We intend to push it in the West, and we were talking of where would be the best place to locate a branch factory at. My brothers mentioned Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, and such places, but I said, "I vote for Wakefield." My brothers said I was cracked. I says maybe I am, but I'm going back to my old home town and spend the rest of my life there and my surplus money, too. I want to beautify Wakefield, and as near as I can remember there is room for improvement. It may not be good business, but it is what I want to do. And also what I want to know is, can I rely on the co-operation of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club in doing its share to build up the old town into a genuine metropolis? Also, what would be the probable cost of a desirable site for the factory?
Hoping to receive a favorable reply from you at your earliest convenience,
Yours truly,
Luke B. Shelby.
The chairman's grin had grown wider as he read and read. When he had finished the letter he tossed it along the line. Every member read it and shook with equal laughter.
"I wonder what kind of green goods he sells?" said Joel Spate, the owner of the Bon-Ton Grocery.
"My father used to say to me," said Forshay, of the One-Price Emporium, "whatever else you do, Jake, always suspicion the fellow that offers you something for nothing. There's a nigger in the woodpile some'eres."
"That's so," said Soyer, the swell tailor, who was strong on second thought.
"He says he's goin' to set up a factory here, but he don't ask for rent free, tax free, light free—nothin' free," said the practical house-painter.
"What's the name again?" said Spate.
"Shelby—Luke B. Shelby," answered Pettibone. "Says he used to live here twenty years ago. Ever hear of him? I never did."
Spate's voice came from an ambush of spectacles and whiskers: "I've lived here all m' life—I'm sixty-three next month. I don't remember any such man or boy."
"Me, neither," echoed Soyer, "and I'm here going on thirty-five year."
The heads shook along the line as if a wind had passed over a row of wheat.
"It's some new dodge for sellin' stock," suspicioned One-Price Forshay, who had a large collection of cutlery certificates.
"More likely it's just a scheme to get us talking about his Paradise Powder. Seems to me I've had some of their circulars," said Bon-Ton Spate.
Pettibone, the practical chairman, silenced the gossip with a brisk, "What is the pleasure of the meeting as regards answering it?"
"I move we lay it on the table," said Eberhart of the Furniture Palace.
"I move we lay it under the table," said Forshay, who had a keen sense of humor.
"Order, gentlemen! Order," rapped Pettibone, as the room rocked with the laughter in which Forshay led.
When sobriety was restored it was moved, seconded, and passed that the secretary be instructed to send Shelby a copy of the boom number of the Wakefield Daily Eagle.
And in due time the homesick Ulysses, waiting a welcome from Ithaca,
received this answer to his letter:
Luke B. Shelby, Springfield, Mass.
Sir,—Yours of sixteenth inst. rec'd and contents noted. In reply to same, beg to state are sending last special number Daily Eagle, giving full information about city and sites.
Yours truly,
Joel Spate, Secy. Exec. Comm.
Shelby winced. The hand he had held out with pearls of price had been brushed aside. His brothers laughed.
"We said you were cracked. They don't want your old money or your society. Go somewheres where they do."
But Luke B. Shelby had won his success by refusing to be denied, and he had set his heart on refurbishing his old home town. The instinct of place is stronger than any other instinct in some animals, and Shelby was homesick for Wakefield—not for anybody, any house, or any street in particular there, but just for Wakefield.
Without further ado he packed his things and went.
II
There was no brass band to meet him. At the hotel the clerk read his name without emotion. When he required the best two rooms in the hotel, and a bath at that, the clerk looked suspicious:
"Any baggage?"
"Three trunks and a grip."
"What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?"
"Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room."
He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs, apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows.
He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked horse dozing at the hitching-post?
Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with the same arch of water springing from the nozzle.
He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score of years ago.
Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and washing-powder Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used washing-powder then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."
As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in Wakefield, now as then.
Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs. Spate had so distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as his hard-driven horses.
Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and whiskers.
Joel Spate, never dreaming who Shelby was, was gracious to him for the first time in history. He evidently looked upon Shelby as a new-comer who might be pre-empted for a regular customer before Mrs. L. Bowers, the rival grocer, got him. It somehow hurt Shelby's homesick heart to be unrecognized, more than it pleased him to enjoy time's topsy-turvy. Here he was, returned rich and powerful, to patronize the taskmaster who had worked him hard and paid him harder in the old years. Yet he dared not proclaim himself and take his revenge.
He ended the interview by buying a few of the grocer's horrible cigars, which he gave away to the hotel porter later.
All round the town Shelby wandered, trying to be recognized. But age and prosperity had altered him beyond recall, though he himself knew almost every old negro whitewash man, almost every teamster, he met. He was surer of the first names than of the last, for the first names had been most used in his day, and it surprised him to find how clearly he recalled these names and faces, though late acquaintances escaped his memory with ease.
The women, too, he could generally place, though many who had been short-skirted tomboys were now heavy-footed matrons of embonpoint with children at their skirts, children as old as they themselves had been when he knew them. Some of them, indeed, he recognized only by the children that lagged alongside like early duplicates.
As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before she reached him he identified Phœbe Carew.
Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled about town on Saturday afternoons. And now the child, though she must be thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by accident or choice, not by nature's decree.
He wondered if she, at least, would pay him the compliment of recognition. She made no sign of it as she approached. As she passed he lifted his hat.
"Isn't this Miss Phœbe Carew?"
Wakefield women were not in danger from strangers' advances; she paused without alarm and answered with an inquiring smile:
"Yes."
"You don't remember me?"
She studied him. "I seem to, and yet—"
"I'm Luke Shelby."
"Luke Shelby! Oh yes! Why, how do you do?" She gave him her beautiful hand, but she evidently lacked the faintest inkling of his identity. Time had erased from recollection the boy who used to take her sliding on his sled, the boy who used to put on her skates for her, the boy who used to take her home on his grocery-wagon sometimes, pretending that he was going her way, just for the benizon of her radiant companionship, her shy laughter.
"I used to live here," he said, ashamed to be so forgettable. "My mother was—my stepfather was A. J. Stacom, who kept the hardware-store."
"Oh yes," she said; "they moved away some years ago, didn't they?"
"Yes; after mother died my stepfather went back to Council Bluffs, where we came from in the first place. I used to go to school with you, Phœbe—er—Miss Carew. Then I drove Spate's delivery-wagon for a while before I went East."
"Oh yes," she said; "I think I remember you very well. I'm very glad to see you again, Mr.—Mr. Stacom."
"Shelby," he said, and he was so heartsick that he merely lifted his hat and added, "I'm glad to see you looking so well."
"You're looking well, too," she said, and smiled the gracious, empty smile one visits on a polite stranger. Then she went her way. In his lonely eyes she moved with a goddess-like grace that made clouds of the uneven pavements where he stumbled as he walked with reverted gaze.
He went back to the hotel lonelier than before, in a greater loneliness than Ulysses felt ending his Odyssey in Ithaca. For, at least, Ulysses was remembered by an old dog that licked his hand.
Once in his room, Shelby sank into a patent rocker of most uncomfortable plush. The inhospitable garishness of a small-town hotel's luxury expelled him from the hateful place, and he resumed the streets, taking, as always, determination from rebuff and vowing within himself:
"I'll make 'em remember me. I'll make the name of Shelby the biggest name in town."
On the main street he found one lone, bobtailed street-car waiting at the end of its line, its horse dejected with the ennui of its career, the driver dozing on the step.
Shelby decided to review the town from this seedy chariot; but the driver, surly with sleep, opened one eye and one corner of his mouth just enough to inform him that the next "run" was not due for fifteen minutes.
"I'll change that," said Shelby. "I'll give 'em a trolley, and open cars in summer, too."
He dragged his discouraged feet back to the hotel and asked when dinner would be served.
"Supper's been ready sence six," said the clerk, whose agile toothpick proclaimed that he himself had banqueted.
Shelby went into the dining-room. A haughty head waitress, zealously chewing gum, ignored him for a time, then piloted him to a table where he found a party of doleful drummers sparring in repartee with a damsel of fearful and wonderful coiffure.
She detached herself reluctantly and eventually brought Shelby a supper contained in a myriad of tiny barges with which she surrounded his plate in a far-reaching flotilla.
When he complained that his steak was mostly gristle, and that he did not want his pie yet, Hebe answered:
"Don't get flip! Think you're at the Worldoff?"
Poor Shelby's nerves were so rocked that he condescended to complain to the clerk. For answer he got this:
"Mamie's all right. If you don't like our ways, better build a hotel of your own."
"I guess I will," said Shelby.
He went to his room to read. The gas was no more than darkness made visible. He vowed to change that, too.
He would telephone to the theater. The telephone-girl was forever in answering, and then she was impudent. Besides, the theater was closed. Shelby learned that there was "a movin'-pitcher show going"! He went, and it moved him to the door.
The sidewalks were full of doleful loafers and loaferesses. Men placed their chairs in the street and smoked heinous tobacco. Girls and women dawdled and jostled to and from the ice-cream-soda fountains.
The streets that night were not lighted at all, for the moon was abroad, and the board of aldermen believed in letting God do all He could for the town. In fact, He did nearly all that the town could show of charm. The trees were majestic, the grass was lavishly spread, the sky was divinely blue by day and angelically bestarred at night.
Shelby compared his boyhood impressions with the feelings governing his mind now that it was adult and traveled. He felt that he had grown, but that the town had stuck in the mire. He felt an ambition to lift it and enlighten it. Like the old builder who found Rome brick and left it marble, Shelby determined that the Wakefield which he found of plank he should leave at least of limestone. Everything he saw displeased him and urged him to reform it altogether, and he said:
"I'll change all this. And they'll love me for it."
And he did. But they—did they?
III
One day a greater than Shelby came to Wakefield, but not to stay. It was no less than the President of these United States swinging around the circle in an inspection of his realm, with possibly an eye to the nearing moment when he should consent to re-election. As his special train approached each new town the President studied up its statistics so that he might make his speech enjoyable by telling the citizens the things they already knew. He had learned that those are the things people most like to hear.
His encyclopædia informed him that Wakefield had a population of about fifteen thousand. He could not know how venerable an estimate this was, for Wakefield was still fifteen thousand—now and forever, fifteen thousand and insuperable.
The President had a mental picture of just what such a town of fifteen thousand would look like, and he wished himself back in the White House.
He was met at the train by the usual entertainment committee, which in this case coincided with the executive committee of the Wide-a-Wakefield Club. It had seemed just as well to these members to elect themselves as anybody else.
Mr. Pettibone, the town's most important paper-hanger, was again chairman after some lapses from office. Joel Spate, the Bon-Ton Grocer, was once more secretary, after having been treasurer twice and president once. The One-Price Emporium, however, was now represented by the younger Forshay, son of the founder, who had gone to the inevitable Greenwood at the early age of sixty-nine. Soyer, the swell tailor, had yielded his place to the stateliest man in town, Amasa Harbury, president of the Wakefield Building and Loan Association. And Eberhart, of the Furniture Palace, had been supplanted by Gibson Shoals, the bank cashier.
To the President's surprise the railroad station proved to be, instead of the doleful shed usual in those parts, a graceful edifice of metropolitan architecture. He was to ride in an open carriage, of course, drawn by the two spanking dapples which usually drew the hearse when it was needed. But this was tactfully kept from the President.
There had been some bitterness over the choice of the President's companions in the carriage, since it was manifestly impossible for the entire committee of seven to pile into the space of four, though young Forshay, who had inherited his father's gift of humor, volunteered to ride on the President's lap or hold him on his.
The extra members were finally consoled by being granted the next carriage, an equipage drawn by no less than the noble black geldings usually attached to the chief mourners' carriage.
As the President was escorted to his place he remarked that a trolley-car was waiting at the station.
"I see that Wakefield boasts an electric line," he beamed.
"Yes," said Pettibone, "that's some of Shelby's foolishness."
A look from Spate silenced him, but the President had not caught the slip.
The procession formed behind the town band, whose symphony suffered somewhat from the effort of the musicians to keep one eye on the music and throw the other eye backward at the great visitor.
"What a magnificent building!" said the President as the parade turned a corner. Nobody said anything, and the President read the name aloud. "The Shelby House. A fine hotel!" he exclaimed, as he lifted his hat to the cheers from the white-capped chambermaids and the black-coated waiters in the windows. They were male waiters.
"And the streets are lighted by electricity! And paved with brick!" the President said. "Splendid! Splendid! There must be very enterprising citizens in Gatesville—I mean Wakefield." He had visited so many towns!
"That's a handsome office-building," was his next remark. "It's quite metropolitan." The committee vouchsafed no reply, but they could see that he was reading the sign: